It's getting warm again. At night the air conditioner runs. This duplex isn't sealed up very well. This duplex is kind of a shithole. It was built in 1953. A real low point for duplexes. The HVAC guy comes to check whatever needs checking and tells me that we're basically living in a worse-case scenario HVAC-wise.

"Uh oh," I say.

"Calm down," he says. "Be a man about it."

He walks around with his hands on his hips, shaking his head. His disappointment is obvious. It seems we could have been doing a better job at whatever it was we were supposed to be doing. He wipes some dust off a shelf with his fingers.

"Pets?" he says.

In Speedboat, Renata Adler says that when you live in the city anyone can call your life into question. But I live in a small town and it's the same thing here. At any moment you can be revealed to be a person who doesn’t know what's going on. It's a risky business even picking up the phone. It could be anyone calling. Lately I've been getting calls from a number that looks like mine. The person calling could be me.

“Why do you keep calling me?” they say when I answer.

“I haven’t been calling you,” I say. “You’ve been calling me.”

I get the feeling we're both being scammed. But for what purpose? And at what loss? How is this even a viable business model, I'd like to know? It seems the scams have gone art house. They're all 501c(3).

"There's a sucker at every poker table," Matt tells me. "I never know who it is so I always know it's me."

Our ceilings are too high. Our ducts are too small. There is no room to expand the ducts. They'd have to knock out the bedroom wall. They'd have to get creative. Our ceiling fan, I find out, has been spinning in the wrong direction.

"Anything else?" I ask the HVAC guy.

"Yeah,” he says. “I know you haven't been changing the filter.”

"We have been changing the filter," I say.

"Listen," he says. "It's cool. You don't have to lie to me. I'm on your team."

"We've been changing it," I say.

"If you lie to me I can't help you," he says.

"Every month," I say. "Like clockwork."

"Don't think of this as an inspection," he says. "Think of it as a collaboration."

Lacking much else by way of plot, I watch the weather for rising and falling action. A few months ago it was all falling. Now it's all rising. The weather is a George Saunders short story. Over time, the weather is a George Saunders short story collection. The grass seems to be turning green again. The leaves are coming back. It's almost tempting to see some sort of pattern in all of it. I said almost.

"I think sanity is the most profound moral option of our time," Renata Adler says. But that was fifty years ago. Fifty years ago and counting.

During the day it gets up into the 80s. The air conditioner runs constantly and inefficiently. Eleven cents per kilowatt hour. Cooling down the neighborhood. A drain on natural and unnatural resources. I've heard the most environmentally devastating concept ever invented was human comfort. A close second was the atomic bomb.

At night we drink Topo Chico on the patio and complain about our jobs. They're so much work, these jobs. They're so demanding. While we talk the dog hunts around the backyard for squirrels. Last night he found a snakeskin in the grass. It occurs to me that a house that lets so much out could also let things in.

The light fades and then we’re sitting in the dark. Our next-door neighbor starts grilling something on his driveway. He listens to mariachi music and turns on his car headlights. Glowing white smoke floats up over the fence like a mushroom cloud. Later our whole place smells like brisket and hot sauce and I have some mariachi tune stuck in my head but don’t know any of the words.

Mike Nagel’s essays have appeared in apt, Hobart, Split Lip, Salt Hill, DIAGRAM, and elsewhere around the internet. His first book, DUPLEX, is now available for preorder from Autofocus Books: autofocuslit.com/books. He lives in Plano, Texas.

I'm thinking of this one summer, not long after my family moved to Texas, when the entire city was covered in crickets. It was something out of a Charlton Heston movie. A no-joke plague had descended upon the greater Dallas area. By July the whole city smelled like dead fish. A cottage industry emerged of kids showing up to grocery stores with push brooms and shovels and offering to clear the parking lots of all the dead crickets. People were slipping on them. Cars were spinning out. It was a liability. You would get close to a wall and then realize the whole thing was moving, every inch covered in layers of crickets. My dad's tennis league cancelled matches. The flood lights were attracting swarms.

I'm thinking about this Monday night on my porch in Carrollton getting pummeled by grasshoppers taking pot shots at me from the grass. They line themselves up and go for the face. The latest generation of insects making a go at world domination. I was being attacked.

On Amazon J finds a mesh fence you can install yourself for $40. It keeps the bugs out and lets the air in. It's the closest you can get to being inside while still being outside. Or maybe it's the other way around. Sometimes things are the other way around. J comes out with the tape measure. Two minutes later she comes back out with the tape measure. "I forgot everything," she said.

As the dominant species on this planet there's a lot of pressure on us to maintain the illusion that everything is totally under control. If all the dogs in the world, or all the hippos, or all the, I don't know, giant squids, found out that we don't actually know what we're doing it could cause a panic. They might freak out. While I was living on the good ship Anastasis, docked in the freeport of Monrovia, Liberia, a favorite joke among the crew was to scream, "But who's driving the boat?!" every time we'd see the captain in the hallway. And I would like to say again now, fifteen years later, from the patio of my duplex in Carrollton, getting pummeled by grasshoppers: Who's driving the boat?!

The mesh gate arrives on Tuesday and in a box that seems too small to contain a device that will change our lives. I've always felt that big problems require things that come in big boxes. I have a philosophy when it comes to boxes. The bigger the better. "We needed a big box for this job," I tell J. "Big." Bugs outnumber humans two hundred million to one. Last year spiders ate more than double our collective weight in prey. Yesterday I saw a really big moth. A gypsy, maybe.

It seems to me that the stakes down here on the good ship Planet Earth are either incomprehensibly high or incomprehensibly low. One or the other. Not both. I read about the President of a small coastal nation who was disappointed to learn there were no active threats against his life. He asked them to please keep looking. I once had a backpack that came with a warning label: "This bag breaks down over time, just like you."

The mesh gate isn't doing much good there, unassembled on the kitchen table, but I feel like it's starting to help. It's sending the right message. On Tuesday night I smash a grasshopper and leave its dead body to rot on the patio. That's sending the right message too. Wars are not won on the battlefield but in the mind. It was not the explosive power of the atomic bomb that was so terrifying. It was the mushroom cloud.

Thursday night we drink Yellowtail wine on the patio and get eaten alive by mosquitos. J makes an executive decision to install the mesh gate. At any moment anyone can make an executive decision. "I'm making an executive decision," they can say. We put the gate up quickly and incorrectly. "Well, that's the gist of it," J says about the gate, which is open on both sides, and has big gaps at the top and bottom, and flaps open in the breeze. "That's the idea."

That weekend J goes on a trip to Canton and it's just me here alone with the animals trying to act like an authority figure, trying to make arbitrary decisions with confidence and resolve, trying to stick to my guns. "It's not time for that," I say when the dog sets a tennis ball in my lap. I want him to think there's a specific time for tennis balls and that I know when it is. "That's not where that goes," I say, when he puts something somewhere instead of somewhere else. I walk around all weekend pointing at things and making announcements. On Sunday I hold a press conference. The animals follow me back and forth across the living room with their eyes until I wear myself out. I wake up at 2am on the couch, 2 Advil and a SmartWater on the coffee table, the animals sound asleep in the big bed.

Mike Nagel's essays have appeared in apt, Hobart, Salt Hill, DIAGRAM, and The Paris Review Daily. Find selected nonsense at michaelscottnagel.com.