A Tale of Two Scorpions

Powering Down — Episode 5

I always think of that scene in Hook when I think of scorpions.

The Boo Box.

Today I battled a scorpion in the least “boo-box-like” way possible. I found it on my floor just hangin out, doing it’s scorpion thing. It scared the shit out of me by simply being itself. It wasn’t trying to harm me…at that moment. Normally, I may find like a spider or one of those small brown rolly-polly bugs by my front door, but a scorpion is different. The very sight of it freaked me out. In my head this was like the scene from Clash of the Titans.

Even though it was small, I just felt uneasy passing by it. Thankfully my very intelligent wife convinced me to buy spider and scorpion repellent in case the situation would arise where I needed to hash it out like Perseus.

I sprayed the scorpion with my repellant and immediately it’s tail raised in the air like it was in epileptic shock. I thought it was going to flail around trying to jab me with it’s last ounce of life. Luckily, it did nothing like that. I tried crawling away and I mustered up the courage to kill it with a shoe, but they don’t really squish. So I used like 42 sheets of paper towel just trying to pick up it’s lifeless body in case it’s tail could still pierce through double-ply. I know, I’m a real man.

Then the search began. I knew that scorpions always travel in pairs, so I started looking. I looked everywhere in the house making sure the second didn’t hide in any crevice or floorboard. Then when I lifted up the garbage bag that I placed on the floor a couple days ago…

There it was!

It was dead, suffocated from the plastic. Which means that the time I was barefoot in my kitchen and I took the garbage bag out lying it not The floor, unbeknownst to me, I dropped it on the scorpion right next to my foot.

Good times.