Nothing this weekend quite went as planned.

Football mojo? Gone. Both Notre Dame and UCLA lost their respective football games, the former because of crap-on-a-stale-cracker officiating and the latter because it played the No. 1 team in the nation. And then yesterday, the San Francisco 49ers choked like a midget whore on Ron Jeremy�s jock, losing to the Cleveland Browns and removing me from my suicide pool. I would make a sweeping declaration like, "I will never pick the 49ers again," but sadly such statements are moot when there�s no more pools left in which to play.

And the capper was last night. As I gathered up the clothes to do my laundry, I picked up a hoodie that was lying casually on the floor in front of my corner bookshelf � its choice, not mine. Naturally if I had any control over my garments, it would have been hanging neatly from a hook or hanger somewhere. At any rate, when I bent down to scold it for its sloth, I noticed something completely disgusting: Bugs. Everywhere. It was covered in black critters.

And so was my bookshelf.

Termites. Fucking termites.

They gorged themselves on the blond, unfinished wood of the IKEA corner shelf that I always meant to varnish but was too lazy to actually do. They burrowed in and ate, dusting the shelves with wood shavings and the nasty little wings they seem to shed. They cohabitated on the carpet near the sliding glass door. They made sweet termite love on my Bad Kitty hoodie and then basked in the afterglow on the Abercrombie shorts that had magically migrated to the floor to keep my sweatshirt company.

As it turns out, they really like Harry Potter. A bunch of them ate their way into the Chamber of Secrets � if only Harry had known it was so easy! � and a pack of others gulped greedily from the Goblet of Fire. Hardbacks, both ruined. Luckily Bill still has my copy of HP 5.0: Now With Five-Hundred Percent More Adolescent Angst.

Lauren helped me clean up, vacuuming the dead bodies from the carpet after I donned rubber gloves and checked the remaining books for trespassers.

My paperbacks seem fine. They didn�t tuck into any of my trip journals, either. But they might have attracted company: Out on my balcony, while I stood tipping this monstrous shelf off the ledge to scrape the termites into oblivion, I noticed a really strange-looking giant oblong bug that creeped me out considerably and which I hope has since fucked off and died.

The apartment manager says the termites came from a tree outside that�s been problematic for a long time, but which I believe the city won�t help remove, or somesuch. Basically, whoever�s in charge of the tree -- whether it�s Los Angeles or the building next door or Chester, King of Our Jolly Forest Friends � won�t fix the problem, and as a result, the termites had time to find swish new digs.

This is a message to that person: Suck it long and suck it hard, Chester. The white-hot fire of a thousand suns is nothing compared to the heat with which my hatred is scorching you this minute. Seriously. I would really enjoy ramming that tree up your welcoming anal canal, depositing a wealth of healthy and hungry termites up there to feast upon your innards before emerging to gnaw on your crotch wood, reducing your genitals to a pulpy, grainy mess of sexual ineptitude that even Viagra can't cure.

Lauren and I don�t handle bugs well under normal circumstances � an invader here, a doomed spider there (where? AHHHH!) � so the whole experience left us incredibly squicked out all night. Any time anything tickled my skin, be it an air current or an errant piece of hair dropping from my head, I would frantically slap at my skin, certain a creepy-crawly something was trying to burrow down in search of a late-night snack.

The exterminator is coming � well, soon. An emergency message has been left. And in the meantime, I�m just hoping one of them won�t turn up in the living room, where the wood bookshelves actually mean something to me and are nice. Cross your fingers.

Let�s hope next weekend will be 100-percent critter-free.

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