Critters

So Darrell put something up on his livejournal that got me thinking this morning. He's been house- and cat-sitting in Nob Hill, and apparently the cat likes him so much she keeps bringing him presents.

I once lived in a basement apartment that I really liked in Oakland. It was right by Rockridge Bart, which meant it was also not far from lots of great food spots, and, in particular, just down College Avenue from Royal Coffee, which is where I would meet up with my posse for delicious coffee and chat. I would have lived in that place a lot longer, but I had a critter problem that ultimately made me flee. I was watching TV one day when I heard something little running fast. Every once in a while I would see it running by out of the corner of my eye. I ended up figuring out it was a mouse. Every time I heard or saw it, my heart rate would double. I asked around for advice on finding a way to give it its freedom, and ended up going for the lazy and cheap solution: poison in peanut butter by a trap. I think it must have gotten to the poison and escaped the trap, because I remember having "succeeded" at some point in isolating it in the middle of the floor in a circle of my shoes and boots. The verb "succeeded" is in scare quotes because, though it wasn't in a state to run around anymore, it was still there living with me. It was really cute, which made me feel ridiculous about the terror it inspired in me. It's funny, because I don't really remember what its ultimate fate was. I have a feeling that it ended up dying and I transferred it into the trash somewhere. What has stuck with me, though, is the wavering horror I just described—the hesitation about what to do with it. Reading Darrell's post this morning, I had overblown ideas: something about our inability to confront the occasional necessity of sacrifice and how it awakens our obscure knowledge of all the moments in our life where sacrifice has occurred unbeknownst to us anyway. These critters in the corners of our houses can recall us to a small proportion of all we know we've forgotten in some corner of our mind.

The actual last creaturely straw was a horrendous stench that came from something much bigger than a mouse. There was a crawlspace in that apartment, and there was a posse of racoons I'd see roaming around the neighborhood every once in a while. I ended up imagining it was one of those racoons that was making the basement reek. Whatever it was, I was happy my friend Katrin was moving out of her North Berkeley apartment and it became easy for me to move away from my proximity to those reminders of all we forget and into a new pad. Call me chicken and you'd certainly be right.