you down with LBB*?

…yeah you know me!

9:45 pm thursday night i was called downstairs to “help!”

a bat was circling around our dining room! it landed on the breakfast table in the kitchen and emitted the angriest metallic buzzing sound when we poked a broom at it. the cat was totally disinterested when it dropped to the floor. eventually my dad chased it out of the house with a broom.

proof!

i realize this is kind of like a big foot photo cause all you can see of the bat is a little brown blur in the center foreground.

*little brown bat

found poems

there’s this short story i wrote during senior year of high school that’s semi-autobiographical and it seems to like hiding from me. so i was looking for that again–didn’t find it, but i found two poems instead.

the first is from february 26 2004. my sister and i “took care of” the house in massachusetts for my last year of high school. shit was crazy then and i felt like i was quietly spiraling out of control. to top it off, two months later we moved out of the house i knew so well. it was like a death. i thought i would include this as some kind of eulogy to 41 delmar. maybe i’ll write more about that house later.

I’m on the highway. I know when I get home tonight the house will be empty. Everyone seems to be away this weekend. For now, it’s just me and my car and a half-empty pack of cigarettes. The cigarette burns red like the taillights head of me. Behind me, headlights shift lanes and distract my eyes. I can feel the acid in my muscles.

At least my car behaves how I want it–just one determined swerve and they’d have to sift through the wreckage to find me.

I see the old exit sign up ahead. The radio sings something about fighting your battles all alone and a feeling I’m ashamed of flashes over my face.

Today a girl said it smelled like summer. She said it was like standing outside a restaurant in July. The frozen ground said otherwise, but I believed her. I took a greedy drink of the smooth air. I can’t ever remember February being so cold.

I speed into the left lane, but there is no hurry. By April, my childhood home will be full of moving boxes. What I’ll miss most is how the summer rain carries the sweeping sound of the highway across the lake and through my bedroom window.

the other poem is found from a collection of shorts stories called Descent of Man by T. Coraghessan Boyle, pg. 45. i wrote this in september 2003.

The dam.

Impossibly swollen, rain festering the yellow surface,
a hundred new streams a minute rampaging in,
the pressure of those millions of gallons
hard-punching those millions more.

There! the first gap,
the water spewing out,
a burst bubo.

And now the dam
shudders, splinters,
falls to pieces like

so much cheap pottery.

hunting and trapping

yesterday, an exterminator came to check out our rodent problem. yes, it’s a problem. we have squirrels in the attic and mice in the kitchen. no bats in the belfry. (actually, mick the exterminator told me a story about how when he was new with the company a man made a joke about having bats in his belfry. mick didn’t know what he meant so he just said something like, “well, i’m not sure if you do. uhh…i’m gonna have to ask someone about that.”)

i’m glad we don’t have bats. but–i did sweep up about 5 thousand mouse turds from under the washing machine today. like someone dropped a sack of black rice. for some months now, i’ve walked into the kitchen and seen a brown or gray mouse scoot from the counter to the stove top, where they have some highway up through the burners.

since they’ve been hanging out in the stove, sometimes when we turn on the burners it smells like nasty mouse piss. once, i left some sliced cheese on the counter for about three minutes. when i came back, one slice of cheese had moved about a foot and another had nibbles taken out of it.

the squirrels, however, live in the attic. the entrance to which is very close to my head when i sleep. i occasionally hear them skittering through the inaccessible parts of the roof. or, when, say, one is reading the paper in the living room, sounds of little bodies throwing themselves around can be heard from somewhere in the ceiling. they are clearly having a blast.

so–according to the exterminator, mice have to be poisoned (cause they can produce like 700 of themselves in a year) by tracking through poison powder placed in their travel tunnels. when they lick it off of themselves and each other, they ingest it and it kills them. this poison does not affect the cat because the cat doesn’t actually eat the mice and even if it did, the dose would be too small for his big cat body. squirrels, on the other hand, must be trapped. the curious squirrel, lured into a have-a-heart trap by a snickers bar (the official bait, apparently) then must be driven to a location over 5 miles away so it can’t find its way back. usually, though, the animals are euthanized.

squirrel trapping plus mouse poisoning costs about $550 and that’s not even a long-term solution. the old house just has so many little rodent highways in and out that what we really have to do is get a roofer and a foundation specialist to plug up all these holes in the basement and attic. (another story about the exterminator–he was explaining to me that the squirrels really have to be removed, otherwise, if they get trapped in the attic it’s much worse than mice when they die. i offered this reasoning: because squirrels have more meat. he seemed to enjoy that a lot.)

so–i proposed a low-cost trial solution: “victor” mouse traps: 8 for $4 at your local Rite-Aid. as in–i am the human with the trap and i am victorious over this mouse which has been driving me bonkers.

so far, i have caught 5 mice in about 24 hours. the cat is jealous, i just know it. or else, relieved that i am picking up his slack. he used to be an excellent hunter and caught many chipmunks, mice and the occasional bird or squirrel.

now it is up to me and the victor traps. the poor little mice don’t stand a chance against those things. but it’s so much more humane than poison, or those awful glue traps. and they actually work. even without bait, the traps work.

so, then i have the kind of sad/kind of primal task of prying the trap open, dropping the dear little mouse bodies into a paper bag and then–leaving them far in the backyard for the vultures or coyotes or owls. ultimate recycling.  i’ve left them at night so i don’t know if they’ve been snatched up or what, but i don’t really want to get too close to them after i set them out there. i know what a decomposing little rodent body looks like.

it seems kind of gruesome but really, we can’t have mice in the kitchen leaving turds in dishpans, frying pans, drawers, etc. or chewing through oven mitts to make little nests. the mice have got to go.

tomorrow i will buy a have-a-heart trap and a snickers bar and see what i can do about the squirrels. did i mention they are poking holes in the ceiling over the litter box in the “mud room”? i keep finding more plaster on the floor everyday from those industrious little buggers.

(also–these traps are eager to catch some mice. just placing it down carefully in a cabinet corner will set it off and that sound puts all my nerves on high alert. i’ve had some near misses with my fingers.)