05-21-00
Non-sequitur, two stories in one.
There is a mouse in this house. This doesn't bother me so much as the fact that I keep catching the little fucker running by out of the corner of my eye. It's a cheeky little bastard too, considering that lights are on, people are around, and yet it feels strangely compelled to scamper about, foraging in the trash, bumping into things that clink and make me dart my head around with furrowed brow, trying to figure out what that sound just was.
A couple of summers ago, I had a different mouse in this house. The fan was occilating around on it's axis, and periodically it would blow on the trash can, making the contents inside rattle. This was keeping awake, not that I wasn't already awake from sweating to death and sticking to the sheets in the midst of a summertime heatwave. Just at that moment, a circuit breaker blew, and the fan and everything else turned off. And the trashcan continued to rattle around and make crinkley cellophane noises. So I sat upright, just in time to see a tiny dark shape rise vertically about a foot above the trashcan and zip off into the darkness that was the living room. I never set a trap for the mouse, and I never saw it again. I think I scared it as much as it scared me.
It's not that I'm anti-trapping per se. But having to deal with the snap-crack of the trap and the wet click-clack of the mutilated mouse as it uses it's final breath to fling itself and the trap around in a last ditch effort to escape the pain and the weight, and the blood, my GOD how can there be so much blood in such a tiny little creature, and it's still warm and dripping as it stops moving and I pick it up by the trap to carry it to the toilet to flush it away, out of my house and out of my sight, and I'm sobbing the whole time as well, because I can't stand to kill little creatures who are just doing what they are supposed to do, but I don't want them eating holes in everything and leaving little turds in the cupboards. Nonviolently scaring the hell out of them is easier on all of the concerned parties, it would seem.
***
I had remarked the other day to Dana that I was in the mood for good, hard, rough-and-tumble sex, and so tonight she invited me out to find men to fulfill our apparently similar sexual needs. I declined, stating that while she could meet a non-yucky man that would rock her world at the Lesbian National Convention [I have no idea if such a thing exists, it just seems the least likely place for someone to pick a man up at. Natch.], I, on the other hand, can't talk to strange men in bars. I talk to strangers for a living, but stick a beer in my hand and play music in the background, and suddenly I turn into a stuttering idiot. People I know, I'm fine; I can grope and flirt with the best of them. It's the strangers that throw me. This is unfortunate, because I've already slept with most of the people I know that I would want to sleep with. Or not exactly sleep with, as the case may be. [Sorry, mom, if you're reading this. If this is my little sister reading this, shouldn't some sort of webnanny be spanking you right about now?] Um, anyways, no sex for me. At least, not now.
