Do Cockroaches Have Purpose? (And Do They Have Beauty In Them?)

      I was inside my room, laboring in front of my computer when I was startled by my niece’s screams. I went out and saw that a flying cockroach was terrorizing her. She went inside my room and locked it while I picked up a slipper (as I am wont to do whenever a cockroach decides that he’d be a soaring butterfly for a few seconds inside our house.) I aimed to hit the cockroach while it was flying. But the thing is, it’s so hard to hit a roach in mid-air as they fly like a supersonic jet and they almost always fly high and near the ceiling and they have very unpredictable flight patterns.  I tell you,  it’s easier to return a Pete Sampras serve than to hit a flying cockroach. But it is very satisfying to hit one in mid-air, it’s like hitting a buzzer-beating three pointer on a championship game.

      Finally, the cockroach landed on  a wall, it flexed its wings, ready to fly again, but unfortunately for it—I had been trained in killing roaches—and I hit it before it could harbor illusions of being a dark butterfly again and fly. And part of my training is not to a hit a roach real hard when it’s perched on a wall as it would be very messy. Just hit it with enough force to temporarily immobilize it and let it fall to the floor—and then you stomp on it. Again, you only use necessary force on it so as not to crush its innards and spread it on the floor. Killing them is justified—they bring diseases. And no, don’t use an insecticide. Slippers are the primary weapon for a single, flying cockroach, although some people, like Nicolas Cage, prefer to eat them alive. The bestselling book, The Perfect Slipper To Kill A Roach will help you choose the right slipper to kill roaches.

      But as the roach lay dead and smashed on the floor, an existentialist question hit me: What’s the purpose of a roach?  One that ‘s noble and beneficial to humans. Why did God create them? I know they’re part of a food chain and they’re good in outing closet gay men who act tough in front of people but scream and run and faint when confronted by a flying cockroach. But aside from these, what else? Something that whenever people see a roach, they can say, "Oh, a cockroach, a cockroach once saved my daughter's life! Bless `em!" Did God make a mistake in creating them? Was He intending to create another butterfly species but He was so tired after creating those wonderful things and creatures that He messed it up? But then, they say everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it, and not even a creature as repugnant as a roach is exempted in it. 

      So I stared at the dead cockroach in my feet and look for its beauty—darn, I wasn’t one who would discriminate, but  all I could see was ugliness. Meanwhile, another cockroach inside our house decided that God made a mistake and that it was just a messed-up butterfly and started flying—and I tightened my grip on my sniper rifl--, er, slipper. The search for the beauty in cockroach and its purpose  would have to wait.

      But here’s a haiku I wrote as a tribute to fallen flying roaches and a warning to those who still are living:

      Darling, when you fly
      The whole world panics and runs
      So stay sweet, just crawl