Up until one and a half days ago, I have survived this sweaty summer with no air conditioning in my Builder’s Warehouse sized and themed apartment. I didn’t mind it either. My monthly utilities bills were nil, I drank more water, and the outdoorsy feeling of having all of my windows open was nice. According to my trusty atomic clock with a temperature gauge that I bought at a Sam’s Club in 2005, the average temp in my living room this summer was 86.5°, but I never believed that my clock was correct because it was a wet heat. But the air conditioner guy came along and fixed it and the current temperature is 71.2° and I’m not so sure that I like it, and now I have another problem on my hands that I’m being forced to deal with.

Anyway, are you old enough to remember those TV commercials that begged you to donate your money to starving people in Africa? Remember how they would show skeleton people living in mud huts and flies would land right on there face while they stared into the camera, and none of them would make any effort to shoo-shoo the fly away? These people would completely ignore a fly as it crawled across the full length of their face, nearly crawling into one of their eyes or their mouth. Now I’m only speaking from personal experience, there’s no scientific data here, but apparently a human’s lack of response to flies is directly correlated to the amount of heat that the human is living in. I say this because now that all of my windows are closed and the temperature of my surroundings is livable again, I am fully aware of the ridiculous amount of flies that are trapped inside of my apartment.

I know that these flies were buzzing around my apartment while my windows were open because they are flying around at increasingly slower speeds because they’re starving and low on energy, so they’ve been in here for some time and I just wasn’t noticing them. What’s worse is my discovery of flies having conscious thoughts because these flies obviously know that they are nearing death. They have now dedicated what few hours or single day that they have left of their lives to committing suicide in an effort to kill me.

It all began this morning around 9:00 AM. I was sipping my pre-workout of 20 ounces of cold coffee with two tablespoons of cacao powder and 15g of whey protein in it because the caffeine and theobromine will tune you in better than smoking a full bowl of crack and the lil’ nip of whey makes you buff as all shit. If your beanbag is big enough to drink a mixture like that then I hope you have a veterinarian on speed dial because your pythons are about to get SICK. So I’m sipping my poopy tasting pre-workout out of a shaker cup and I decide to take the lid off. I probably had maybe two sips of it and a fly lands directly in the middle of the liquid and it doesn’t even struggle, it just begins to sink. It was an obvious attempt at ending my life by an extremist fly. So my whole pre-workout concoction was ruined unless I chose to take the risk of disease or choking to death by drinking it anyway. No, I poured it down the sink and just had a plain ass cup of bitter black coffee instead.

I’m working out now and the coffee has got my blinkers blinking but not quite as well as my secret pre-workout mix that is so strong it can kill a dog would, and I’m not even joshing you about it being able to kill dogs. I don’t josh when it comes to joshes like that and I’m a notorious josher. Okay, so I’m doing some ass to grass squats to build my goddamn quads and bulk my gorilla squat ass and not one, but five flies take turns landing on my head. Two flies would land on my head every time I tried to squat while the other three perched themselves on the window curtain in wait. Then those two flies would leave my head and switch places with two other flies on the curtain, and the third fly was coaching the attack and would sometimes “get in there” to show the other four flies how it’s done. These flies obviously met up in my bathroom and coordinated an assault on my noodle. They probably read my little dry erase board with my workout routine on it and specifically chose to attack while I was performing the most difficult exercise, the godly squat.

An hour goes by and I’m done working out now and boy oh boy am I spent. I do drink a protein shake or two everyday, but not always. I’m doing the low carb thing so instead of a shake I decide to have a cheap hamburger patty with some whole milk greek yogurt mixed with chives and sriracha sauce on top; it’s odd but oddly delicious. So I open up my freezer and open the bag of hamburgers and a single “we love death as Israel loves life” Palestinian fly glides directly into my bag of burgers. It instantly freezes itself to the top hamburger patty, the very patty that I was about to reach for. I’m angry now but I just say “King Kong ain’t got shit on me!” and I cook it and eat it anyway.

Alright, so it’s a few hours later and I’m hungry again. I’m a short man with a tall appetite and I go back to my fridge to feed these freshly squatted quads and butt cheeks. I open the refrigerator door, I pull out my little vegetable crisper shelf to take out some radishes and lettuce, and what the fuck? Two flies swoop beneath my arm and successfully helicopter land directly onto my radishes. My fucking radishes. There are few things in this world that can tame the tummy better than a tasty radish and two jihadi houseflies buzzed “Almond Snackbar!” and land, they land on my fucking radishes. I’ve got money but I’m not ‘toss radishes in the dumpster’ rich, so I washed them and ate them anyway. With lettuce and a baby bowl of cottage cheese.

Then tonight when I’m getting ready for bed and typing this, and as I said I’m going low carb but that doesn’t include carbs that come with alcohol, so I’m pouring my little cup of vodka and water with a squirt of lime. I’m in my kitchen using a shot glass to measure the amount of vodka I put in because I don’t know why, that seems really stupid now that I’ve typed it out that I use a shot glass to measure my own vodka. I’m serving this drink made from my own vodka to myself and I’m still measuring it with a shot glass. Why? Anyway, I pour a shot glass of vodka and guess who stops by for a drink? That’s right, another “kill nonbelievers wherever you find them” fly. The little fucker doesn’t land in my slightly bigger baller glass but it lands directly in my teensy shot glass of vodka. This fly did it. This was the last fly that I was willing to handle today. So yeah, I didn’t pick out the fly or pour the shot of vodka down the drain. I poured the shot of vodka with the fly into my mouth and swallowed it. It was my proclamation of war. It was my way of taking it back. When I say “it” I mean my enormous lavish apartment.

The window curtain in my kitchen is covered in flies. There are two dead or nearly dead flies in my kitchen sink. There is a dead fly in my toilet. I know that they are starving because I take my trash out fairly often. My apartment doesn’t stink because it contains trash, it stinks because it contains me. These flies don’t belong here. Everything in this apartment was placed here by me and for me. My beliefs and actions made this apartment into the glorious shithole that it is, not these flies. I will protect this apartment from the jihadist flies and their ideology of death and regurgitating on food before they eat it. As God is my witness. Amen.