i’m going to share some thoughts about having mice in my apartment and i’m going to use the words “mouse/mice” and “rat/rats” interchangeably. and i know they’re different, like, creatures, but i’m using “rat” as more of a slur for “mouse”. because i don’t like them. i know there are people who have pet mice and they have like white fur with pink tinges around all their various holes and openings and stuff, and i’m not trying to offend you and your pet that crawls all over your chest, but if you get down with a roi de rats you might want to skip this. i’ve also spoken to my super about this stuff already etc. anyways here’s ~2,000 unedited words on rats.
we have rats. fucking rats, man. i’ve struck a horizontal line on the household pest bingo card. ants. that’s free space, everyone has ants at some point. bed bugs, fucking bed bugs. bed bugs are a kind of pest that change your personality long after they’re gone. they leave a scorch mark on your ancestral dna. 60 million years from now a scientist is going to point at a gene sequence on a hologram computer and go, “yeah right here is where it all started going wrong for this species, if you’ve ever wondered why you’re always scared of dark pieces of lint and your bed is 4 feet off the ground, this uh, this is why.” uh lizards and bats when i lived in florida, whatever, the point is that rats were always the end, the final frontier. the thing you only see on tv. now the only thing i have left is like, you ever hear about those stories that are like, “nanny cam footage reveals how an old japanese woman lived in this couple’s house undetected for 20 years!” that’s all i have left. haunted blonde twins with white eyes, that’s my new rats.
it all started, well i was at work, so like, already my soul was in a weakened state. like my spirit was extra susceptible to the universe fucking with it. i was at work and i got a text message from my girlfriend. it went something like, “i don’t want to freak you out, but i think i just saw a mouse in the apartment.”
and that text message, it marked the Before of my old life and the After that is my life trapped in rat crime city. my brain chemistry altered after reading those words. unknowingly it altered, because i was in denial at first, obviously. in fact my first reaction was to text back, “were you falling asleep at the time?” because sometimes when you’re falling asleep you’ll see weird, scary shit, right? like a demon sitting on your chest or something.
well whatever, i worked the rest of my shift in a daze and eventually, somehow, hours later found myself kneeling in an aisle of duane reade that i had only ever visited once before to buy fly traps. because i’ve had flies, and i bought a cute little fake apple to kill fruit flies. the apple of death, i was the purple witch to the fly sleeping beauty. whatever. i was kneeling because even in the aisle dedicated to killing the vermin of nyc, they put the rat stuff on the bottom shelf, not even the bottom shelf, like the space under the bottom shelf. because it’s so shameful. it’s rat killing merch and a dusty can of blueberry redbull that rolled under there five months ago. it was one step away from buying weapons from a guy in a dark alley. i was there kneeling, hunched over, like in prayer to the altar of the god of rat death. and the hovering, infinitely black orb flashed red and answered my prayers by unfurling like a rose and in the center of the strange petals was a poison trap.
so i bought the poison trap and here’s what i thought the poison trap did. i thought the rat walked inside of a little room, ate poison, and then somehow the door locked behind him and he just died in a shitty little poison rat studio apartment. upon getting home my girlfriend informed me that how it actually works is, the rat eats the poison disguised as delicious food, and then just goes and dies randomly some time later, probably in a hard to reach spot in the room where i live.
side note. i pay too much money to live in a very small space because i feel aimless and lost and i’ll do things like move to a city to try and find meaning in my life, uh, rats have miles and miles of subway tunnels to live in. go, go be in them. get away from me.
so i returned to the altar of the god of rat death and prayed once more to the giant, hovering, infinitely black orb, and i said, “you fucking sold me- what is this trap for? give me the classic mouse traps, my god. i thought rat trap technology had evolved. just give me the regular cartoon thing made out of wood.”
they had two kinds of those, the classic retro wooden clap trap, and some more modern looking grey plastic one that looked like a building from command and conquer or some shit. i bought a bunch of both. i dropped mad stacks on rat traps.
i’d also like to comment on how the old fashioned traps, the wooden ones, they say on the package, “pre-baited” but when you look at them, at the spot where the bait would be, there’s nothing. like i looked at a couple and i was like, “where is the bait?” the little platform where you’re meant to put the bait is shaped like a tiny slice of swiss cheese, holes and all. that’s what they mean by “pre-baited. like what kind of acme logic is that? pre-baited with a cartoonish wedge of swiss cheese? rats don’t know what swiss cheese is! rats aren’t fucking born with an innate knowledge of swiss cheese. they don’t know that humans think they specifically like the cheese with the holes!! that’s not real. rats eat fucking glue and garbage and shit! by that logic an elephant trap would have a big plastic peanut on it. that’s not pre-baited!! bear traps don’t have pots of honey on them!!!
we decided to use the modern-y, plastic-y clap traps. you bait these in a little hatch and then when the rat lifts up the lid, it snaps down and breaks their neck. like if i opened my fridge and inside there was a spring-loaded metal bar that just swung out and clothes lined me to death. we baited them with peanut butter. which uh, marked the jar in my head as “rat peanut butter.” like it was new and i opened it for the traps and i don’t think i’ll use it now. like i can’t put a dollop of jif into a plastic death trap and then spread it on some ritz crackers. not appetizing. but hey, only the best name brands for my rat buds, eh? choosy daniels choose jif. you think they’d prefer crunchy over smooth? you think rats keep their peanut butter in the fridge?
side note again. my girlfriend pointed something out to me that was apparently rat droppings. a little black like, bit of dirt behind the sink. i was like, “that’s what that is? i’ve seen that every day, i just thought it was like, crud? you know? like schmutz, like just dirt that builds up from being alive and walkin around and shit. that’s what that is?” it blew my mind.
three days passed, alright? every day i woke up and went to go check the traps like some kind of fucked up easter egg hunt. four little sections of my tiny apartment where i can’t go anymore. my girlfriend had since gone home for vacation. i was alone, i was convinced there was no rat.
on the fourth day i woke up. rat in the trap. big fucking rat. not really a rat, it was a mouse, but like i said, well, to me, a rat. i froze. i knew i was going to be late for work. once i was late for work because i had to psych myself up to pick up a dead roach. a rat? that has a spine and an immune system and shit. i thought i was just gonna call and quit. here’s the real twist though. i looked over at the other trap and did a fucking double take. there was another rat. two, i caught two in one night. it really looked like a mom and a baby. everyone i’ve told this to, at this point they get sad thinking about a mom and a baby, but it just freaks me out more. rats don’t have one baby, they have a bunch. for all i know my apartment is a poorly staffed rat daycare right now.
me picking up the traps with the rigid dead rat bodies isn’t important, just gross, but it’s something i had to do that i didn’t think i’d ever do, so there’s that. add that to my wheelhouse.
how did we even get rats? we’re clean, don’t leave out food, no british ships had docked in my fucking living room. (why isn’t there a stereotype of the arrival of british people coinciding with the arrival of rats? isn’t that how rats got to hawaii?) the only thing i can pin it to is construction they were doing down a manhole on our street. maybe that displaced them. would i have preferred to have four ninja turtles crashing on my couch? no, i don’t want anything from the sewer being displaced refugees in my apartment.
but now we’re all caught up. because this is where i am. i live in fear. when the sun sets i just go to bed because rats are nocturnal and i figure i’d better give them enough night time hours to kill themselves in my traps. like i just don’t stay up anymore and then i dread going out into the living room in the morning.
i got home from work last night and pulled out everything from under the sink. taking a tip from a coworker, i taped up the holes in the back of the cabinet where the pipes from the sink meet the walls. you’re supposed to use steel wool because they can’t chew through it. all i had was purple duct tape left over from when i went through a duct tape wallet phase four years ago. so i was dripping sweat in my apartment with the ac off so i could hear rats trying to sneak up on me. i was shirtless, wearing jeans, my most rat bite-proof pants, a child’s headlamp so i could see under the sink, and wearing leather gloves. why was i wearing the leather gloves? because if i saw a rat and somehow i caught it in my bare hands i wouldn’t have the courage to crush it, but the leather glove would empower me to choke the life out of it i guess. yeah, shirtless, jeans, leather gloves, child’s headlamp, and a roll of purple duct tape. like a shitty sexy calendar miner. this is my life forever now, i guess. at night i dream from the perspective of the rats. i am them. where do you see yourself spending your last moments on earth if you’re a rat? rolling green hills, the feeling of wind gently running through your fur. in the distance are ancient ruins being overrun by moss. vestiges of a forgotten time. and now time would forget you too. something like that? no please i’m a rat and i want to die surrounded by some loser 25 year old’s shitty ikea furniture. i can’t go back to the way it was. i hate rats.
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