It would be weird to explain our relationship with rats to an alien. They give us our greatest scientific advances, but if we see them in our kitchen at night, we go after them with a tennis racquet. Apparently, we share many biological attributes with rats, but we still want to kill them. We don’t have that range of emotions with dolphins, for instance. It might be a grudge because rats spread the plague. Plus, in the ’80s, there were all those vans painted with evil renditions of rats with fangs cheating at cards. Rats get a bad rap. They’re not looking for trouble and when you turn on the light they run away. It’s not like you come home and a rat is banging your girlfriend. I think the real problem is their posture. Rats always look like they’re up to no good. In Disney movies, the hero always has great posture and the villain is always hunched over. Hummingbirds have great posture and we love them. But the rat is our mortal enemy. We’d all probably have rats as pets if they would just hit the chiropractor and take care of that scoliosis.

Snakes: You kids already know that where we live we have rattlesnakes. You may have been too young to remember when our dog, Molly, was bitten by a rattler. A year or so later, our gardener found a rattlesnake as he was making his appointed rounds with the hedge clippers. Because of those two incidents, your mom decided that not only did we need to get Molly rattlesnake-aversion — trained, but we needed to have the snake wrangler come out and safety proof the place for you two.

First off, I’m not even sure if what the gardener found was an actual rattlesnake. There are nonpoisonous snakes that look like rattlesnakes. They’ve taken on that camouflage, so birds of prey and coyotes won’t go at them. What the snakes didn’t factor in when evolving that camouflage was the fireman who gets called out by Lynette to chop them in half with a flathead shovel.

So, anyway, despite me and my wallet’s protest, the snake-proofing guy came and laid down a powder that smelled like mothballs and tampons put in a Cuisinart (by the way, Mothballs and Tampons is my favorite morning zoo team). He sprinkled this powder in a big circle around the perimeter of the house. This all seemed like a good plan until my assistant, Jay, piped up with, “What if there are snakes that are already under the house? Doesn’t that just keep them in?” Thanks, Jay, for working the wife up all over again. You’re fired.

Flies: Every house has flies. That’s just inevitable. They’re called house flies for a reason. Amazingly, we’re well into the 2000s as I write this, and we still don’t have a great way to kill them. Inevitably, you’ll get that fly buzzing around and go looking for a flyswatter and not be able to find it. It’s a twenty-nine-cent item, but you’ll only buy one and thus spend an hour looking for it. This very thing has happened to me. Just like everything I attempt to locate in my own home, someone had moved the flyswatter to some random drawer seemingly just to fuck with me.

Everyone thinks they’re a ninja with the bar rag or T-shirt when it comes to flies, but you never manage to actually get the fly that way because the whoosh of air you create just pushes it to safety. And the catch-and-release plan never works either. It’s nice to think that maybe that fly was a good person in a past life and you should give it its freedom, but it never pans out. I had a fly in the house once, and after chasing it around for an hour, I cornered it in the bathroom, then sucked in my stomach and slid out the crack in the door to give it a time out. But to the fly the bathroom is Valhalla, like a fat guy getting trapped in a Fogo de Chao. Eventually, I found the flyswatter and sent it to the big shit pile in heaven.

My point is that you’re going to get these things a lot, so don’t go for the fancy Sharper Image flyswatter that kills with electricity. That shit never works. They’re always trying to invent new fly-killing technology. This one uses lasers to shoot them down in midair, this one kills with telepathy; you put on a hat and think bad things about them. Just buy a half-dozen of those classic cheap plastic flyswatters and keep one in every room.

On that note, let me give you a list of other stuff you’ll need to have in your home.

Blue LED Clock: This thing is a life changer. Totally worth the money. It sheds enough light so that you can find your way around at night. It doesn’t need to play an iPod, it just needs to illuminate the room so that when you get up to take a piss you don’t trip over the dog or have to turn the light on and wake up the wife or husband. It’s not so bright it cuts through the eyelids, either. It’s a nightlight for grown-ups, it keeps the room in a cool light and isn’t shaped like Spiderman.

Dimmer Switches in the Bathroom: In that same vein, there’s nothing worse than when you hit the bathroom in the middle of the night, turn on the light and have your eyeballs scream. That ends up waking you up completely, and you will struggle to get back to sleep. Or you piss in complete darkness and end up urinating into the potpourri dish, not noticing until someone decides to take a sniff and thinks, “I didn’t know they made asparagus potpourri.”

There’s something about pissing in the dark that makes even the calmest among us freak out. Once when I brought Natalia over to Jimmy’s for football Sunday, I took her for a piss in his first-floor bathroom. This is a small bathroom, with just a toilet and a sink. No windows. So when you shut the door there’s no natural light (unless that’s what you’ve been drinking). Well, after Natalia took her pee, Daddy decided to make a little water, too. And, as always, she decided to fuck with me. The light switch is inside the room and while I had my back turned out went the lights. While Natalia was laughing hysterically and I was yelling, “Turn the lights on,” I noticed that I wasn’t hearing the splashing of my tinkle hitting the toilet water. I started to panic and overcompensated trying to find it again. I ended up covering not just the floor and toilet in piss, but also a copy of Bill Simmons’ book, Basketball, which was next to the toilet. Sorry, Bill. On the bright side, Jimmy definitely had to buy another copy.

Plus, when it comes to bathroom lights, you can never find the switch. There’s no uniformity. Some bathrooms have the switch on the outside, some are on the inside, some are on the right side as soon as you enter the room and some are on the adjacent wall above the sink. So what you end up doing is feeling around in the dark like Helen Keller, running your hand over every crevice in the tile wall that is covered in years of fecal particulate. Can you think of anything other than the underside of the toilet seat that you less want to be running your hand over?

So when you have your own home you should install some dimmer switches with the little LED in them. (I love LED lights, in case you haven’t noticed.) That way, you can find the toilet without pissing all over the place, and turning your shower into a golden shower, you don’t shock your eyeballs with the overbright overhead light and you don’t have to see how bad you look at four in the morning in your underpants.

Flashlights: I love me a good flashlight. It’s something everyone needs, in every room of their home. You need one in each room because you never know where you’ll be when the power goes out and you may just end up killing yourself on the stairs trying to find the flashlight in the dark.

That said, be careful what kind of flashlight you choose. Hopefully, the flaws with current flashlights will have been addressed by the time you’re buying your first house.