Alex Neason

The honest thing is that, like, when I tell a stranger a story on the record about a roach in my home, like, there is something, however small, in my chest that's a little bit like, damn, now they know.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think of roaches in the same way that I think of rats.

Again, Bethany Brookshire.

These are animals that are succeeding because our social contract has failed.

because of a massive failure of a social contract that we called enslavement, right?

And they continue to succeed where social contracts fail, where racism thrives, you know, where people end up underserved and kind of forced into histories that leave them in a state of poverty and lack of opportunity, right?

And so you could see them...

My goal here is to regard the roach as a roach.

And in so many ways, the roach is not just a roach.

The roach is a stand-in for like class and race and like all of these things that are like way more consequential than just like a bug being a bug, you know?

Yeah.

And all of this got me thinking about another roach fact.

I can talk about bugs forever.

Sammy told me about, which is that roaches are only dirty because they live in our sewer systems, which are filthy.

And just like in New York, the way we dispose of trash, what do we do with it?

We stick it out on the street all night and then the roaches crawl all over it and pick up germs and stuff.

They're actually naturally very clean animals, cleaning their antenna almost the way that cats clean their whiskers.

They spend a lot of time trying to clean themselves of filth that they picked up from us.