#bedbugs cw

If you're the same way, I believe it will get better for you too! I just gradually thought about it less and less, and one day it will be just a dim bad memory for you, too. You're going to be fine! They're probably gone for good! If not, you're tough and you'll figure it out, no matter what! Humans are like 1000x their size and probably at least twice as smart! 

I’m weirdly entertained that that offhand comment is getting a response! but honestly I do appreciate the compassion because like. I feel like people who have never had bedbugs underestimate how much of a nightmare dealing with having bedbugs is. (it’s bad! it’s really bad!)

I’m unlucky enough to have had issues with them...twice?? in the last five years (in two different apartments) so yeah, I’ve got...a bit of PBSD (post bedbug stress disorder) that means every time I have any weird itchy bumps I start freaking out a little bit.

it’s been a solid...couple years now I think since the last round so I’ve calmed down about that a little but it still lurks in the back of my mind as A Thing That Could Happen and honestly the worst thing about it is not so much the bugs as it is the...massively expensive and stressful process of trying to purge them.

pretty sure I ended up spending upwards of a thousand dollars last time all told, between the washing and fumigating of all our belongings and apartment and boarding for the cat who wouldn’t be able to tolerate said fumes. 

bedbugs are bad, guys. and unfortunately in this city there’s only so much you can do to prevent them outside of living in a metal box. 

...anyway this is all my PBSD surfacing again and I’m going to stop now, but the moral of the story here I guess is a) don’t take upholstered second-hand furniture home and b) get you bedbug covers for your mattress and pillows. it might not stop them but you’ll at least feel a little better.

The last few weeks my housemates and I have been fighting a bedbug infestation and that really sucks but it led me to think some things

A bedbug almost exclusively lives on human blood as its food source. After a few generations, nearly every cell in a bedbug's body is therefore presumably made from molecules that came from our blood. In a way, it's like we're fighting our own blood, transformed into insect form...

It would really, really suck to be a bedbug. There are several reasons for this...

For one, your primary food source is a vast technological capitalist civilisation which devotes a portion of its research and industrial capabilities to creating new, ingenious ways to poison you, boil you, steam you, trap you etc.

For another, you - like all living organisms - have a compulsion to reproduce, which for a bedbug, takes the form of "traumatic insemination". The bedbugs with mobile genetic material (I'm not gonna use "male" and "female" language) stab their "aedeagus" right through the carapace of the egg laying bedbugs - often multiple times.

So... it probably sucks to be a bedbug even more than it sucks to be bitten by them. This is not particularly comforting.

It's very tempting to turn to military metaphors for our conflict (there's one!) with the bedbugs, but how does this fit theories of war? Clausewitz (whose thought @baeddel has gotten me interested in) developed a "dialectical" theory of war, which took as one of its initial poles that war is "an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will". The "will" of the human side is pretty clear: we want to stop getting bitten. But what does a bedbug want - what do bedbugs collectively want? Can we say they 'want' to survive, or is that anthropomorphising too much?

Of course, bedbugs do not formulate a strategy, or come up with plans to use against us. But bedbugs are not only frustratingly difficult to "battle", capable of hiding in endless tight spaces, but they can actually gain ground: bedbugs are increasingly resistant to pesticides that used to reliably kill them.

In this sense, our "enemy" is the impersonal workings of chance and evolution under the fiercest selection pressure! No bedbug carried out research to thwart a pesticide, but some bedbugs happened to have alleles that made them slightly more resistant to pesticides, and entirely unknown to the individual bedbugs, just by surviving and breeding and carrying out their bedbug lives as usual, they increased the proportion of the population that resists pesticides and gained ground in the "war".

How did bedbugs evolve? Presumably their habits of feeding on mammals at night then retreating into hidden spaces must have evolved long before humans, driven by pressures such as the hosts' tendency to squash them if possible. There are closely related 'bat bugs' for example, which feed on bats. However there's no info about their evolution on wikipedia, not even a cladogram!

It's occurring to me that the vast majority of animal species have really very little capacity to defend themselves from small parasites. Not just lacking our suite of poisons, but also our capacity for fine manipulation. What could a horse or a dog do if it had, say, fleas? I guess it could go for a swim? Then again, fleas aren't exactly a solved problem for humans either - cf the whole bubonic plague thing.

For a bedbug, the stakes are existential. If they don't eat our blood, they'll just straight up die of starvation. For us, the stakes are pain and irritation and comfort in our "home" - serious, but we're not at risk of death. We have the power to kill, they don't. All the bedbugs can hope to do is to be one of the lucky ones that survive. Even so, I have no sympathy for them! If I see one I'll chase it and crush it until I'm sure it's definitely dead.

If the bedbugs were conscious, if they could conceptualise some sort of collective interest, they might hope to find a way to force us to let them feed. Or to accept some sort of accord, where we would provide blood in return for... what?

For capital and proletariat, as currently constituted, we depend on the cycles of capital to provide us the things we need to live - food, a place to sleep, bedbug traps and washing machines. But capital cannot hope to move and grow without us, which gives us a weapon the bedbugs lack. And while the bedbugs cannot but remain bedbugs, we can hope to one day abolish capital and proletariat and form something new...

Returning to Clausewitz, according to some wikipedia editor:

The synthesis of his dialectical examination of the nature of war is his famous "trinity," saying that war is "a fascinating trinity—composed of primordial violence, hatred, and enmity, which are to be regarded as a blind natural force; the play of chance and probability, within which the creative spirit is free to roam; and its element of subordination, as an instrument of policy, which makes it subject to pure reason."[13]

Although the 'thesis/antithesis/synthesis' framing may be dubious, this seems at least somewhat apposite to the bedbug war - the play of chance and probability, especially. However 'fascinating' it is, though, I would really prefer it be over.

There are probably few species that see anything like the resources dedicated to their extermination as bedbugs. Humans are wiping out species faster than we can count what we're killing, but ironically the species we hate most are so resilient it seems impossible to imagine that we'll ever 'win' and finally 'defeat' the bedbugs.

Bedbugs, by parasitising the species which invented things like 'boats', 'agriculture', and 'colonialism' really hit on a winning evolutionary strategy! And possibly unlike other species which have massively grown in number through human industry, such as cows, bedbugs are poised to benefit pretty well even if humans die off in a massive way - they can go back to parasitising other animals with a vastly extended geographical range. That said, I'm not sure how well they'd deal with climate change. They don't seem to like heat so much.