On Avoiding Hysteria in Hysterical Times
"I think you might have bed bugs," she said. She had spent the night and when I took her home, she had gone back to sleep. When she woke up, she had welts all over back and arms. It seemed unlikely to me that that had come from my bed because I never had any bug bites. I slept in that bed every night and no bites, so I figured they must have come from someplace else.
We crawled into bed, which creaked and popped like Oscar the Grouch’s metal trashcan with every single move we made. And that’s where we tried to understand what he meant when he said, “Please no bleeding on the bed sheets. It can be very expensive for you because with all the blood, we have to throw them away. But, hey, I get it. I’m married, too.”