A cockroach in your corduroys is horrifying. There is an obvious initial feeling of revulsion, coupled with and augmented by the distressing tactile grossness of insect spasm vs. leg flesh. After you have raced into your bedroom and stripped, you decide that from now on it has to be skin tight pants forever - which is sad, particularly if you like to have pockets that are big enough to fit an entire bottle of wine. More problematically, you begin to think about yourself as a terrain, and about your nutritional value relative to the backyard compost, and finally about how this is all wrong; neither the compost nor your corduroys were ever meant for this. The compost heap is meant to convert food waste into plant food which is eventually more food for humans. For humans only! Corduroy is meant to be a durable denim alternative of fluctuating trendiness. Cockroaches were nowhere in the pamphlet.

This distressing contemplation of your body as a potential adventure zone for something that shits in the sink plagues you for hours, and makes it hard to go to sleep. You decide to play guitar for a while to unwind, but in the backyard where you normally enjoy the night-time rock-outs are the compost and the cockroaches. You are driven to the front stoop so you can smoke at the same time as you stroke the strings and try to find mournful chords but for some stupid fucking reason your neighbor has a life of his own and that life has intersected with yours at the point at which he wants to go to sleep because it’s actually 1:30am. You finish your cigarette and try reading a Wikipedia article to get some perspective. You discover that cockroaches have been on earth since the Carboniferous period, up to around 300 million years ago. This basically blows your mind. You feel no more or less important than everything in the history of life ever, which has all been a terrain of sorts, and has all been crawled all over. You forgive the cockroach, and, when you do finally sleep, you dream a nice dream about being a corduroy mountain that can walk around.