NEEDLING

(an essay without an end nor much of a middle, and a rather crappy beginning, is, i guess, probably not an essay at all...)

3h49
There’s a flying rat in my kitchen. I just got out of bed, put on a sweater for the first time in months, am feeling good like you do when you’re finally sleeping inside a blanket rather than inside a thin layer of sweat, and I’m at my kitchen sink thinking life’s not bad at all these days, singing to myself while washing a tea cup with soap and hot water. Totally unexpectedly, as one can imagine, a rat leaps out of my top cup-board and lands behind the refrigerator making a big thump noise. A good seven feet down. My mood flips instantly. First, I panic. With a tight hold on the cup and the sponge, leaving the water running, I jump about five feet backwards, thinking to myself: What The F...!!! I realize this is not the most insightful thought one might have under such a circumstance. Hey, I’m no green beret! I don’t deal well under unexpected situations. My impulse is to get the heck out, not attack back. My defensive and offensive maneuvers are a bit rusty. Are there any instructional cassette lectures one can purchase? You know, something to listen to while you’re stuck in traffic going to work. Anything along the lines of How to deal with unexpected flying rodents in your kitchen? Second, I realize what has just happened, analyze, calculate the images, the facts, the probabilities, my own sanity, whether I’m awake or not – during the actual moment when the rodent flew way too close to my face, I didn’t take the time to calculate that it was a rat, it was simply something grey, something abnormal, something to be urgently weary of and I instinctually jumped backwards – it took a few seconds more before realizing what had missed me. This is when, upon fully visualizing and understanding the flashes in my brain, that I grimace with disgust and feel all nasty inside. It’s like I’d just seen my own skeleton flash at me in sickly green neon colors while crossing a very busy Parisian intersection around Barbes on market day. Third, I shiver out of the kitchen and into my living room, feeling slimy. I consider blocking off the kitchen and never using it again. Fourth, I slip my sandals on, and decide that building a wall between my kitchen and the rest of the house is not a viable option. How do I afford the bricks, the mortar, the time, and the energy? Fifth, I bravely make it back into my kitchen, fists up, ready to defend myself against any more flying rodents. It’s like a b-rated horror film taking place live right here in my kitchen. I hope Sigourney Weaver plays the female lead, because I think she’s hot, and she’s good in those kinds of pictures. Specially when she shaves her head.

I make myself a much deserved cup of tea.

***

Did I mention that I’m scared of rats? It’s not like some insurmountable phobia where I freeze up and I can’t deal with life anymore, it’s just that I’d rather not be around them at all if I can help it. Sure, sure, little white mice are cute to look at with their pink noses and such... but rats? No way, man. And mice, as far as I’m concerned, are just fine for pet snakes’ snacks – that’s a tongue twister – though I do think differently about mice now that I’ve read the complete series to the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy a couple weeks back.

10h21
This post is going nowhere. What is my theme? What am I talking about? Am I getting anywhere? There’s definitely a beginning, but is there a middle and an end, or at least one or the other? Nothing. Just fluff. I’m at a dead end hitting an inexistent brick wall full of rats gnawing holes through the centuries one generation at a time.

***

Brutus, my hundred pound chocolate Labrador, is useless as far as the rat situation is concerned. He simply can’t be bothered about it. He is after all supposed to be a retriever, not a hunter. I understand, but still...

The rat situation started a few weeks ago, and so far, I’m loosing. It became widely evident when one evening I was lying on my couch watching television. Brutus is lying on the floor right next to me, waiting for food to accidentally fall to the floor, when out of the corner of my left eye I notice something moving. I turn my head from Seinfeld to the left where on good days the kitchen usually sits, and see right in the middle of the brightly lit linoleum floor, a grey rat chewing on something. I can’t believe the audacity. I respect the rodent for a fraction of a second. Our eyes meet. He doesn’t move, he barely stops chewing for a moment. Then I look at Brutus, who’s completely given up on getting any more food from me that evening. His head is relaxed on his front legs while he’s looking straight at the rat with a totally bored, please don’t bother me right now look in his eyes. I nudge him a little, to no avail. I have to get up and pound the floor a couple of times before the rat actually decides to get the hell out of dodge. There was no more denying the problem. I bought some rat poison, placed it where the rat should get to them and where Brutus couldn’t however hard he tried. I found the little hole in the wall next to the refrigerator where I saw the rat make his get-away. A few days later I started smelling decaying flesh, and figured I’d had him. But then the smell stopped way too fast. And then came this morning. The smell going away was good. The smell going away so quickly brings me to assume there’s something else under my house eating the decaying bodies of dead rodents. That usually means more rodents. Rodents are like humans, they use the death and misery of their comrades to build and strengthen themselves. It’s a very affective, efficient, and smart policy, if you can stomach it.

***

How does a rodent get into the highest cup-board of my kitchen? That’s where I keep the coffee machine, the grinder, and all the other coffee accessories which I haven’t used since August 4th. That’s also where I keep absolutely no food of any kind. It makes no sense. I have to get rid of this problem. I can hear them at night in the attic running around on top of my head, or underneath the house scrounging around, there’s got to be a whole infestation. And what scares me the most, is that I could have been standing two feet to my right, lets say, reaching for something in one of those cup-boards, and that rat would have been flying right into my head.

I can picture myself fighting with a rat straddling my face, clawing at my eyes and getting tangled up in my hair. I’d be screaming murder through the house, and finally ripping the rat off my scalp and slamming it down on my driveway’s hard pavement cement. This is neither here nor there, but once when I was thirteen years old and a freshman in high school, a squirrel got cornered in the school in between two flights of stairs on the midway landing where a window had been left open. Several kids surrounded the creature and blocked it in a corner. They were throwing all kinds of things at it: spit balls, pens, books, bags, trying to kick at it and such... keeping as safe a distance from it without letting it get out of the circle. The squirrel was scared out of its wits. I broke through the circle with bravado, to show off to the other kids really though rationalizing to myself that I was trying to save the poor thing from their cruelties, that I was some kind of hero. I walked right into the group towards the squirrel and grabbed it. Right as I was going to put it back out onto the window ledge it had fallen from, the little shit bit me. It hurt like hell. Before I realized what I was doing, I slammed the thing on the tile floor of the hallway. The other kids backed away in awe, and I felt like a dip-shit.

Basically, what I’m trying to say, is that I’ve had my dealings with rodents. And I would like to be through with them if at all possible. They haunt my dreams.

13h10
Imagine being in bed, thinking you’re awake but not able to move a single limb and other than this slight dysfunction of motor skills, all is more or less normal. That is, you’re seeing the room around you and it seems fine. Then, everything shifts a bit. Not by much. Not wacky enough to reassure you this is only a dream. Just funky enough to warn you that something’s drastically wrong. The door’s a little bit taller, the angles are smaller or wider than usual, the light is of a slightly different tune, the floor creaks in a different tone, the perspectives are not quite right, like those of a beginner in art class, and your bed is facing the wrong way... et cetera. It’s a mixture between hallucinating and dreaming, if the two aren’t the same to begin with. All the sudden, a whole school of rats comes racing into the room from nowhere in particular, from the door, and carpets right over your body at high speed. It’s like a heard of tiny wild buffalos. Thousands and thousands of tiny feet running on your back and disappearing on the other side into the wall or through the window you’re not sure. The whole experience lasting no more than one minute. Can you imagine how that feels? It doesn’t feel good. And flying rats in my kitchen only reiterates my fear of them. Every rat I see is like a bad omen warning me the plague is on its way. Maybe the plague will start right here in my house. Should never have read Camus! They’re breeding themselves into an army down underneath my humble habitation, taking control of the walls, the attic, and slowly coming into my kitchen, until finally, they will flow out like a sea of gangrene overtaking my body before going into the rest of the city and spreading to every corner and every house they can get their teeth into. I better put a stop to this right away. I’m the hero on a mission to save the planet! Kill all the rats in and around my house! (This is really starting to sound like a B-rated flick. Anybody want to write the screenplay? Nobody in the neighborhood believes me, other than the lead lady of course who lost her whole family to the rats as they were visiting, and we have to go about it alone, until it becomes too late, the rats have all ready eaten half the population of the city, we’ve fallen in love, when finally we discover the hiding place of their leader: Twinkle Twinkle, the Grand Master Rat!) Anyway, I don’t want them getting all cozy and stuff in there with me footing the heating bill this winter!

22h49
Can I go to sleep in a house full of rats?