A Mouse In The House

[[Ve...]]

So, I wrote a little bit today a bit of a Halloween story I wanted to write because I thought of how scary what I've been though (and still am going through) is and I thought I'd share with my Buddies. Like every good Halloween story it's a little bit scary and a little bit funny. Hopefully just scary enough to give one goosebumps. Hopefully the funny parts are actually funny. Anyhow, not finished. Also, super first-drafty. While the spelling is as impeccable as modern computer technology can assure, please forgive the errors both in syntax and in judgment.

 

A Mouse In The House

 

Early evening, August, dank and rainy. One of those nights that makes people disbelieve global climate change. It should be miserable. Instead, it’s miserable and wet and cold.

 

This gives me the perfect opportunity to splay myself in the beanbag. To read. Perhaps have an apple later. The Honeycrisps are on sale and I have a fridge full of them. Four of them, but they’re very large. And sweet. So sweet. Each bite is a melted liquor mouthful of cotton candy; the kind that comes in the paper foil bag, always slightly stale and firm but almost painfully sugary.

 

On the radio — except it’s not a radio, it’s digital, delivered over the internet instead of the airwaves, though in one of those ironic twists that spice up daily life, the internet is delivered through radio waves now — through the speakers of my ancient, analog stereo system that once complained of being overdriven to distortion in the neighbor-disturbing amplification of Paradise Theatre or possibly The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars painstakingly distorted clicks and bleeps tumble out into the room, clip about like ponies in a clover field, then reassemble about the beanbag with smirks on their faces to assure me they mean business and what would I think if they clawed about the labyrinth for a while and upset some grocery carts and possibly put the compost in with the recycling. How would I feel about that?

 

I enjoy it far more than I feel I’m supposed to. It tickles the inside of my head. It makes me forget the screaming of tinnitus that is my aural day-in-and-day-out. Once upon a time I believed Klonopin would make that go away. It never did. Instead, it made me stop caring about it. Loud as ever, it still drowned out other sounds not just at the same register but any sound near or below the same volume. Unsurprisingly, having removed the ability to care about halves of conversation lost did little to diminish the feeling that I was missing something. This was quickly resolved by the new lack of caring that had been established as my new joy in life. And it was joyful for far longer than it really should have been. Even had I learned of the detail of experiences I was newly missing out on, it’s doubtful this would have mattered at all for me. For my new life was one of carefree loss. Sheets to the wind. Drunk on a newfound ignorance of detail.

 

Having denied myself for so long, these days I crave detail.

 

This particular music is all about detail. Detail and the deliberate breakup of that very detail into new facets and the forms that followed from the breakup. The style had been dubbed Intelligent Dance Music, though that brought up a bit of contention because from there one follows that there is somehow Unintelligent Dance Music.

 

Still, it has an undeniably danceable beat.

 

It is to this mocked-up beat that my fingers oscillated on the obsidian mock felt, mock velvet of the beanbag cover. There were no beans in the filling, instead it was some type of foam. Possibly shaped using the same molds that once made styrofoam peanuts. That slightly disturbing merger of circus peanut and conchiglioni shell that managed to look like neither yet look like it might taste like either.

 

When I was a child we had a beanbag chair that contained actual beans. Black-eyed peas, actually. We found out when it burst after being jumped upon. During one of those moments where no one was really sure if there was jumping or chasing or perhaps the thread had been pulled and it all just sort of spilled out on its own. They were everywhere on the shag carpeting of the wood paneled television room like millions of jaundiced doll eyes, pale yellow with an unrealistically large black pupil. It was the funniest thing ever and we laughed all through the punishment we so richly deserved, having learned nothing.

 

Months earlier, when Princess and the Pea Syndrome was at its fiercest, the beanbag without beans spent its time stacked up in the bedroom with futon and the mattress and everything else that smelled of industrial solvents and felt to the skin as soft as rusty razor blades. I have no idea what I slept on, but I do know that I didn’t sleep much at all when I tried to. Instead, I was so afraid of sleeping that I actively avoided even trying. For weeks this went on: Me, afraid to go to bed because I might not be able to fall asleep.

 

Not that I would swear an oath on getting a full eight hours even last night. But in that space between a fevered mind grasping and rapid eyes moving sometimes it feels like sleep. And that’s enough for now.

 

It leaves me wondering though, when the hallucinations might return.

 

The book is “Spark of Life” by Professor Frances Ashcroft, a little textbookish piece on ion channels and the way they generate electricity along the membranes of cells due to the influx of sodium and the outflux of potassium ions. Because it’s aimed at a general audience, the book is filled with tales of diseases, neurotoxins and genetic mutations that either effect or are effected by ion channels. Also many electrocution anecdotes. Because apparently the English-speaking public isn’t really all that interested in science unless it includes seeping or sharks. Preferably both.

 

It’s not an easy read and I’m having difficulty wrapping my head around Ohm’s Law when I see it out of the corner of my eye.

 

....

 

To be continued!

[[Ve...]]

Apologies!

[[ba...]]

Hi Vegan,

 

Congrats on your diazapm jump 3 months ago , i hope your recovering well,

 

i have an issue with Mouse in the house, the last few days i caught 8 mice in mouse traps ! , then earlier i was mowing outside with a large riding mower there was some waiste high grass i was cuting and i was coming by again i saw something move in the grass , i stoped and looked closer it was a mouse i ran over with the tire it was dying, i felt terrible  all day long from running over that lil mouse and i didnt feel bad with the mouse traps , strange aint it? 

[[Dr...]]

Hey Katie, no, it's not so strange. You are a caring person. The mouse you hit accidentally was suffering and so you felt for it. I have gotten to the point where I don't want to kill anything. But I do. I killed three moles in the yard in the last three weeks. One with a trap and the other two with a shovel. I apologized to them all. But I know I will kill again. And feel bad again. And so on until my time to join them comes.