Do you think anyone’s ever put out a hit on an amphibian?

If so, just how much would it cost me and how quickly can we get this job taken care of? These are the kinds of questions that have been filling my head over the past three hours – hours during which normally I would be sleeping a gentle slumber, dancing amongst thoughts of jellybeans and gumdrops and other entirely wholesome entities inside this relatively sound head of mine. But I’m not sleeping, you see, and it’s not because there’s a pea under my mattress or because I watched Ghostbusters 2 earlier this evening and I’m more than a little concerned about a river of primordial ooze that could very well be running deep underneath our fair city even as I sleep.

Nope – I’m not sleeping because the loudest frog in the known universe has opted to station itself directly outside my bedroom window and is using his time in my presence to practice his yodeling technique.

Ok, so just for the record, I’m not entirely sure that frogs necessarily know how to yodel, but I figured that for something even half as annoying as this racket that I’m enduring right now, it might very well be the frog equivalent of yodeling. Either that or maybe he’s just talking really, really loud on his frog cell phone without showing the proper etiquette to his surroundings – use whichever analogy you’d like!

But the fact is, this here frog is being way too loud and I’d really like him to stop, and oddly enough, when I tried to go down and politely ask him to possibly give it a freaking rest so that I can get some (rest) myself, he certainly did quiet down…for about a minute and a half! Of course, I wasn’t able to actually articulate my request to him face-to, errr, snout, as frog’s have this funny ability to pretty much blend in with whatever their surroundings actually are…as long as they just so happen to be green, that is. Which, come to think of it, would be kind of a neat feature to try out – like if the rest of the world was a pasty, pale-like color so that I blended in with everything else and I could just hold real still and no one would be able to tell where I was, but we’re getting off topic here…

The funny thing is – this is the first negative run-in with a member of the frog family that I’ve ever had that comes to mind. Up until now, they’ve all seemed pretty cool to me – I’ve always been a huge fan of Kermit the Frog, The Frog Prince has always been one of my favorite fairytales because if anything, the mental image of some rich chick going around smooching swamp creatures in search of her knight in shining armor “amuses me,” and even that little dude from the Geico commercials … no wait, he was a lizard of some sort, wasn’t he? Yeah, I’ll betcha he’s not out there causing a whole heap of racket, keeping his neighbors up at night! He’s far too cool for that.

But really, what can you do when there’s a nocturnal beast outside your window, keeping you up all night with its incessant noise-making? You can’t very well just all the cops on the little guy – trust me, I’ve yet to find a member of our local law enforcement community that can keep a straight face and take me seriously when I ask how to deal with an amphibian of this imposition. There was one officer who offered to put me up in the county sanitarium if I wanted to pursue the matter, and I almost took him up on the offer because I was just that freakin’ tired, but I hear those places are a little easier to get into than they are to get out of and really, who needs a mark on their record for crazy frog stories anyways?!

So instead I’ve decided to follow my plan B as the next best thing – that’s right, it’s a man-on-frog showdown. Eventually he’s got to stop chirping sometime, whether it’s to eat or breathe or talk to his frog wife about how her day was, and when he does stop I’ll be waiting … waiting to make my move and take a nap. It’s really a foolproof plan that has to work because otherwise, well, I’m not quite sure how long man can go without sleep and I’m way too lazy to just give up on the pastime altogether.

This is it – it’s either him or me. Hopefully I’ll be talking to you next week about my newfound love for frog legs, and then again there’s always the possibility that next week’s column may actually be written by that very frog after he finishes me off. And as lucrative as that might sound to some of you right now, let me assure you that not all of them are as funny as Kermit is, so that said, please keep me in your thoughts…