After having beeen deprived sleep via baby, cat, and a lame-ass party whose patrons were wailing 'Hotel California' at 4am, (ON A MOTHERFUCKING SUNDAY NIGHT/MONDAY MORNING) I found myself taking it out on an elusive prey.

A lone mosquito roused me from my umpteenth attempt at micro-sleep, and I set about engaging my reptilian brain, with an eye to sending that sucker to the insect Valhalla. Armed with the underpants I had recently removed due to a torrent of baby vomit that had splashed-down all over not only them, but my side of the bed, I crept stealthily about the slumber-tundra alive to every buzz, eventually discounting those of my gritty eyeballs, and the grinding of the base of my tired skull into neck's end like portar and pestle, as I whipped my head in its every bedevilled direction.

For a second, I caught a mental glimpse of my visage - absurd to the universe, a suburban Martin Sheen-alike, attacking a tiny bloodsucker with underpants soaked in his infant's sick. was this the meaning of life? Or at least it's most caustic metaphor?

It was just mad-enough to be a dream, but so appalingly mortal, it couldn't be.

I whipped at the curtains and heard it's disturbance. My tired eyes locked on the fucker as it hovered toward a wall.

I stood for what seemed like an age.

Knowing that this had to end now. It was as though we had been locked on a collision course since birth. I knew every hokey stripe on this little bastard's every leg. Still, I stood, unable to make a move until the impulse felt like the decisive one. I pulled the waistband taut, and baldly ignored the corner of my soul from where insect empathy was long since evicted. My undercrackers whipped past in a white flash like a rogue ghost fleeing the exorcist's lips, painting a mosquito rainbow on the haunted wall.

The world fell silent.

Even the Hotel California Dawn Chorus seemed to have been obliterated by this act of absurd murder. And as the last throngs of night gave way to dawn as it chalked it's abstract majesty across the naked sky, my heart was forever shaded a tone blacker.