My neighbors have been hearing all sorts of screaming, screeching, yelping and thudding around my apartment lately, as I have attempted to stem the tide of the moth invasion with spray poison and phone books.

I am afraid of moths.

Given that fact, I apparently chose the wrong year to move to North Dakota. Because of our wonderfully mild winter, the moths are coming out in droves, fuzzy-winged, fluttery and frightening.

They are also coming in in droves.

They can apparently get through my screen windows, so I have to close those. They can apparently survive being doused with enough poison to kill, for example, me. Or at least send me out of the room, coughing, wheezing, and brandishing the spray-bottle of Raid as if it were a club, or maybe my last hope of salvation from the evil moth menace.

The problem is, once you spray the darn things,  their mothy navigational system goes haywire and their wings stop working right, so they dive-bomb the room, swerving around like a B-52 with a drunken pilot. Unfortunately, what this means to someone afraid of moths is: They fly directly at you slightly faster than the speed of light.

To my neighbors: Sorry about all the screaming. Once moth season is over, it’ll quiet down… at least until spider season starts.