Last week I got a mosquito bite. It was an outrage.

What it means is, I’m already behind 2010, a year in which no mosquito struck until the first or second week of May. But in an uncharacteristic (for me) glass-half-full way, every mosquito bite reminds me that in San Diego we don’t have much of a mosquito problem at all. It’s one of those little things, like about 275 days of glorious weather a year, that we spoiled locals tend to take for granted.

Which isn’t, of course, to say that two or three measly mosquitoes can’t ruin two or three nights, even here. Still, I have a very effective move, apparently inherited from my father – there must be whole gene sequence devoted to this alone – in which I pull the sheet over my head, wrap it around my face, and be perfectly comfortable with nothing but my snorkel exposed, offering only an area of skin that mosquitoes have no interest in, at least, not so far. The problem is that, having solved the mosquito problem for the moment, I go blissfully to sleep, only to wake up having thrown the sheet off my head, and, defenses breeched, itching.

And slapping at one of the more horrifying sounds in nature: that whining zzzzZZZZZzzzzZZZZT!, the ZT! finale meaning, of course, that the Eagle has Landed.

Some decades ago there was something called the Shell No-Pest Strip, a slab of raw insecticide solidified and sold, presumably unregulated, to innocents like my family. My brother and I used to place one right between our beds. We slept pretty much undisturbed throughout our teen years, contently inhaling toxic Whatever eight hours a night for three months out of every year. It explains a lot.

But now, every summer, I travel to southwestern Ohio for a week or so with my wife’s family. Lovely country, although from my perspective it reeks of insect repellant, with which I coat myself about five times a day/evening in an attempt to avoid being bled off-white by the little bastards. The mosquitoes, not my wife’s family. Miss a spot, and they’ll find it. How people live there is beyond me and then beyond even that.

They have other bugs, too. A lot of them. Weird ones. And have you ever been to the beach on the east coast of the United States? There’s some seriously creepy stuff creeping around. I once saw a creature skittering sideways along the sand, and I swear, it had its eyes on stalks. I looked around for the UFO it came from, but the craft must’ve been cloaked. Anyway, let me just tell you that out here, we’ve got it made in the sun.

… And this would seem to be as good a place as any to talk about bedbugs, currently chomping their way through New England and the mid-Atlantic states, apparently hell-bent on colonizing the nation.

They may arrive here this year, next, or whenever. It’s going to be … itchy.

As it happens, I’m something of an expert on bedbugs. We’ve done furious battle. Each of us has been bloodied. I mean that literally.

This was (again) some decades back. I was living on a kibbutz in Israel, and I took a few days off to travel with a friend to Eilat, at the southern end of the Negev desert. We hitchhiked, and on the way back we got becalmed in the West Bank (that’s how long ago it was – it was safe to hitchhike in the West Bank) and had to stay in the cheapest hotel in some small town.

We awoke frenzied: We were being bitten all over by bedbugs. They’re small, they’re relentless, they scurry away at the first photon, and they burrowed into our sleeping bags and traveled back to the kibbutz with us.

The war commenced. Every night, I’d feel a tiny, almost imperceptible itch: a bedbug at work. Very slowly I’d reach for the bedside light with one hand and the top of the covers with the other. Then:

Snap on light throw back covers look WHAM! And if I was fast enough – and I got very fast – I could whap the (literal) sucker before he made it to the edge of the bed. A splotch of red – my blood – confirmed the kill. This would happen four or five times a night.

They gave me a new mattress and fumigated my sleeping bag, but it didn’t help: The bedbugs were by then camped out in our shack. My bed was against the wall. The bedbugs climbed up the wall. I moved the bed away from the wall. The bedbugs climbed up the legs of the bed. I put all four legs of the bed in large cans, and filled the cans with water. The bedbugs climbed up the walls, along the ceiling until they were directly over me, sensed my body heat, and dropped. (I’ve read that bedbugs don’t do this. Ha.)

Finally the Israelis cleared us all out, called in an F-16 strike, or damn near, and fumigated the hell out of the whole area – a real scorched-earth approach. It worked. I slept.

But now the bedbugs are on their way here. Think When, not If.

I’m available for consultation.