Frankincense and Fur

There was a girl standing there on the side of the platform at Canal Street, wearing a furry white hat... She light up a cigarette, and murmurs of disapproval began almost immediately. A woman standing next to me with her four kids threw up her arms in disgust. It took me back to those old days I never even knew, a longing for the Great Time of Smoking, when everybody smoked everywhere. It was, of course, a metaphor for something much bigger, a certain freedom from knowledge, a naiveity. This seems to happen every fifty years or so: we look back at our primitive, savage bygone days, shaking our heads in diapproval while we puff on our pipes, and patting ourselves on the back for being so much smarter now. Oh yes, we were total fucking idiots before, but this time we've got it allllll figured out.
But clearly there is a certain logic in ignorance, and such an obvious support system for it, with many rewards.

The mouse was in rare form tonight. Apparently he had a few tricks up his sleeves, as we quickly observed upon entering the living room. The mouse was perched atop the doorjam, wearing a pirate getup, and descended upon us with a terrifying and grotesque mouse-shriek. The scale of this operation was unfortunately (for him) no match for our looming humanity, as we merely stepped a foot back and observed this spectacle unfolding before our eyes. With his target safely out of range, the mouse simply plummeted towards the floor. Though I don't doubt he would have cut our throats had he had the chance, I simply couldn't allow the obvious conclusion of this sordid act to come to fruition. Snapping into action, with endearing reflexes the likes of which I had never known, I ran over to the window, yanked out the screen, and dove beneath the flailing form of our rogue rodent protagonist. Though I intended to catch him fireman-style, he bounced right off of the screen trampoline-style, and right into the rather befuddled but receptive arms of Kristin, who was standing right there behind me.
Well, we were pretty pissed. But that mouse looked up at Kristin and planted a big, wet smackeroo right on the lips. We cracked up, rolling on the floor with laughter. It's just too hard to stay mad at that cute little guy for too long.
We celebrated with fresh cheese from the Union Square farmer's market. The mouse and I did, at least. Kristin had to settle for a small piece of potato, as she's on a cleansing diet right now. But in the end, the situation proved to be mutally beneficial to all.

Happy New Ear

"Wouldn't it be silly", we all wondered, "if anyone cared about this?" Questions like this were everywhere and they were maddening. Certainly we were tempted to stomp upon the Tyrant and release the Messenger O' Love... but frankly, it's simply a matter of restraint.
Tonight there's some godawful whistling sound coming from the radiator. My tinnitus, now celebrating its thirteenth month, is ironically no help at all. You would think that the constant presence of a 15 kilohertz sawtooth wave right in the middle of your head would help mask our high-pitched sounds. Not in my case, of course. Conversely, I seem to have become even more sensitive to them. Particularly regarding car brakes, and the subway. The subway is so varied in frequency information as to make a brave man weep; ridiculous, spleen-rattling sub-sonic wavelengths churning through the ground as the train comes from afar... followed by hair-splitting jolts of high-frequency hilarity when it pulls up to the platform, way up in the area of 100 Kilohertz and beyond I wouldn't doubt.

So recently we've had a furry little visitor in our apartment. He's come to see Kristin twice, and has conceivably visited many more times. Kristin suggests some type of device she heard about: it blasts out super-sonic frequencies that keeps the mice away... and arguably, the cats, dogs, and other smaller mammals as well. Obviously this is more humane than a mousetrap. I'm paranoid, though, that the device will be my undoing as well, due to my super-sonic sensitivities. I can already picture it:

Hanging out in some dark, dirty alleyway with a handful of mice. We are all sharing a small block of cheese, and a FastBreak bar. We're all thinking back to the good old days, eating our meager meal in silence. Yes, we talk about it sometimes, but the pain is great, and could well break us if we were to think about it too much. More often than not, we simply choke down our meal in silence. Sometimes we are joined by the cats and dogs, and even some species of beetles. The other day, the cat comes up to me and says, he says: "Well, I can't get anywhere near the goddamn place, how about you?"