Yo! This is not cool. WTF.

I woke up about 40 minutes after falling asleep, hearing what I thought was a big moth banging against the window screen trying to get in. It went on long enough that I grabbed my flashlight to see what it was. When I turned it on, something whizzed by my head, and I realized the moth was already in the bedroom, and it was trying to get out.
So I got up and put my glasses on and hit the flashlight again to go find the lightswitch, when, lo and behold, the thing flew by me and I realized, it’s a bat!!. Uh, okay. I bolted out the door to the hallway, and turned on the hall light.
So now I’m standing there, naked, dazed and confused, in the middle of some decent REM sleep, trying to figure out what to do. Do I have to deal with this now? I’m tired, can I deal with this in the morning? Well, first, let’s verify it’s a bat, and not just a really big moth.
So I open the door just a bit, and flip the lightswitch on, and a big grey bat comes dive-bombing at the door, which I slam shut. Yo! This is not cool. WTF.
So, I’m thinking, where’s my sleeping bag? I don’t think it’s in the bedroom. It’s not in the spare bedroom, but hey, there’s the futon Kathryn moved over here when Rob and Sarah lived here last fall. I can sleep there. Kinda cold, nice to have a blanket or something. So I head downstairs to find the sleeping bag. Not in the closets. Basement maybe? I’m down there rooting around and can’t find it. Ugg.
Well, maybe I can catch the bat and get it out of here and just go back to bed. And then I realize I’ll be chasing after this thing barefoot in my birthday suit, and that just seems crazy. Too many bad things could happen. I just want it to go away, a particular instance of my pacifist “tuck into a fetal position, roll out of the way, and hope for the best” approach to physical conflict.
So I go back upstairs to the bedroom hallway. I listen closely. Maybe it has left? Then, schnit, squeal, bang into the screen. Nope, it’s still flailing. I’m going to sleep in the spare bedroom. In some sort of weird bat-mind theorizing, I leave the bedroom and hallway lights on, figuring he wants to get out, and he’ll be less likely to head for the bottom of the door if it’s light on the other side.
I find the winter comforter, and pull it onto the futon, and bunch some of it up at the head for a pillow, and crash sometime after midnight.
I wake up and don’t want to get up. Eventually I get up and listen at the door. Nothing. I peek inside. No apparent danger. I quickly put on sweats and a t-shirt, and get out of there. I spend an hour wondering about my approach to the search. I eat a banana. I check email. I check my morning blogs. I call Kathryn. Finally, I get my Tilly hat, my leather garden gloves, and my capture implements: a 3 gallon paint bucket, and an 11 x 17 sheet of photo-mount backing board.
I carefully head into the bedroom, searching on the floor, walls, and ceiling. Nothing. Corners? Under the bed? On the slats up under the bottom of the bed? Behind the curtains? Behind the pillows on the floor? In the closet? I can’t find him. Maybe he really did find his way out under the air conditioner, the likely way he got in. I tape up the A/C slot, and hope he really got out, leaving my bucket and backing board handy in case I need them tonight.
It all feels like a weird dream, kind of like the fiction I wrote in 2002. But amplified, since it was, in fact, real. Six or eight hours from now we’ll be headed to bed. I wonder what will happen….