Wooden Traps

About two weeks ago I went out and got some mouse traps, the glue kind. I would have gotten the old school wooden traps that you seen in cartoons and movies, but I couldn’t bear the thought of cleaning up smashed mouse guts and brain. It grossed me out. I’d much rather watch their tiny little suffocating bodies galvanize and jerk in a square plate of sticky goop as I threw them in the outside trash. It just seems more humane that way.

To bait the traps, I put a dollop of delicious creamy peanut butter in the center of each square. No rodent can refuse the delightful allure of peanut butter, no self-respecting rodent, that is. Then I strategically placed the traps where I knew the mice liked to hang out. Seriously, they have little parties in certain corners and nooks around the house every single night. I have a feeling when do, they talk shit about me. I’m not absolutely certain, but I have a feeling. They’re assholes, these mice. A bunch of tiny, little, non self-respecting, peanut butter hating, motherfucking assholes.

Yeah, they didn’t go for the peanut butter. I knew I should have used bacon, I knew it. But I just couldn’t part with even a fraction of a nibble of my beloved swine delight. Its just too damn precious, no mouse deserves to taste such a sweet delicacy. The little fuckers were lucky I graced them with some PB. I’ll be god damned they get some of my bacon. They’ll have to pry it from my cold, dead, fat, greasy hands. The bastards.

They chase each other around, playing tag or some shit. Dancing around like they’re in a music video. They don’t even care if I’m present anymore. They just do it in the open, like my living rooms a fucking sandbox and all my clutter a god damned jungle gym. They wait until L-shuteye is asleep, they wait until they can hear her slight snore, then they prance around the place as if its their own.

I guess in this situation L-shuteye is the cat, because when shes away, they sure as fuck decide to get their motherfucking play on. Fucking pieces of shit.

So today I see my landlady and she tells me that an exterminator came to the building and planted some cubes of poison and that these cubes of poison are going to finally rid me of my pesky little rodent problem. She said to take out the glue traps that had been set and throw them in the trash. She said that they wouldn’t work, that the exterminator told her to just get rid of them. The mice, she said, were too smart for glue traps.

An eerie sense of déjà vu swept over me. I could have sworn I had stood on that exact same step and looked down at her from that exact same angle and I think the sun even hit my eye in the exact same place and I had to put my hand up to block it in the same exact way as I had done some time before, in the past. In another time. Another time that was happening again. But there I was, talking to my landlady, listening to her tell me how just how incredibly smart the mice were. Again.

It was weird, and for a second I felt like I was living in a vicious cycle. A vicious cycle of inept exterminators and gullible landlady’s and empty glue traps that didn’t work. Of sitcom reruns and empty malt liquor bottles and girls that are like cats and are always gone away. A cycle of suspicious glances at the shadows on the floor, strange sounds coming from behind the closet door under a pile of dirty clothes and mice that were Harvard fucking graduates. A vicious cycle, one that I had to get out of. Just another vicious cycle that I had to escape.

Fucking stupid smart mice asshole punks.

There is only one way I can do it, and I have to get my landlady to understand this: I am gotta get me a cat.

An adorable cat. A cute, cuddly, sleep in your bed and purr in your lap kind of cat. With a violent distaste for mice and at the very least a degree from Columbia. If you know of any, give me a shout. Cause I need a motherfucking cat like you wouldnt believe.

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Im not the only one with mouse problems in new york. But I mean, you totally already had to know that.