I can take civil war, but this new devilry, well it simply won’t do.

Last night I’m having dinner with my Venezuelan contact in the hotel restaurant, the lovely open-air place where I’ve eaten all week. At the end of the meal, I notice on the white stucco a few meters behind her, a nice, fat cockroach.

Much as the thing is far away from me, and minding its own business, and much as I try to focus on my colleague, I can’t ignore the beast behind her. My eyes shift quickly between making eye contact with her and seeming to listen to what she’s saying, and keeping an eye on the disgusting creature moving around on the stucco. All of a sudden my mind starts transforming every little itch it feels into an insect crawling on me, every little dark spot on the wooden table is a potential cockroach and I keep batting away imaginary bugs from my arms and legs. I start to look very twitchy indeed.

Luckily the meal is over and I get out of there. As I walk towards my room I know this will stick in my mind and I’ll have a nightmare involving cockroaches if I don’t think about something else. So I stop at the Internet cafe and I blog. When I go back to the room, I notice that there’s a full inch of space under the door. I check every nook and cranny, and satisfied, I go to sleep.

Middle of the night. Gotta pee. Get up, turn on the bathroom light. There’s a dark brown spot on the floor. I know my mind’s messing with me, and I squint my sleepy eyes to see if the brown spot is what I think it is. That’s when the brown spot says “Holy Speedy Gonzalez! A human! Run awaaaaay!” and makes for the bathtub.

Upon seeing the brown spot suddenly move, I draw upon all my poise, countenance and self-control, and execute a beautiful backward jitterbug. While screaming, of course.

Knowing that the creepy crawly hates light, I turn on all the lights in the room so that it’ll go away and not come back. I spend the rest of the night sleeping with my airplane sleeping mask on.

I leave it to you to guess where I ended up peeing.