I remembered the thing I’d reminded myself to remember but had forgotten - cat caught a mouse.
The reminder had remained but without content, like my mind playing that stupid doorbell ringing prank we’d sometimes do as kids, we called it ding dong ditch, you ring the bell then run off, maybe hide somewhere to watch the person open the door and look around in mild confusion. Well this time the obnoxious unfunny prankster that is my mind has been caught and forced to explain itself, and what it explained is that the weirdest of our cats - licks plastic bags, listens in agitation to the furnace through the vents, tries to nibble my feet - caught a mouse. She’s the best mouser of the crew, and has this particular cry she makes when she has a mouthful of mouse, it has a distinct vocalizing-around-a-rodent-stuffing-my-gob muffled sound as well as being a distinct cry she only makes at these times.This time she was in the playroom, which, as is our custom, had many, many toys all over its floor so the thought of her leaving a mouse in there was extra gross. I grabbed two plastic grocery bags from the kitchen and balled them, went to the playroom and talked softly to the cat, put a hand on her back, and with the balled up bags grabbed the mouse from her mouth. I walked with due haste to the front door clutching the dead or stunned mouse in the bundle of plastic. We have a screened in porch and some of the cats like to dart out there, I don’t approve but no one cares what I think. The newest of the cats ran out there when I opened the door, which was annoying because I didn’t want to extend the duration of my mouse-clutching time, an annoyance my exact expression of which escapes me but I recall it was at high volume and contained the word ‘fuck’ and something about being sick of cats sometimes. Having shooed the cat out the way, I went outside to finish the mouse removal process. Life is a series of small adventures.
This was Sunday, maybe? I forget now.
Today I went to go for a run over by the park when I got there the weather, which had been dithering - that’s why they call it whether, because it often can’t make up its mind - began to noncommittally spit, just enough action to be annoying, so I canceled the run. I didn’t want to get soaked, plus I had my phone and wallet in my pocket. I walked a little then did sprints - very slow ones, mind - up what seems to me a big and steep hill. I did two, felt very out of breath, walked to get my breath back, two more, walked, one last, and headed to the car.
Once I got in the car a sloshing sploosh of sweat came over me, or out of me, which was unpleasant but kind of rewarding in a ‘see I did really exert myself’ kind of measure of exertion sort of way. (Speaks to something about me that I want tangible evidence of work, maybe, and that I hold in esteem the deliberate endurance of an unpleasant condition.) I turned the car on, put it in drive, and the gear shift handle popped off and fell somewhere on the floor. I was able to get the car back in park - the handle makes the underlying mechanism more easily manipulable but is not the mechanism itself, luckily - and rooted around on the floor until I found the handle, button, and spring. I futzed with it a while till I figured out how to get back on but it went on too loose, kept coming off. Turns out there’s a set screw that needs an allen wrench (a tool named after Alan Wrench, wrestler turned IMF economist, I enjoy pretending to believe) to tighten. I got that fixed when I got home. More of life’s little adventures.
Then the youngest tripped over a cat and hit the floor hard, nasty bruise on her hip. The ten year old get her a ghost-shaped icepack from the freezer. After crying a little she joked with me that her pants were haunted, since the ghost was tucked under her waistband. I made that joke and she followed it up with saying that the peas - had a pack of frozen peas for her banged knee - were baby ghosts that she was eating. Her jokes are darker than mine.
I had forgotten that I meant to say - woke up very tired today. Mondays are extra long work days for me, my longest, and last week was very tiring as well. I had a coffee nap in the early to mid afternoon, that helped, temped to have another now but it's late enough in the day it might sabotage my night time sleep. I once told a friend about coffee naps, in a tone of great enthusiasm, and he said it sounded like a distopian nightmare. You say nightmare, I say life's little adventure, let's call the whole thing potato, turn it off. In a social media coincidence I saw an article pop up about the brain science of mental fatigue, about prolonged high level mental exertion leading to the build up of some chemical that needs to be processed, sort of analogous to how I remember lactic acid working in muscles, except there's no positive 'feel the burn and get stronger' element to the best of my knowledge. Makes me rethink these long mondays for the future. Some life's little adventures leave you with treasure, others just leave you.
