Nut Job

I bought a “humane” mouse trap a couple of weeks ago, a metal box with holes on either side and a handle.  You slide the top open to put food in.   The mouse goes in and triggers a mechanism that traps him.  For each of the three days prior to my purchase three baby mice visited.  I trapped each of them in a shoe box and let them loose in the woods.  Years ago I trapped a mouse on a glue trap.  He was on there bleeding, squeaking — I cried all day, swearing never to kill another mouse.  The next one who came I fed.

After that third baby mouse a couple of weeks ago, when I decided to get the trap, I didn’t see any more.  The contraption made me  nervous.  I feared hearing the clacking noise caused by the mouse getting trapped inside.  I checked, peering into the holes every day — or I’d kick it.  Days went by and and no mice.

Last night at 4am I heard skittering, clacking, scraping.  It was a mouse in the box.  It frantically scratched, scraped and clacked, desperately trying to get out.  I let it go on.  I wasn’t going to the woods at 4am to let it out.  It disturbed me emotionally so when I slept, I dreamed of holding the mousetrap, a larger version, with a dog inside, frantically butting at the top of the box.  I could see its head.  I was on the train taking it somewhere to release it.   There was another dream with two mice and some other kind of creature in the box.

I woke up preparing to free the mouse.  I sank inside, thinking of it in that small space with the bits of bread with peanut butter I had put in there.  (I tear up typing this part.)  He was hungry, so it was a logical place for him to be.  He had no idea he’d be trapped.  I shook the box lightly to make sure he was in there.  He poked his nose into one of the holes.  He was in there.

Across the street I placed the metal box on the dirt, turned the box sideways and slid the top off.  After a couple of seconds, I  told it to go, go, be free, run.  Finally it scampered up the hill through the dirt, its tail trailing behind.  I breathed out and headed back, thinking that the trap was not humane at all as the thing is in there terrified.

Should I just let the little bastards run around here until they die in the walls or find their way to another apartment?  After work I came home and looked out the window at the woods.  Where is the mouse now, I wondered.  What is he eating?

Hip Hop from the 1940s

Warning:  the content below, as relayed by my 86 year old friend M, may be considered offensive.

“The dozens ain’t my game but the way I f**k your ma is a goddamned shame.”

“I took your father in my car, and I beat your ma.  Now you know who you are my son, my son.”

I’ve written about M before.  We’re friends.  He visits the botanical garden where I work.  He was in WWII.  I had asked if he had PTSD from the war, from killing people.  M’s Jewish.  He says to me, “I tried to kill as many of those motherfuckers as I could!”  I asked him to stop right there because he was getting me hot.  Some of you may have heard me say that I have been turned on by a 90 year old man.  This is him, though he’s really 86.  I like extremes so I round it off.  He has soft hands and likes to touch my face – don’t say il!  He has good genes.  He’s spry, cute, funny as hell, he exercises, and still has sex.  He says it wipes him out for days after however.  He comes to the botanical garden where I work with different women – cute, 70 something year olds with nice shapes.  I don’t get jealous.  I just hope they’re not jealous of me, because he comes to see me in the gallery to tell me different things.

He told me those lyrics above yesterday.  I said, “That’s hip hop M!”  “Yeah well, where do you think hip hop came from?”  He says.  He went to school in the South Bronx in the 1940s.  The school he went to was half black and white.  I was surprised, although I did see a dead relative’s year book with half black and white people from back then.  Wow.  M had black friends.  He told me stories yesterday from the days of yore, and how he learned those lyrics up there.  He used to get into a lot of fights too.  I am totally crushing on M.

Have Some More Ass Cake

 

I’m not naïve. But why is my ‘Have some of my ass cake’ post popular?  It doesn’t have actual ass in it just pictures of nice cakes.  There isn’t any porno.  One of the popular tags that people follow leading them to my blog is ‘ass’.  I had no idea ass was popular – I thought it was tits people preferred – well maybe I should try a tits post and see how many folks hit that up. And it won’t be about actual titties, it’ll be about the suckling teats of a rhinoceros.  I’m trying to imagine what people think a post called ‘Have some of my ass cake’ is about.  Do they think the ‘cake’ part means I’m saying that my ass is sweet?  Maybe they think it’s sex talk:  ‘Comere baby, gimme some of that ass cake lovin’.  Yeah, you know what I’m here for?  Some of that big ‘ol ass cake, bitch — yer!”

The Mice in My Life

 

A long time ago I used to think that having mice was morally bad.  If you had a mouse you were derelict in some unspecified way.  I thought that bad dirty people had mice.

Ha!  So dumb, yes.  And I deserve every bit of that very scorn.  I have one now.  He/she lives here.  I don’t try killing it or anything.  Only if I see it, I ask it to please run away, or I stomp in its direction.  Oh holy crap — I only hope it’s the same one!  For all I know each time it could be a different one, which would mean that I have several.

Back in 1988, I saw one for the first time in my apartment on 147^th Street.  I killed it on a glue trap.  I woke up and it was squealing and maimed on that thing.  At work I cried all day.  I swore I’d never kill another mouse.  A few weeks later when another one came, I fed it – no silly, I didn’t go up to it and put food in its mouth – I put the food on the floor for it.

I wrote a poem about a mouse back then.  I had seen a mouse on the train tracks spinning around.  My boyfriend said, “It’s been poisoned!”  I was mad as hell and wrote this:

Damn the putrid human louse

For feeding the small and little brown mouse

Specious vittles on the ground

Causing its deranged and furry frame

To spin round and round and round,

Over and over and over again.

These aren’t the exact words because I’m only remembering loosely what I had written.  I’d have to dig the original out from somewhere and it would be too exhausting – you’ll get the gist though.  Also, please forgive the poetry — I was young.

After living where I am now for seven years, I saw one for the first time.  They get on my nerves now.  I’ll maybe see one every couple of years.  But one day there were five.  My boyfriend and I saw one, he killed it, and then another one came and he killed that one.  Another one came and by this time I was hysterically yelling, “Get it, get it, get it!”  We ran around the apartment behind them and my boyfriend swatted them with a broom.  Shortly after I went jogging and came back.  I asked my boyfriend if another had come.  He said with his head downcast, “I wasn’t going to tell you.  But, yeah, I killed two more while you were out.”  I felt that they were taking advantage of me, so I cried – it was that time of the month.  He said maybe one just had babies.  At that point my love affair with mice — over!

While I sometimes get the urge to feed them, I don’t always look at them like they’re all cute and everything, because I know, given the opportunity they’ll try to take over.  If we spoke the same language – if I could squeak to them or if they spoke English, it would be fine because I could communicate with them, but I don’t so they aren’t going to be welcomed here anymore.