Last night, the second we’ve spent at the rental next door (we have until mid-month to give up the keys to this one), I had a fairly unnerving experience. I was cold, and my extra-warm comforter that has seen me through more than a decade of love and trauma was in the dryer. Probably, I’d reasoned at 1:30 AM, it was dry by then, and also wonderfully warm, so I’d hopped out of bed and went down to the basement to retrieve it.
At which point I looked at the northern basement wall, just past the dryer, and observed an approximately foot-long (including tail) rat scampering away from the dried soups which had been stored on our shelves down there.
After issuing the requisite blood-curdling scream, clearly while I was not at the height of my powers of articulation, I posted the following update to my Twitter page:
OMG there’s a motherfucking rat in the motherfucking basement of the house for which we just signed the motherfucking lease last week. FUCK!1(link)
followed, after a bit of reflection (albeit still in a state of panic) by:
This isn’t psychologically transporting me back to experience of dealing w/ my hateful, schizophrenic grandmother’s rat-infested home AT ALL (link)
We’ve contacted the landlord, but as of this writing (7:47 PM) still haven’t heard back concerning what they intend to do about the situation. So right now, I’m attempting to wrap my head around the fact that we are heading into Night 2 of cognizantly cohabiting with motherfucking rats. And yes, I actually did consider moving all the furniture back into the old house, and or sleeping on the floor there until the crisis resolves, but it would be a logistical nightmare; also, the kids don’t know about Mr. Furry Disgustingness in the new basement, and I don’t need to infect them with my panic, so my solution right now is two-fold: 1) Raiding my old stash of clonazepam, reserved for only my most serious panic episodes, and 2) writing about it (while hoping today is not the day my also-fairly-high-strung teenager decides to read my blog).
And here’s the funny thing. A long time ago, I’d drafted a specifically rat-relevant blog entry which, if it ever was actually posted, it would have been years ago, at my very briefly anonymous blog, “Queen of the Bean” (where my love for caffeine, the bass player from the Butchies2, and assorted mental health issues were discussed). In any event, the text file in which I found the draft has a last-saved date of December 15, 2005.
Here, then, are my metaphorically rat-specific ruminations from a few years ago:
I’ve taken the laptop with me to bed, with the idea that given its weak ass battery, I won’t be able to write for long, and so there will be some brake system to keep in check my typical inclination of late: to forgo sleep in favor of writing all night long. My will to do this is formidably strong, even though, by all rights, I should not (at least at this moment) possess it, given my very few hours of sleep last night, the long, wearying day that followed, and the fact that it’s approaching 1:00 A.M. of the next day as I begin this.
I had made a credible effort toward slumber, but upon becoming horizontal, my brain had begun its usual racing around its own self-defining tracks. I’d been batting about some stray thoughts about this process: embarking upon this recent effort toward maintaining some conscious awareness of my mental “features” (let’s be nice and not call them “impairments,” shall we?), ala the diagnostic categories of ADHD, PTSD, GAD, and now (are you tired of the inscrutable psychological acronym game yet?) this tentative diagnosis of underlying bipolar disorder (as discussed with shrink today), albeit a variety within the less extreme range of the spectrum (perhaps BP II, or this cyclothymia term that I have lately been puzzling over).
And one of these batted-about ideas was the notion that I have begun to feel like I am my own personal lab rat; that I am creating certain obstacle courses for my own use, then blindfolding myself, then running around the various courses in a mad panic to get out. It all seems so goddamned self-indulgent. (Though at least with this blog not being in my name, I can desist with the usual pattern of self-condemnation: that anything I write, particularly when it concerns the inevitable stuff around inner life, that it is all mere self-aggrandizement.)
And then I laughed out loud (poor husband: he is used to such unexplained, late night outbursts from me), with the following phrase ringing in a distinctly operatic (yet off-key) fashion, in my head: “Rat! Torturing my BRAIN!”
What I was recalling was a certain poem by the inimitable and wondrous Sharon Olds. It goes like this:
The Try-Outs
“Rat! Torturing my BRAIN!” is the aria
my mother sang, trying out to be a singer
in a downtown theater. All month, she had practiced,
“Rat! leaping out in sharp coloratura
from that mouth that drew back from kissing my father,
her mouth I kissed as if it were sacred,
“Rat!” suddenly in the pantry, and then the pause, then
torturing and my run together in a
slurred mutter, then that radical, stridulating
high, off-key note, “BRAIN!”
–this was how a woman tried
to enter the world, Rat torturing my
brain vacuuming, rat torturing my
brain doing the dishes, atonal
shriek like choir gone wrong, or as if
the housework, itself, screamed, matter
and dirt-on-matter squealing, the dust-rings of
Saturn grating on each other. Backstage,
the folds of a massive curtain, and the mothers were
going behind its lank volutes,
one by one, and trying out,
Rat torturing my brain, I could tell
my mother by her pitch, about an eighth of an
inch below the note, and by
the way my skin tightened, and rose, and I
cried, when she sang. I would stop making
the paper Easter basket, and shudder
till another mother sang. At least I thought they were all mothers,
those grown-up women, although I was the only
child, there, cutting strips of
construction paper in the bad light
down at the base of the blackout aurora,
cloak of a potentate, where you wait
to be born, where your mother prays to be famous.
I never wondered just how the rat
tortured her brain, I cut out bunnies and
chickens and stood them up inside a basket
by bending them hard at the ankles, and taping
their feet to the floor. My jaws moved
with the scissors, chewing - it was a sort
of eating, that making, a having by pouring
forth, hearing from the dark the soprano
off-key cries of my kind.__
Naturally, the very fact that the self-made rat scampering about, past the midnight hour, in the self-made torture chamber of my brain had reminded me of the poem, next forced me to go rifling about upstairs for the book in which I had first read it (Blood, Tin, Straw, New York: Knopf, 2001, pages 67-68), because I knew that I would have to transcribe it, and, well, now I’ve done that, and my battery is on empty and I should have taken my fucking Ambien three hours ago but I didn’t, so maybe I can get in a few solid hours of sleep tonight, in spite of rats… torturing my brain.
__
1 In response to which one friend stated, “I’m glad you took the time to tweet that. I wouldn’t have the presence of mind to do that,” to which I added the clarification, “Well, first I screamed my head off.”
2 Title of that post was, if memory serves, There is nothing wrong with me that a few shots of tequila, a slightly darkened room, and the bass player from the Butchies couldn’t fix. (Someday I’ll dig it up and retro-post it.)