About
By GinUp
August 23, 2025
Michael McLeod, Alex Formenton, Dillon Dubé, Carter Hart and Cal Foote are pigs. Michael McLeod talked inebriated “EM” into leaving a bar with him to have consensual sex with him in a private hotel room and then texted other players on his hockey team to join him in the same room with her, to join him in a “three-way”. Semi-nude, inebriated, and only just coming off the throws of sex with the one man she had agreed to be with that evening, EM was suddenly presented with up to 11 more large, intimidating men crowding the room and pushing her to give them all blowjobs and join in other group sex acts. Feeling herself to be in the intimidating and dangerous situation that she was in fact in, she felt she had no choice but to go along with what they wanted in order to placate them and stave off the danger. After the invasion of the hotel room by those arrogant, drooling, self-serving pigs, she, so terribly alone, was in no position to save herself from any of the follow-up sexual activity with them. It was not, as the defence lawyers pressed on the judge, a riot of sexual adventure for her. Who would want their daughter to have been in that room when those pigs showed up? (And, hello, the only reason Michael McLeod recorded the two videos of EM after the group encounter had finished, hounding her to say she consented, was to cover his and the other players’ asses. Duh!?)
Anyone with a brain knows that is the gist of what went down for EM that night, that EM did, in fact, NOT consent to every sexual act perpetrated against her during that nightmare. Any mothers of those hockey players know it, as do their sisters and female cousins, female friends, yada, yada, yada. Sure, none of those women wanted their sons, brothers, cousins, friends to be found guilty and be sentenced for what they did, but, though they may not admit it out loud, they were and are definitely all horribly ashamed of and disgusted with what they know deep down to be the depravity of their boys’ behaviour that night. And I am quite sure that most of the players’ fathers told them that was not how they raised them to treat a woman and that they were and are beyond disappointed with their sons.
If the NHL lets those men back into the league, then the NHL will also have screwed over women.
Of course, there is one person involved who supposedly has a brain who did not get that message—Justice Maria Carroccia. Her finding in the case, including that EM was neither ‘credible nor reliable’ (see The Guardian: Canada’s hockey case raised questions about toxic culture – so why did the accuser end up on trial?) reads like a law student’s answer to a question in a Criminal Law exam in Law School (I would know—I’ve been there) rather than a reasoned, considered, 21st century understanding of the effects nine grueling days of testimony, seven of them under cross-examination by five separate tag-teams of lawyers, one for each accused, might have on a sexual assault victim, especially when the drunken events in question occurred seven years ago. How many highly paid defence lawyers does it take to hammer away at and dent the reliability and credibility of one lone young sexual assault victim over seven days? Are we surprised when it turned the judge? Seven days?!? Arrangements could have been made by the judge to only allow for a maximum set number of hours of cross-examination with a maximum number of questions set by the judge. Seven days is perverse!! And demeaning!! And, inevitably, as it turned out, destructive!!
Carroccia’s ‘attack and then blame the victim’ approach is right out of the clichés of the past. Did she ever even practise criminal law? Did she ever notice that when her clients testified, they always had at least one inconsequential point where they were sure they needed to stick to a version of the story as they wanted to tell it, even against their lawyer’s stern advice? (Mine always seemed to.) So EM lied about her weight? Has Justice Maria Carroccia never lied about her weight? Does she not know that women in our culture lie about their weight all the time—All. The. Time—whether giving testimony or not? That a woman lying about her weight of all things does not preclude the veracity of every other word she says? And does she really believe that EM should have remembered who touched whom first when McLeod was initially coming on to her, after that innocent moment was followed by hours of pressure by the appalling behaviour of almost a dozen looming hockey players crowding and taunting and slapping and pressuring her in a testosterone fetid hotel room? Does she believe, in fact, that if EM initiated touching with McLeod, that meant she initiated all the long, grueling hours of rabid handling that followed during the rest of the evening? Has Carroccia never had sex with a man when she really didn’t want to because she succumbed to the pressure? (If so, she’s lucky.) And she must never have had a piss-reeking dick shoved in her face for an entitled, nonelective blow job! How else to explain she can imagine that over a dozen in one evening by one naïve inebriated young woman for a room full of privileged, perverse, behemothian strangers is good, clean consented fun instead of H E Double Hockey Sticks?!
Was she bribed? Did the secret Hockey Canada fund come into play again? Or is she just a pig too? As well as a liar!
Here are two comments from that post:
In NHL says players acquitted in Hockey Canada sexual assault trial can return to league, the Globe and Mail wrote:
Though the NHL says the players can return to the league:
There's only one more kick at the puck for redemption—teams can refuse to sign the pigs! What are the chances? See September 12, 2025, Cathal Kelly of the Globe and Mail: NHL cleverly outsources moral judgement to its paying customers
By GinUp
May 20, 2025
On the day of my birth in 1955, just before the Sixties sparked major social and political movements leading to significant cultural shifts in attitudes towards race, gender and social norms throughout the end of the 20th century and into the 21st, I was pronounced a biological female. But I was not female. (Neither was I male, but more on that later.) Not at any moment in my life of 70 years and not in any cell of my body have I been female. And I am the only person on Earth who can say this about me. No one else in the entire world has the right to declare my gender, no one, not even the President of Bizarro Universe, where there are only two sexes and they are not changeable.
(If you think no flesh-and-blood trans women would look as sweetly female as the young woman in the above cartoon, guess again! Yet Trump neanderthal law deems them male.)
When I was three, I knew in my heart that I was not the girl my mother wanted me to be, not the girl she dressed me up to be—doing my girly-long hair, adding a dainty necklace—but I did not yet know that neither was I a boy. I just knew in every part of my being that I did not want to ever be seen in a dress and I knew that I wanted to wear cool stuff like my brother got to wear. This picture tells it all.
© GinUp
When I went through puberty, and my breasts grew, my three brothers made fun of them and I knew my being one of the boys, along with my dreams of playing in the NHL, were over. During my teens, I would stand in front of a full length mirror and press in the sides of my thighs in so I wouldn’t get hips. Luckily, whether my ministrations worked or not, I never got much in the way of hips. When I was 19, I realized my breasts were outside the envelope of my being and I spoke to female friends and my sister about wanting them removed. They were all shocked and appalled and couldn’t discourage me from that idea quickly enough or insistently enough. They didn’t have a clue and so failed me terribly. I was in no position to actually have the surgery at the time, but they could not stop one moment to hear me.
When I was twenty, I came out to myself as not straight, but there was no such thing back then as nonbinary that I knew of, so I had no other option but to use lesbian as an identifier, because I was seen to be a woman and I loved women. (Butch lesbians like me got a lot of grief back then for creating butch/femme couples that were supposedly just copies of male and female couples and therefore deemed wrong [by correct lesbians and feminists].)
The thing is, whenever the term lesbian was applied to me, either by me or by others, something always rang false. (I became more comfortable with calling myself gay as that word evolved to include lesbians, as in the Gay Liberation movement.) I thought my problem with ‘lesbian’ might have been because I might be a man, but I was pretty sure I didn’t want to live as a man, and, as I said, at that point the concept of nonbinary didn’t exist in my world. I later came across the First Nations belief in two-spirited people, but I was not that either. Every once in a while, little kids would ask me if I was a boy or a girl. (Out of the mouths of babes.) A timid voice from deep inside my head always whispered, “No.”
In 1988, when I was 33, I gave birth through artificial insemination by unknown donor, and I happily nursed my child for three years. It was good that I still had the tools to nurse, because we both loved nursing, which helps nurture more than just as nutrition. (When she was 18-months-old, her fingers on one hand were squashed in an accident, and because nursing calmed her so, I was able to ice her hand while we nursed through it. I don’t think icing would have been tolerated otherwise. Her still rubbery 18-month-old finger bones recovered completely.)
Finally, in 2006, I had FTM Top Surgery and was blessedly breast free. (I was actually lucky to have waited so long before doing it because the surgery had by then been perfected. I have personally seen the results of a much earlier surgery and was much dismayed.) In the late 2000’s, I helped form a group of five FTMs who met regularly to socialize and discuss transition issues such as FTM Top Surgery and masculinizing hormone therapy. The other four now live as men; I do not because ultimately, I came to see that I am not a man. Not a woman, not a man.
I am not female, I am not male, President Know-So-Very-Little Trump. Ergo, I am nonbinary. I have done my due diligence over my gender, achingly so, decade after decade, and I have the right to proclaim it. I doubt Trump has ever done due diligence on anything, never mind on a concept as fundamental as gender. In fact, I doubt he could ever even understand what due diligence means or even have the attention span for it. Some people say they are concerned that kids are declaring themselves transgender and are then exposed to gender-affirming care before they are mature enough to make that decision. But when Trump so callously and carelessly took nonbinary off the US Federal table, he attacked an option that had led me to my truth, which I had to strive for decades to search out for myself. It is harder to be what there are no words for. Once the words are found, we must honour them, hold them dear, as a precious gift to those who need them. Even the word lesbian did not appear in my world as anything but negative until I was 20, and so I struggled through my teens with a difference I could not understand.
In my sixties, somewhat late in life, I became aware of the nonbinary identifier, but vacillated in accepting it—could this finally be my answer and was I brave enough to adopt it? After all, I was a product of a long life buried in my culture, as we all are, and the first granting of the gender ‘nonbinary’ by an American court only occurred in June 2016. Judith Butler didn’t even come out as nonbinary until 2019. In 2020, at 65, I finally fully embraced it. (These days,'gender-critical' feminists call out nonbinary people who were pronounced female at birth for abandoning womanhood due to gender role oppression. Just as meddling as right-wing-fundamentalist-nutbars!)
And now we have to suffer Gender-Peril-Trump-Fool?! Being non-straight, I have lived as part of a vilified minority in North America my whole adult life, though until January 20, 2025, things were incrementally improving. Ironically, as the USA has slowly civilized, multitudes of bigots have been acting performatively, hiding their need to meddle in the closet. Others haven’t hidden it at all. Trump wants to let the vilification out again in full force against transgender and nonbinary people and is actively encouraging hidden bigots to take their masks off.
On Feb 7, “the American Civil Liberties Union sued the federal government (Orr v. Trump) on behalf of seven transgender and nonbinary people after many had tried to renew their passports and ended up with documents with inaccurate sex markers. The ACLU argued that the Executive Order, and subsequent passport policy, are unconstitutional, and will cause harm and infringe on trans people rights to privacy. A preliminary injunction granted by a federal judge on April 18, offering temporary relief to six of the plaintiffs in that case, requires the State Department to allow them to obtain passports that reflect their sex markers consistent with their gender identity.” (Lil Kalish, HuffPost)
On Apr 30, the ACLU filed a motion asking the court to certify a class of people adversely affected by the current passport policy (i.e. All Trans, Intersex, and Nonbinary People Seeking Passports) and to extend the preliminary injunction to that entire class.
The final outcome of the matter could be years off as it winds itself through that federal court case AND appeals (starting with an appeal of that preliminary injunction, no doubt) and God knows what else, delayed all along the way by Trump’s henchpeople, whose tactics could very well include impeaching every judge who does not rule with Trump—MAGA actually means “Make America Grate Apart’. (My Google AI Overview said that, figuratively, ‘grate apart’ means something is being torn apart, destroyed, damaged. Out of the mouths of AI.)
There is, however, a significant pushback against this Executive Order that nonbinary Americans can, unhindered by official considerations, legal requirements, or delay tactics, step up for right now—for themselves and for those transgendered people who don’t want to be perceived as trans for their own valid reasons, including, at a minimum, reasons of safety. That step is to—openly and en masse—reconceive ‘passing’ for nonbinary people for the immediate future.
Passing (i.e. being clocked) as a nonbinary person is pretty well an impossibility because nonbinary doesn’t have any particular presentation to pass as, and the nonbinary community is too diverse for that anyway (looking androgynous like me is not nearly the only way to be nonbinary). “There is no one way to be non-binary. Passing and transitions in general sometimes involve interventions that alter how someone looks—medical transitions are procedures such as hormone replacement therapy (HRT) and surgeries, and non-medical transitions (also called social transitions) are things like changing one’s wardrobe and choosing a new name and pronouns. It should be said that many trans and nonbinary people will often choose not to medically transition, and it is more often that nonbinary people make that choice, though there are plenty of nonbinary people who do choose to undergo a medical transition” Passing, Transition and the Non-binary Experience, as I finally did with FTM Top Surgery at 51.
For most of my adult life, my gender presentation has been confusing to people—since I came out as a lesbian in 1975 when I was 20, I’ve been called ma’am by 90% of strangers who’ve addressed me and sir by the other 10%. (I was called sir in a corner grocery store when I was eight months pregnant. I was wearing an army green flight suit. I looked like an avocado. Apparently, a male avocado.) Forty years later, in my sixties, I became aware of the nonbinary identifier, and knew that that was me.
As nonbinary, the confusion continued. Bottom line, there is no one way to ‘look’ nonbinary. “Confusing people is the closest I can get to passing; no one will ever look at me and know I’m nonbinary. People could look at me and know I’m queer by how I’m dressed which is all fun and good but I’ll always be misgendered in public and that’s just something I have to live with,” says Royal in Passing, Transition and the Non-binary Experience. I say, until now.
As I‘ve done in so many other parts of my life, I went forward with living nonbinary in a dedicated burst of hoopla. Our clothes are our second skin. They can tell people a lot about who we are. Having spent so much of my life wearing clothes that lied about me, that were not me, I decided to explicitly declare what I really am every time I step out of my apartment. I endeavour to wear primarily the four colours of the nonbinary pride flag, even if no one who sees me knows what the colours mean. I know, and I know I’m killing it when I’m wearing 'my enby colours.’
In March, 2021, I initiated a NonBinary Wardrobe Makeover.
© GinUp
Here’s one of my nonbinary flag outfits from 2022 or 2023 that I’m quite happy with. I often get positive comments on my nonbinary second skin, especially when I’m wearing these camo pants. Whenever I get a comment, I ask if they’d like to hear about the four colors. They always do. And they always listen respectfully.
A pansy on the T-shirt because many pansies boldly carry the four colours and, because ‘pansy’ is being reclaimed. Sunglasses and mask because they make me look cool (and, OK, I don't do makeup, I don't have a makeup artist, and at 70, I'm not as photogenic as I used to be and have to reject way fewer photos when I wear a mask and sunglasses). You can find more photos of my NonBinary Wardrobe at ginup.ca/fashion. (And, no, I don’t hide behind sunglasses and a mask when I walk around in public in my nonbinary second skin.)
I’ve even used the four colours for my Bitmoji avatar ever since I heard about Snapchat users turning their Bitmoji-skin-tone purple.
© GinUp
So, do you get where I’m going with this? Trump’s science-less, soulless, perverse, unpresidential declaration that there are only two genders is unacceptable, just as the police raids on the Stonewall Inn were unacceptable. “In the early hours of June 28, 1969, a police raid on the Stonewall Inn provoked a spontaneous act of resistance that earned a place alongside landmarks in American self-determination such as Seneca Falls Convention for women’s rights (1848) and the Selma to Montgomery March for African American voting rights (1965).” “By the time of Stonewall...we had 50 to 60 gay groups in the country. A year later...1500.”
Trump’s deftly named Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism And Restoring Biological Truth To The Federal Government Executive Order is not only a wake-up-call-to-arms for nonbinary persons, it is a five alarm, 3D, ultra-neon, “Uncle Sam Needs You” cyber-poster! Trump’s EO declares only male and female—only binary—and intends to drive the rest of us underground. Well I say ‘nonbinary in yer face’ wherever I go in my nonbinary second skin. You can too! Rise Up and Wear Your NonBinary Flag! It doesn’t have to be as loud as my camo pants. It can be as simple as these:
Or it can be a pin or a purple tie or a yellow tie or a yellow, white, purple and black tie, or scarf, or cap or t-shirt, or skirt or suit. Or something like the black T-shirt shown below. There are myriads of possibilities—I’m thinking of painting the flag on the doors of my red Mini Cooper in big. And it doesn’t have to be every day of the week. (If we were to pick a day, I’d pick Tuesday, to make it be ‘Not Twosday’, because binary basically means two.)
With the tedious, too oft seen scribble of his Sharpie, Trump thought he could erase us. As if he could disappear an America-sized tableau of Whack-a-Moles with one blow of his God-like Sharpie mallet. He can’t; just like Whack-a-Moles, we won’t/can’t/ain’t about to stay down. Just like Whack-a-Moles, we will not be driven underground. We will rise up! And, like the people of Whoville in Horton Hears a Who, we all need to shout “we are here, we are here, we are here!” We need to rise up and shout—for ourselves and for those transgendered people who don’t want to be perceived as trans. We are Stonewall 3.0! Supporters, feel free to join in!
Be safe, but if you can, rise up and wear nonbinary colors, boost this strategy viral, and together, we can be part of the pushback to Make America Decent!
Paint pride colors all across America and rouse its citizens out of the grey Trump-induced torpor so many of them are in. Leave no doubt in any corner of the USA that everyone has the right to declare their own gender identity with the full backing and cooperation of governments. It’s a UN goal for every country in the world! It's civilized. It's decent.
The bravest people in America walk around every day in skin that is not white. Wear your nonbinary-flag-coloured second skin until we no longer have to. For all our sakes!
By GinUp
January 17, 2025
2009: In her article Flee, Dry and Die: Is a New Weapon in the Bedbug Battle Ready for Action? published June 10 in Scientific American, Lynne Peeples wrote:
2017: In her article Bed bugs are back—here’s how one neighbourhood is learning to live with them published December 11 in The Conversation, Heather Lynch wrote:
2024: In her article The ‘Unthinkable’ New Reality About Bedbugs: Another, much stronger species is headed north published February 10 in The Atlantic (aka Getting rid of bed bugs: Trickier than ever), Ute Eberle wrote (as if her titles weren’t disconcerting enough):
Actually, traps aren’t just used for monitoring—Bed Bug Foundation, Home of the European Code of Practice for Bed Bug Management, posts self-help advice for bed bug control that relies on turning every bed in the house into an island with traps to capture all bugs trying to access the human on the bed. If tropical bed bugs can climb out of traps, this ‘turn your bed into an island’ strategy fails, too.
Is it just me, or does all of this lead to something that seems pretty grim and hopeless? To recap: If chemicals don’t work and traps don’t work and nonchemical methods work so slowly that residents have to live two to three months in infested quarters and if some people have just given up and decided that you can’t beat the bugs and have resigned themselves to living with them instead, what is left? Which brings us full circle back to the comment in 2009 of “being pretty much open to anything at this point.”
In his article Bed bugs are a global problem published October 25, 2023 in The Conversation, William Hentley wrote:
Coincidentally, in 2023, I experimented with a strategy that took into account how bed bugs function in our world. In fact, without any treatments at all, chemical or otherwise, and relying very little on traps, I removed a light infestation from my home for good. It’s not a strategy for everyone in today’s world, but if every other approach fails, as it looks like they may, my strategy could very well be the only tactic for the future, crazy or not.
So, that’s the case for my method of bed bug extermination. Now comes the ‘crazy’: a synopsis of my lone defeat of a light bed bug infestation, based on the full narrative, ‘Tilting at Bed Bugs’, found on my website at ginup.ca/bedbugs.
It started in mid-March, 2023. For three days in a row, while I was reading on my daybed couch in my living room in the middle of the day, I noticed a bug crawling down my chest. I didn’t know what kind of bugs they were, but I thought their day after day almost identical behaviour was odd. I flicked the first two away and killed the third one. A couple days later, I noticed a bad rash on the back of my thighs, and then the same rash on my butt cheeks the next day.
I thought maybe I was allergic to something on the quilt that covered my daybed, so I threw a clean blanket over the quilt (which clean blanket happened to be white fuzzy fleece) and slept on top of that. The next day, I noticed what looked like a few bug bites on my arm and face, and also a small scattering of little black balls on the white blanket. The next morning when I first opened my eyes, I saw a bug walking on the white fuzzy fleece blanket about six inches from my face. I spent the day freaking out, researching on the internet, making a plan, because … I had bed bugs!
I couldn’t tell anyone. I lived in seniors subsidized housing, I had mental health issues, I was estranged from my family and had basically no friends, and I was horribly ashamed. I didn’t want to draw any attention to myself. I knew I should tell my apartment building manager, but I just couldn’t. So I couldn’t ask for help. (Almost as important, I didn’t like having strangers in my apartment. I didn’t even like anyone knocking on my door. Also, I don’t like people telling me what to do.)
So … it was up to me.
During my internet searches, not only did I learn stuff to do about bed bugs, I learned a lot of stuff about bed bugs themselves, and as I paced around my living room that evening, some of the stuff I’d learned came together like pieces of a puzzle until suddenly, I had an idea of how I could attempt an extermination. Theoretically.
Piece 1: Bed bugs are nocturnal. During the day, they hide in nooks and crannies in mattresses and bed linen and behind wall mouldings and in furniture and carpets and electrical outlets and even in computers and so on and so on and the internet said you are supposed to look for them in all those places and to declutter to reduce the number of places. I had absolutely no desire to look in all those places, or to declutter. I did check the corners of the fitted sheet on my daybed in the living room and, sure enough, in every corner I found numerous clusters of little black smushed spots from bug excrement bleeding out into the fabric (yuck, yuck, yuck!)
© Unknown
I found only a tiny bit in only one corner of the double bed in the bedroom which I had fortuitously stopped sleeping in only a few days after the bed bugs had apparently invaded. Bottom line, bed bugs are nocturnal, i.e. they come out of hiding at night. I didn’t have to search for them at all. They’d come out to me, on their own.
Piece 2: Bed bugs live on blood, though not just human blood. However, with mine being the only blood in my apartment, I was their only target. Again, they’d come to me.
Piece 3: Bed bugs come to people, at night, in our beds because that’s where most people are at night. In our beds. Bed bugs can sense our body heat and our CO2 output as we breathe. When we lay in our beds at night, we produce a big neon sign of body heat, perfumed with a captivating cloud of CO2. Loud and clear, our bodies say, “Here we are! Come and get it!”
Piece 4: When they came to my bed at night, I could kill them.
Piece 5: I’d have to be up at night. I’d have to become nocturnal.
Piece 6: Instead of lying down on the daybed at night, could I just use part of my body to lure them? Could I just use, say, … my bare feet?! Would my bare feet give off enough body heat?
Piece 7: If I used my feet as a lure, and they came, I’d get lots of bites on my feet, and though bed bugs aren’t known to transmit disease, they do cause a variety of negative physical and mental health issues. Some material on the internet even suggested the danger of blood loss leading to anemia. Some people commit suicide when they have bed bugs! Would I be safe?
I knew it was nuts, but I decided I could at least try it once, that night, March 26, as an experiment. I gathered what I thought I might need from what I had on hand. Peacock blue exercise leggings to protect my legs. A t-shirt and a black hoodie to cover the rest of me. A week or so later, I added my dark grey muddy-buddies to my protective gear.
© GinUp
I set up a lure station in front of my daybed with my office chair and a war table: a flashlight to surprise and reveal the bed bugs once they had gathered around my feet. A box of tissues to wipe the bug guts off my fingers after I squished the bugs dead. Hydration fluid (for me). My iPhone, so I could pretend to read while the bed bugs gathered in the dark. And to keep time.
© GinUp
Articles on the internet said bed bugs come out from about midnight until 5 am, so I decided to start at 11 pm as a buffer, and just continue until they weren’t coming out anymore. Calling it an experiment helped a little with the creepiness of what I was going to do, but mostly I tried not to think ahead. When 11 finally arrived, I turned off the light, reluctantly took my position on the office chair, double checked the position of each item on my war table, checked for the flashlight on the floor and sighed. Then I just sat there—sat pretty well motionless for many moments in the dark, trying to hang on to my plan. I saw on my iPhone it was 11:05 pm, I sighed again, then resignedly lifted my bare feet up over the front edge of the daybed and placed them in the middle of the white fuzzy fleece blanket, my heels about 8 inches (20 cm) apart. You can see the dents my heels made in the picture above. Imagine you’re sitting there, in the dark, with your bare feet on the killing field. Cripes!
Half an hour later, I grabbed the flashlight, turned it on and pointed it at my feet, fearful and sickened. There wasn’t one bed bug to be seen.
For the sake of logistics and nomenclature, I came up with terms for the different parts of the plan. A session was comprised of two parts:
Obviously, the very first session was a bust. The lure didn’t work. Not enough body heat? Not enough CO2? Turned out, I was just early.
The lure for the first successful session ended at 1:00 am. I went for the flashlight on the floor, my heart pounding. I knocked the flashlight over, felt around for it, found it, picked it up, turned it on and shone it at my feet. Bed bugs surrounded my heels, maybe 10. They immediately started scrambling to get away. Horrified and revolted, I jerked my heels up off the blanket, brushed at my heels with my free hand, struggled to get my feet between the bed and the chair, planted them on the floor, stood up, leaned over the bed without touching it and started killing bed bugs within the circle of the flashlight’s glare. Right thumb and forefinger, reach and pinch. Pick a new target, reach, pinch, repeat. The bugs were running for their lives and the blood that spurted out of them when I squished them was mine. When I finally stopped, I was extremely overheated and whipped off my hood with my bloody hand. End of the first sally.
I wiped my fingers on a tissue. I counted the dead. Eight. I counted the bites on my ankles. Fifteen. I didn’t take a photo of my ankles that night, but here’s one from three weeks later:
© GinUp
After the first sally ended, I went to the bathroom to wash my hands, quite obsessively, with lots of soap. Twice. I went back to the living room and prepared for the next session.
I killed about 40 that first night, having carried out about seven sessions, the last one or two lures garnering no bugs. I took breaks between sessions to soap and wash my hands, use the toilet, top up my water, have a snack, try to pull myself together and so on. I didn’t do a lot of introspection of what I was doing (killing) and how I was feeling (about killing) that first night. The process and mechanics were so new to me, I had mostly just numbly followed the plan. Lure, sally, rally, repeat.
So I had started my new nocturnal life. And a war. (A war that, admittedly, the other side wasn’t even aware of.) I wouldn’t be able to sleep in my apartment again at night until every last bed bug was gone. How long would it take? Could I last that long? Could I ever win or was I just tilting at bed bugs as uselessly as Quixote tilted at windmills?
I was kind of at loose ends the next day. I didn’t want to try to get some sleep on the daybed right away, not so soon after seeing all those bed bugs trampling and bleeding all over it. I realized how perfect the white fuzzy fleece blanket was for the killing field. Of course, that it was white made the bed bugs as visible as they could get, but almost as importantly, it slowed them down. The surface of a bedsheet would have let them zip away like greased lightning but the blanket, made of thousands of tiny tufts, forced them to climb up and down little mountain peaks of tufts all along their way. That was a singular military advantage for me.
© GinUp
Adjusting to a nocturnal cycle seemed easier than I thought it would be. Staying sharp through the first two nights was a breeze. On the third night, however, I kept nodding off, then jerking awake. I promised myself not to let that happen ever again—it was so disconcerting to set myself up as live-bait and then lose consciousness. Then I think it was near the end of the second week that I fell asleep during a lure and didn’t wake up for three hours!! Slept through the sally! I felt like I had really messed up. What if none of them ever came back for a month because they were all so sated? And the thought of bed bugs crawling all over me for three hours, feasting on my feet and legs like free-range chickens really freaked me out. I never fell asleep during a lure again after that. (Yes, the irony is that that’s what happens to millions of people all around the world every night.)
Sleeping during the day was not easy because it was not natural; it was not easy because I knew some bed bugs wandered around during the day; and it was not easy because, due to the hell I went through every night, I was pretty freaked out most of the time even during the daytime. After a day nap when I felt a bed bug walk across my eyelashes (horrible, very memorable, sensation), I tried wearing a bike balaclava backwards, but the balaclava was so tight across my face, I could hardly breathe. I never got enough sleep no matter what I tried.
I also never really settled on a schedule of nocturnal meal times. Perhaps if I had sat down to work out on paper or on Word or Excel, when would be the reasonable times to eat in comparison to when I used to eat during the day, but I never did that. I couldn’t really have and didn’t really want to have a meal during a night shift, or take a lunch break, so I just snacked, and then ate meals whenever during the day.
But, wow, did I ever learn a lot about bed bugs! For example:
Piece 8: Bed bugs can’t jump! Can’t, can’t, can’t! No matter what anyone tells you, bed bugs can’t jump. (Or fly.)
Piece 9: Speaking of nocturnal, my bed bugs consistently came no earlier than the 12:30 am lure and then consistently wound things up and skittered off to their hidey-holes about half an hour before sunrise, although there were occasionally a couple wandering around at times during any given day.
Then came the crash! Not even three weeks into the ordeal of nightly killing sessions and random bed bugs showing up in and on my things and wandering around during the day, I hit a wall, hard. Halfway through a shift on April 14, I was brought to my knees when a sense of total inadequacy and oppression overwhelmed me. It suddenly all just felt too insurmountable to carry on. There I was, alone, in the middle of the night, waiting for a lure to run its course while bed bugs gathered at my feet in the dark to bite me and suck my blood—for the 100th time—on a bed I couldn’t sleep on, in my home that hadn’t been a home for weeks, as low as low could feel, tired, crushed, physically tortured and desperate. Despairing. Great idea for an experiment, Gin!
But … there’s gotta be something, I told myself. Something I could do to help pick myself up. What, oh what could that be? What could in actual reality bolster me, at this time and in this hell? “What about … a … a reward?” asked a meek little voice in my head. OK, this may sound sad, but that word ‘reward’ in truth perked me up momentarily. In fact, the idea of it turned into a little bright spot in the hell I was going through. But that still begged the question: What for a reward? I sat there alone in the dark for minutes, as the lure inevitably counted down. I seemed unable to imagine a thing. The momentum to find an answer was distressingly slipping away. And then it just popped into my mind: pie. The reward of pie. I love pie. I hadn’t had pie for a long, long time. Pie! Pie might do it. No. Wait. Pies. Lemon meringue and strawberry rhubarb. Both at the same time.
The very next day, I went out and came home with pies. Just seeing them sitting there on my desk, side-by-side, before I’d even taken a bite, I knew this was going to work. (I just hoped a bed bug didn’t walk across one of them. It’s not like it would make me not want to eat the pie if one did, it’s just I wanted the reward to be so perfect, so pure, that I could be in a place for just one moment in my bed-buggy life where there were no bed bugs. Just the life of pie.)
At that first sitting of pie heaven, I ate almost a third of both pies. (The strawberry rhubarb was a six-incher and the lemon meringue was a big pie, a 9-incher.) The next day, I had pie for every meal. Only pie. And, God I felt good! The reward worked way better than I had imagined it would! I was back! My will to live was back! My will to kill was back!
Sometime in May, I noticed there were fewer and fewer adult bugs showing up, until there were only medium sized ones and little ones. Also, total numbers were down. Was this crazy miserable experiment actually working? After I saw (and killed) only five bed bugs during the whole June 4 night shift, I decided that it was finally time to deploy the mattress encasement and the bed bug traps under the daybed legs. I’d waited so long because I didn’t want to have to rely on them—I wanted to rely on my strategy.
On June 5, I installed the daybed mattress encasement and the traps, and only one bug showed up at my heels on the encasement that entire night. I ended the lure-and-kill sessions on June 13, after seeing no bugs on the encasement surface since June 5.
On June 14, I began lying on the daybed on the bare encasement the whole night, in my protective gear, with no cover, with spotlights on the whole night. I got one face bite that night and a waist bite the next. No bites on the 16th. The internet said lights wouldn’t keep the bugs back, but I just couldn’t bring myself to start lying on the bed again in the dark. Needless to say, not much sleeping took place. By June 16, there were no signs of bed bugs at all except in the bed bug traps. Between June 5, when I installed the bed bug traps, and June 19, about twenty bugs were caught in the traps.
On June 20, I shed my protective gear for a white long-sleeved t-shirt and light purple PJ pants, plus socks (Tommy Hilfiger) and gloves, and began to actually sleep on the daybed encasement, with a spotlight on/off clicker to use if (when) I woke up. Any decent period of sleep was foreshortened by nightmares. Guess what they were about. I still didn’t use a cover—I couldn’t bear the thought of being confined under a blanket with bed bugs all around me, especially after all the hundreds of bed bugs I had seen running around on the killing field. Yes, I knew intellectually that bed bugs wouldn’t show up under any cover anymore in numbers, but still.
The last time I cleaned the bed bug traps out was June 26. No bed bugs showed up anywhere after that. Here are the anti-climactic, housekeeping items that followed:
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| Jul 02-05 |
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| Jul 06-12 |
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| Jul 13 |
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| Aug 13 |
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Bed bugs can live for several months without a blood meal. How could I be sure some of them weren’t just lying low, hiding in hibernation, waiting to pop out months later? If all their hiding places weren’t tracked down and treated, how could I be sure? I could be sure because bed bugs only remain in a state of hibernation until they detect the signals that there is a host to feed on close by, i.e. I could be sure because bed bugs are driven to come out of hiding (mostly at night) when a blood host is available. I was available and none were coming out, day or night. And unhatched eggs aren’t viable for months; bed bug eggs hatch within 10 days after they’ve been laid, period. If they hadn’t hatched within two weeks of the death of the last bed bug, they never would.
It was over. I had done it. Mission accomplished.
I didn’t really celebrate to any extent. Maybe a little the first time I slept in the double bed, with all new linens, 100% free of the fear of bed bugs (OK, 99.9%). I did make up a little song about it though:
Understandably, the victory took a while to sink in. And this may be the weirdest thing I’ve yet to say: For a while, maybe a month or so after they were for sure gone, I missed them. Every once in a while. They had been part of every hour of my life for nearly three months. We’d had conversations (okay, one-sided). I’d named them (okay, I couldn’t tell them apart). I’d teased them. We had bonded. I’d felt really bad some nights when I killed them. Maybe it was a sort of twisted Stockholm syndrome. Even now, writing about it a year after it was all over, I remember missing them. I remember missing the caustic smell of them even. I remember taking all their lives.
‘Course, even over a year later, I still thought I saw a bug in my peripheral vision now and again, or I imagined a horde of them gathering behind my back. I hope to never, ever, see another live bed bug again in my life. So, was it worth it? It took three months to end my infestation and I spent under $250 on mattress encasements and bed bug traps for my daybed and my double bed. I didn’t have to look for bed bugs. I didn’t have to attack them where they hid. I didn’t have to hot launder all my clothes over and over. I didn’t have to declutter. I only vacuumed my apartment once, at the beginning, cuz the internet said I should and I was more easily manipulated at the beginning. I didn’t lose a stick of furniture. I’d use the same strategy again if necessary, but the second time, I’d know all along that my strategy was actually going to work. There’d be much less freaking out and no pie required.
A retired couple living 11 floors above me got bed bugs a year after I did. The housing authority has in-house exterminators. Two initial inspections revealed no bugs. Then the exterminators put traps down and three bugs were caught. It was deemed a ‘light infestation.’ The exterminators ended up spraying on three separate occasions before the biting stopped, and then once more for good measure. Before each treatment, the couple had to look for bed bug hiding places, declutter, and box up most of their stuff. They had a lot of plants, which were all moved to the hallway the first three times. Throughout, they had to hot launder and vacuum, vacuum, vacuum. After each treatment, they had to wait eight hours to return to their apartment. They had to buy a bed mattress encasement and they lost a couch and a recliner (replacement cost: $3,000). From the initial discovery to the final ‘All Clear’ was six months. Yes, my nights were a horror show, but they lived horror 24/7 for twice as long.
Takeaway 1: As a friend said, my method of exterminating bed bugs maybe isn’t practical for most people. The infestation would have to be caught within a month or so, it would take an unflinching household willing to be non-social shut-ins, go nocturnal, and conduct killing sessions every night for at least a couple/three months. Not many people could pull it off. Imagine the Kardashians tilting at bed bugs! Or did I miss that episode?
Takeaway 2: The crazy question is: which makes more sense in the coming years, the faltering professional exterminator agenda or my strategy? A strategy that bed bugs can never counter. Unless …
Unless they are in fact capable of spreading disease.
The above article is a summary of the full story Tilting at Bed Bugs.