Epic.

So. Ever seen a vinegaroon?

Now you have.

This is important because they live in New Mexico. Much as I did once. And my buddy, back when we were 17, found one in his room. Yeah, not quite that big. Close. It was obviously a bit of a shock, and more than a little intimidating. However, we eventually screwed up our courage and rationalized that it was just a bug. I had a pretty good idea that it was a vinegaroon (they're actually pretty reclusive; you never see them); at worst, it was a pseudoscorpion and not likely to have any ability to sting us to death. So with that settled, the hunt was on.

Not being female college students, we decided that the coolest thing to do would be capture it and feed other bugs to it. We put a clear piece of printer over the top of it - think 8.5x11 Lexan tupperware - and it bumbled around most amusingly. Despite the fact that it started the evening as Death on a Stick, a few minutes of watching that thing stumble about was enough for us to name it Clarence. So now we needed to find crane flies for Clarence to eat.

The capture was the easy part. Amazingly enough, Clarence and the crane fly bumped into each other a few times as Clarence paced the perimeter of his prison and the crane fly did what crane flies the world over do. We'd just about lost interest when Clarence reached out lighting-quick and snatched the crane fly out of the sky.

(all inch and a half of sky, to be honest)

We watched in a mix of horror and fascination as Clarence cheerfully passed the crane fly through his mandibles as if he were kneading bread dough. An insect went in the left end; a shriveled and desiccated husk came out the right. It took Clarence a good fifteen minutes to finish up, and then he rubbed his mandibles together rhythmically, gleefully, comically for another few.

And then we heard a mouse.

It was full Wild Kingdom now:

And despite the fact that it was probably 1am, and despite the fact that it was Wednesday night, and despite the fact that my buddy’s parents and sister were asleep not too far away, we were going to catch that goddamn mouse.

So we cornered him under the bed and he got away. And we cornered him behind the hamper and he got away. Then we cornered him behind the bookshelf and although there was nowhere he could go, he was well out of reach.

In my defense, the idea hit us both simultaneously. In our defense, we’d caught rodents with a shop vac before - they plunk harmlessly into the bin. And in our defense, it was now 2am and if we’d had any sense, we wouldn’t run a vacuum at 2am on a Wednesday anyway. All that said, we didn’t have a shop vac, we had a dirt devil hand vac with an extension hose that was just the right size to fit a mouse and it made the most satisfactory fwump as it went down the hose and then we looked at each other in horror as we realized which side of the impeller the bag was on and then, well…

So now it’s 2am, it’s Wednesday, we have Clarence the Killer Cricket under glass in one room and one of these full of mouse guts in the other.

Mouse intestines. Around the brush.

Mouse paws. In the bristles.

Mouse pelt. Wrapped around the impeller.

And the saddest thing is we were laughing uncontrollably the entire time. It’s amazing his parents didn’t wake up. Perhaps they realized that two teenaged boys with a dirt devil at 2am on a Wednesday just wasn’t something they wanted to know about.

By 2:30 we had the dirt devil restored to a non-abbatoir state of functionality. Clarence was still cheerfully rubbing his mandibles together. We decided our best move was to let him go far, far away from the house and hope he didn’t make his way back. We sure weren’t going to squish him. For one thing, he could probably kick our asses. And for another, we’d had about enough reality for one evening.