Month / November 2004

by DrMabuse

You Dirty Rat

There is a rat in the apartment. I discovered him making an escape tonight after investigating some sounds in the kitchen. The rat is small and scampers through a small hole that I found near the stove. Even though the rodent may be tiny and spurious, the simple fact is that he scares the bejesus out of me, as rats seem to do. There’s the disturbing possibility that he could run like the devil in the post-midnight hours and take a bite out of my flesh. Or something worse. I didn’t read H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Rats in the Walls” lightly.

The timing’s about right, given that I end up dealing with a rat perhaps every four or five years. The last time, the rat emerged as I was whipping up my trademark pasta sauce. I was a foolish twenty-six back then. And I immediately freaked out. This time around, there’s slightly more maturity, in that my reaction doesn’t involve jumping onto the closest countertop like some housewife in a Warner Brothers cartoon. So my manhood’s on the line too.

But this sort of thing is to be expected. It’s getting to be the wintertime. Which means the rats are coming in from the cold.

Of course, when humans in the Western world deal with these sorts of things, they, of course, go all out. Certainly in my case, obscenely so. I’m now the proud owner of three boxes of rat poison, several traps, and a barrage of truly masochistic devices that will kill this dreadful beast. I feel like Wile E. Coyote ordering from Acme.

Part of me sees the hypocrisy in demonizing the rat. Part of me would like to be friends with the rat. But because I’m terribly afraid, because I detest its presence and its mentality (which is, primarily, to scavenge upon what it might find, which isn’t much, given that my food’s all packed away), I want the rat dead. I want it out of my life. Go bother some other bachelor. The NIMBY principle was never more strernly (and justifiably!) applied than it is for rats.

So I have declared war. Chances are the rat’s just as frightened of me as I am of him. (He certainly skedaddled fast when I turned the light on.) Granted, if the bookies were to put a spread on this, I’d win by leaps and bounds. I have a bigger brain. I’m larger than the rat. But it moves much faster and the rat’s interests and existence aren’t as complicated as mine. Even so, does the rat have brothers or sisters? Or is it simply vermin prepared to spread a new wave of bubonic? Even if I defeat the rat (as I suspect I will), who’s the real winner in this battle?

by DrMabuse

Thought of the Morning

Six years ago, the American public saw one of the most brutal battle scenes in film history. Despite the fact that Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan reached across several audiences, left and right, and was much talked about and led to a very public reconsideration of going to war for the right reasons and what our boys were in there for, the American people still voted for Bush.

Ergo, the American public has no memory in cases of exemplary artistic influence.

Also: head hurts.

by DrMabuse

#9 — the male mind

8:50 PM: I am officially on Screwdriver Five (I think). I am also colliding iinto walls and it is heinously arduous for me to type in a fucking post. I hope for B’s sake that this isn’t considered “moderate.” It sure as hell doesn’t feel that way. My head is beginning to throb. In my defense, I should say that drinking copious amounts of alochol is no longer a reality for me. At least, it hasn’t been the case since my mid-twenties. So I’ve had to force the stuff down my gullet, with the caveat that I should last to some degree. I’m a man of my word, as some folks here know.

Anyway, fair is fair. And I’m happy to address Lauren’s point concerning “the end of the relationship.” From my standpoint, at least, the female anatomy has been of more pressing interest since the end of the relationship. The value of a relationship involves rampant sex and intimacy that stymies the male resolve to some degree. But when it boils down to a solitary existence, the male is prone to download porn and to drift his eyes towards the fantastic tits bundled beneath a tight and revealing upper garment. This is comparatively normal, I’d say, as males go. We really can’t help ourselves. It’s biological. But in our defense (or at least my defense), we are also interested in the brains behind the machine. Except that this concern is revealed later in the game. Surely, my explicitly stipulated “putty” clause from the post in question was clear enough. But if it wasn’t, let me be the first (if not the umpteenth) to suggest that males are inherently visual and that, ostensibly, there is nothing wrong with this. We love your anatomy. We love to take it home with us. But, as was the case with this afternoon’s “let’s swap the material objects we left in each other’s apartments” meetings with my ex-gf, we males, I suspect, take the end of a relationship harder than the female hoping to become steadfast friends at the drop of a hat. It bothers us to enter some domicile in which we were previously intimate, precisely because we are inherently visual procrastinators.

Does this sort of answer your question, Lauren? If not, please advise and, as the drinks continue to pour down my larynx, I’d be happy to clarify. Kiss kiss.