One of my friends has mice. It’s never singular, because there’s never just one mouse. We had mice a couple years ago. My wife, She Who Must Be Taunted, dubbed them “our hated enemies”, and it stuck: we have always been at war with Mouselandia.
Boy, those little devils were persistent. They came up into our kitchen one winter, and showed no signs of being interested in leaving. SWMBT has an exaggerated startle reflex, and when she encountered one unexpectedly she’d actually squeak – “eek”, like in the cartoons. They’d stop, in the middle of scurrying across the kitchen floor, and stare at her, as if they knew she Must Be Taunted. They once tried to eat a cantaloupe we left on the counter. They can slip through quarter-inch cracks, and the only way to get rid of them is to seal the cracks – all of them. I spent a good deal of my time on my back, on the floor, looking for cracks.
We conquered them, eventually. Or maybe they just found other cantaloupes to gnaw on. We haven’t seen them in a couple years – but boy, it took a lot longer to get rid of them than we expected.
Nobody tells you about this when you’re growing up. Actually, they do, subtly, but – and let’s be frank here – you’re not paying attention. You’re focused, obsessively, on what you’re not allowed to do: drink, drive, have breakfast cereal for every single meal, stay out past your bedtime. You’re watching TV and thinking about being a baseball player, or a rock star, or a big wheel in something or other, or (apparently, if you’re a kid now and watch the X-Games) being allowed to kill yourself in all sorts of interesting ways in the snow. Being a kid is harshing your mellow, man.
You think childhood is harshing your mellow? Trying being an adult.
Sure, you can stay out past curfew, but who has the time? The dog is coughing, and the fridge is leaking – or maybe it’s the other way around – and your mother wants to know why you Never. Ever. Call, and you haven’t seen your friends since the last time the house needed to be fumigated and you needed somewhere to sleep, and you’re wearing sweatpants because (a) you just can’t be bothered anymore, and (b) everything else you own is in the laundry, and you don’t have time to do the laundry because the fridge is coughing, and the dog is leaking, and you get the idea. Don’t get me wrong – you couldn’t pay me enough money to be a kid again. But there’s no free lunch, anywhere. There will always be mice.
The problem is when you start using it as an excuse. And I, perhaps the laziest industrious person I know, am a capital P Procrastinator. Every Saturday I have a list of things to do, and somehow, “practice” or “send out booking requests” ends up at the bottom of the list more times than I’d like to admit. Those things are important, and I hate them, and when you get right down to it, I’d rather clean the basement. Or mouseproof the kitchen.
I’m getting better, here in my old, creaking age. I’m beginning to understand what they mean when they say youth is wasted on the young. If I only had the energy and clarity of my youth, and the wisdom of my years, I’d be doing great – but we don’t get both. Or, at least, I didn’t. It’s taken me all the time I’ve had to learn to work on things in my own time, and understand how annoyingly true all that trite pop-psychology advice can be. I’ve missed my chance to be Peter Mulvey, but I probably wasn’t cut out for it, anyway. I get to live in one place, and go home to SWMBT every night, and I still get to entertain you lovely people, as long as I remember to send out booking requests on occasional Saturdays.
It really isn’t our hated enemy’s fault.