Tales From This Side

Part I Part II Part III Part IV I awoke mildly dispirited from the night before, and lest I be labeled a “sissy” or other such term, it is worth noting the importance of not killing without reason. To wantonly destroy is not “wrong” – concepts such as “right” and “wrong,” “good” and “bad,” are merely constructions that exist in our minds – but it does, if repeatedly enacted, reduce the ecological diversity of an area, and doing that reduces the fitness of that portion of the ecosystem. Reduced fitness, multiplied, is extinction. Thus, to destroy without reason (i.e., for purposes other than food or defense) risks creating a state of mind that, generation upon generation, could lead to our own destruction. It was with this sort of selfish thinking that I rose and lamented the unnecessary death of my roommate. Such sadness, however, would be short lived. As I entered the kitchen I expected to have a quick clean-up job before me, but to my surprise, the bait that I had left out – a ...

Part I Part II Part III Now, when it comes to mouse traps, there are more out there than you might think. The variety is immense. There are "bucket" traps that involve convincing a mouse to jump into a bucket of water to get bait, where they drown. There are glue traps, flat boards with powerful adhesives that the mice run across and then get stuck on. (We actually had a variation on this in my college fraternity house where spilled beer on the kitchen linoleum from the night before would turn sticky and catch cockroaches by the handful. Should have patented it.) There are electric traps that shock mice to death. There are even traps that gas chamber the insidious and dangerous beasts, Nazi-style. And, of course, there is the classic, wood-based spring trap. On top of all of these there are also what are termed "live catch" traps which are not dissimilar to the raccoon trap I previously mentioned, only much smaller, obviously. My goal was to "live cat...

Part I Part II It is at this point that the story takes on a decidedly darker hue. Among the contributing factors to my new earnestness to capture the mouse was the activity of my upstairs neighbor. Now, he and I share a door. Our apartments are, in fact, designed to work as a single unit, in case the school we work for ever found itself in need of a very large apartment for a family with several children. Like one of those connected hotel rooms with the door locked from both sides. He, his wife, and I, aren't enemies, but neither do we get along particularly well, and as such the door has remained permanently locked. What acts as a barrier for us, however, is nothing of the sort to this story's antagonist. It was after several weeks of comfortable cohabitation, just prior to the aforementioned issues that developed between mouse and I, that I was walking the main dorm floor, fending off inane questions from freshman boys. Just another day in the freshman dorm. "No...

Part I Now, I have told this story to others and have been accused of "over thinking" things in my life (whatever that means), but I swear by such an overactive thought process. I thought about the situation and realized that both the mouse and I were in a bit of a bind. The entire reason that the mouse was in my apartment was due to a series of chance events: two doors that were rarely open at the same time had, in fact, opened simultaneously, right when the mouse was in their proximity. This meant that, in order to escape by "natural" means, a similarly unlikely event would need to occur. As already stated, the dorm was new and seemed quite impervious to rodent penetration, and as happy as I was about that, it also meant that mouse and I were new roommates, he as unable to leave as I was to evict him. So I kept thinking, and I thought that if I kept the place clean of food and debris, as I normally did, he would have nothing to eat. If had nothing to eat,...

Neither Robert Burns , Tony Banks , nor Ian Anderson have adequately prepared me for my continuing adventures with our small and distant mammal relatives, though perhaps they have helped to bolster my esteem for such creatures. Though often thought of as mere vermin, I have a hard time looking at the mouse as such. Of course, my recent forays into Kafka and his first-person experience as a " monstrous vermin " have also helped to moderate my opinion of the fidgety little devils who seem to have truly been given the short end of the stick. Nearly everything that is predatory eats mice, and civilization even caters to this, selling them as a fodder-commodity in pet stores for everything from snakes to piranha to tarantulas. Once upon a time, in San Diego, I even saw a minute falcon drop out of the sky to catch one. I had been running Mission Bay's scenic bay loop and was routinely witness to male, American kestrels that would float, motionless, on the air streams tha...