James and the giant earwigs.

This is James.

You can probably tell from the look on his face, but not much bothers him.

Except earwigs.

I had never encountered one of these abominations until James moved to southwest Minnesota. He was living in Ellsworth in the summer of 2011, which was a particularly wet year. Poor James endured an earwig invasion. They thrive in damp environments, and James's junky rental house was just the moist environment they needed. The earwigs took over. They would crawl on his face at night, and they would pour out of the faucet in the morning. James scattered earwig traps (tuna cans filled with vegetable oil) around the house and found them full of earwigs every morning. James came to visit me in Minneapolis one weekend, and earwigs fell out of his suitcase. It was truly horrifying.

Thankfully, such earwig explosions don't happen every summer. However, they're still an unfortunate staple of our southwestern Minnesota lives. 

Several summers after James's earwig trauma, he and I were in our backyard in Luverne with my parents. James lifted a dead log sitting by the side of our house to find it swarming with earwigs. He immediately doused them in Raid... and when he didn't think that was enough, he came at them with a blowtorch. I might mention the log was sitting RIGHT NEXT TO our house. James was absolutely willing to burn down our house if it meant thinning out the earwig population.

We live in a new house now; one which James has not yet tried to burn down. We have the same old damp basement as we did in our last house, so earwigs do stroll through. (We find them in the cats' litter boxes all the time. Disgusting.)

However, an occasional earwig does make it up to the main floor. Just today, I was cleaning out the water fountain we got for the cats. (Pro tip: as handy as this sounds, don't fall for it. It's always full of fur and incredibly gross.) I flipped the water fountain over to find two big earwigs squirreled away in a little indent on the bottom of the fountain. "James!" I said. "There are earwigs in here!"

James came RUNNING from across the house and smacked the earwigs out of the fountain and into the kitchen sink. "DIE, MOTHERFUCKERS," he said as he poured scalding water and soap down the drain after them. He then plugged the drain and filled the sink with Ajax to make sure they are extra-dead.

James then walked the cat water fountain right to the garbage. 

It's worth noting James spent his early childhood in Arizona with scorpions and tarantulas, but none of that bothers him. 

Earwigs, though? They're a different story. 

If you see James with a blowtorch outside our house this summer, please try and talk him down. Thanks in advance.