I had the house all to myself: my son had just gone to bed and my wife was at work. So I sat down at my living room table to do some writing. 

Then a large bat burst out of my fire place and frantically flew all over my house. It circled and circled, doing figure eights in the living room air. I opened the front door and tried to shoo it out by waving a giant beach towel in the air. But instead of following my lead, the damn thing landed, sliding in between the fire place ledge and the painting that was mounted above it. I grabbed an oven mitt, a spatula, and a bucket. I don’t know why I grabbed a bucket but I thought it be good to have a bucket around for something. My plan was to use the spatula to flick the little bastard out of his hiding spot and grab it with my oven mitt. 

This plan failed miserably. The bat flew out. It was now even more pissed than he was before because now he’d just gotten man handled with a plastic cooking utensil. The bat flew all over of the living room.   Again, for some insane reason, I thought I could just shoo the thing out the front door with a beach towel. After ten minutes, the bat landed on the living room ceiling. He hung upside down like a large slimy bag of licorice. I looked at it and said out loud, “I’m tired of this mother f@#$-ing bat in my mother f@#$-ing house.”

To be honest, I wasn’t really concerned with the bat. I was more concerned with the fact that my son would wake up, crawl down from his bunk bed, and see a large bat zooming around our house. Murphy is totally Chicken Little. Last week, he saw an ant in our living room and he freaked out so bad we almost had to move to a sterile biosphere dome.

So I went down stairs to find an instrument of death. My first choice was easy: my beloved composite hockey stick. But I quickly realized that trying to hit a flying bat out of mid air with the thin blade of the stick would be like some sort Mr. Miyagi training session. I grabbed my tennis racket instead.

I crept up to the bat with all the grace of John Belushi. This is to say, there wasn’t any grace. I pretended to sneak up to it. Once I got within a few steps, I just teed off. I hit the thing so hard it practically exploded on impact. It hit the wall eight feet across the room.

Boom. Roasted.

Then my wife came home from work. It was 9:34 pm. The living room was spotless when she left to go to work. But now the front door was wide open, a beach towel was strung across an antique chair, an oven mitt rested on the TV, a tennis racket was on the coffee table, and a large orange bucket was on the fire place mantle. And I was standing there holding a bottle of 409. It was a scene out of a Quentin Tarantino film.

“How was work?” I asked her nonchalantly.