[towntravis]

Last night I was bitten by a centipede.

While living in cities for most of the past six years, I forgot how frequently country life revolves around animals. Raccoons eating on the front porch. Baby birds or bunnies rescued from cats. Turtles injured on the highway. Polydactyl kittens. And it’s not uncommon for a centipede or a scorpion to find its way up drain pipes or through crevices into the house.

It’s a testament to the pervasiveness of social networking media (or perhaps merely my own obsession with it) that upon being bitten, immediately after cursing, I reached for my iPhone, snapped a picture of my assailant and tweeted about the incident.

Ironically, my reading material for the day was my favorite of the James Bond series, Dr. No. Indeed, I had just reached the very chapter (“The Finger on the Trigger”) in which Bond endures the harrowing travels of a six-inch tropical centipede from his feet up his body, across his face and onto the pillow where his head rests. (In the film version, it was a tarantula.) Of course, unlike Bond, I was in no danger from the centipede. The affected area on the palm of my right hand merely turned red and hurt for a few hours.