Of Mice and Hats

When young I wore baseball hats and shaved my head, then aged into balding and kept wearing the hats. For a brief tragic period in the middle I wished for a quiff, Morrissey-style, but those tastes had come on too late and my follicles - true Smiths fans, I suppose - despaired too early. (There is a light and it shines off my scalp.) I live now, sartorially speaking, in the shaded overlap between a circle labeled ‘comfortable’ and another ‘underwhelming.’ Hoodies, mostly, and a hardware store baseball hat. As literal objects the hats cover the bald head. As textual objects the hats cover the dead mice. Any covering over the unsightly proves ultimately temporary, I suspect, and so, sighing (and, full disclosure, slouching), to rodents I now turn.

“I suppose though in a way it was hats again, metaphorically speaking,” that’s how I’d intended to start this second paragraph. Astute readers will note that I have, in fact, successfully acted on this intention; I derive neither joy nor sense of self-efficacy from that fact because, first, I am saddened at the thought of any astute readers slumming it around here when they could be reading something edifying, and, second and above all, I know what comes next - “because in a sense I do wear a lot of hats, like, around the house.” I suppose really it’s what’s coming next after this that really fully sours the satisfaction of writing a sentence after first thinking it; I’m not saying that bit a moment ago wasn’t underwhelming, riffing as it does on a cliche, but I am not such a snob as to let something as small as that detract from the joy of raising a structure in my imagination before erecting it in reality, even if that structure is merely a topic sentence and that reality is merely a small blog. The really enjoyment-wrecking bit hasn’t happened yet - that is, it gets worse, don’t say I didn’t warn you. “For instance, on Thursday I wore the hats of hero, thief, and janitor, and nearly put on the hats of judge and executioner.” There.

Do you see? Some of you no doubt are wearing a look of forced composure - my face at age ten when my great aunt made crab salad sandwiches and mid-meal said “you don’t have to eat them, it’s okay!” and I, liar, said “no, I like them!” and took a second - because you understand already and your stomach sinks as you realize I am going to explain it anyway. Others of you, however, simply must be dim, which is why you’re reading this at all, and you need me to explain. Know that it is because of you that your betters among your fellow readers have to suffer this explanation and so relive the disappointment they already endured on their own. It’s a bit like going to see a 90s band on a reunion tour, and you are the reason that tour happened. Shame on you.

None of them wear hats. See? Or rather, none of them have specific hats that identify them. Hero hats? Thief and janitor hats? “I saw a guy on the bus, hat like a janitor, know what I’m saying?” is a sentence no sane person would speak. Now, they certainly are allowed to wear whatever hats they like, at least some of the time. You might argue that judges and executioners wear wigs and hoods, but those are only judges in Great Brexland and more importantly neither wig nor hood is a hat, anyone who says otherwise is incapable of understanding the most basic facts of costume parties. And so it was that I had an idea for that second paragraph that I liked but got to the end of it and found that it had dissolved like the future of the generation of millenials and that left me unable to enjoy the fact that I succeeded at starting it the way I’d planned. Honestly I resented that success, as the way it played out made it no longer feel like success at all but rather honey masking a poison pill.

Worse yet, I thought I could make something of the conceit of being disappointed that the metaphor didn’t work out - and, I suppose I must admit I have made a paragraph or two and these two, too (too much?), were first thought up in my brain then written down, rather than riffed right out of my fingers thoughtlessly - which is the sad reality of this particular meandering line, if you’ll permit another admission - but the thing is that I have again seen just a little too far, and this time to two particular nexts, that make me unable to enjoy that second alignment of will and execution either. (“And so passed, the time given to me on earth.”) Neither sentence nor paragraph can one enjoy when breakdown and carnage follow. Kierkegaard should have said that, then I could have quoted it.

Because the thing is in saying “I wear a lot of hats around here” one is not in fact making a claim that people who do specific roles have specific literal hats. Consider: “wearing my editor hat, I would say this is slush pile dreck.” Fair, I suppose, if impolitely forthright, as an assessment by one of the astute readers - astute but perversely stubborn - who has made it this far, but the point is that such a statement commits one to no belief that editors in fact have special hats. (They probably ought to wear executioners’ hoods.) And so the conceit breaks down.

There is really nothing wrong with “wearing my judge hat” - to be clear, I would never defend the awkwardness of phrase, the final DJUH sound of “judge” making the starting “h” of “hat” feel a bit redundant, or the unfortunate stress on the syllables, I mean only that there is no problem with the content of the utterance. That’s the problem exactly, that there is no problem, when I’d set up there being a problem as the center of those couple three paragraph above, and it turns out now to all be a big juicy nothinburger. If you’re keeping score you know that was one of the reasons I couldn’t enjoy the small triumph of molding a thing according what I envisioned before acting - part of what sets us apart from bees and spiders, so I’d read - and you know that there’s another coming, and you may recall that it involves dead mice.

Trying to salvage a little dignity here, I am going to avoid telling you any of the details, because the details are unpleasant. I will only say I sponged a surprisingly large quantity - I would guess two tablespoons, thick and gelatinous and dark red like cough syrup - of blood from the kitchen floor, and that at first I thought the bits of chopped red onion that had spilled on the floor - scraps from the meal preparation interrupted by the brutality of my most cowardly cat - were chunks of the body of the former creature I now think of as “poor Mama Mouse.” They were not, and I felt relieved, a relief shattered by discovering a moment later that poor Mama Mouse’s remains lay strewn onto one my dress shirts, fallen from the back of the kitchen chair where I’d hung it. I threw that shirt, along with the remaining third of the now surely bloodless poor Mama Mouse into the garbage can outside.

I felt satisfied then for a moment, having done some of the grosser work and spared my wife and children the sight, a satisfaction predicated, like that of the dimmer readers above, on not knowing what was coming still next, namely the resumption of brutality this time by my friendliest cat. This latter brutality involving the discovery of two mice of such small size that it became clear that poor Mama Mouse was in fact poor Mama Mouse. I will spare you, only telling you that I picked up the friendly cat, holding a piteously squeaking poor Baby Sister Mouse and carried the cat toward the front door where she gave me an offended look as if I were trying to steal a family heirloom then spat poor Baby Sister onto the floor, where poor Baby Sister, still squeaking, began to try to limp to the shelter of my shoes.

Cursing loudly I grabbed some paper and a cardboard shoebox - one, and I am not making this up, that my children have been playing with lately, using it is a dollhouse and also as a character they call Boxy - and using the paper swept poor Baby Sister into Boxy’s yawning mouth, then rushed outside where in the cold and the daylight I realized I had no further plan.

I quickly surveyed my options.
Option 1: let poor Baby Sister go in my yard, so that she’d come back in the house to be torn apart by the killing machines my children dote upon.
Option 2: throw poor Baby Sister, along with the now abhorrent Boxy, into the trash can to starve to death near the dismembered corpse of her mother.
Option 3: stomp poor Baby Sister to pieces on the theory that it’d be the most merciful course of action.
Option 4: release poor Baby Sister near the alley in the back of my house far enough away that she won’t get indoors and, perhaps, will miraculously avoid the stray cats, cars, owl, and exposure to the elements, and become an adult mouse with a healthy fear of human homes.

I went for four and tried not to notice the way she twitched and shivered next to the telephone pole. Then condemning my accomplice in crime Boxy to the garbage can - in the hope of thus throwing away my own guilt, it wasn’t me, blame the inanimate object I used to commit the act - along with the guts and gristle of poor Mama Mouse, I went back inside only to find that cowardly cat had located poor Big Brother mouse - poor Big Brother was bigger than poor Baby Sister, but still so small as to be clearly a young mouse child, one whom, I am sad to say, had the day before been caught by friendly cat and released - repeatedly! feline sadism is boundless! - released I will add in front of the bedroom door of one of my very sensitive children - the sensitive child who had awoken me in a frightened voice to tell me that friendly cat had a mouse. She’d been up early watching My Little Pony videos. The child, I mean.

Early rising sensitive child’s bedroom is on the second floor of the house. I watched in horror as friendly cat scampered playfully up the stairs with what I now know was poor Big Brother mouse, friendly cat no doubt thinking that either gutting a baby rodent amid early rising sensitive child’s toys or else doing so on one of the beds of my other two sensitive children, at that moment still sleeping in another bedroom, would each be a very nice time. Both doors being open, friendly cat had options. Maybe it was because she was considering where to best finish torturing to death a defenseless living being that she became distracted and allowed poor Big Brother mouse to escape. Until now, a day later, when, while I was abandoning poor Baby Sister to death by exposure and blaming it on guiltless Boxy, cowardly cat scarfed poor Big Brother mouse then barfed his innards all over the playroom floor, which I discovered when I walked back in, shouted “do not come in here right now!” to warn off my family. I wiped up poor half-digested Big Brother with paper towels that I then scooped into a plastic shopping bag, then added him to the can alongside Poor Mama and the innocent Boxy.

Knowing that this is what was coming, perhaps now you understand the temptation to faff about with digressions and metaphorical hats, and understand as well why it was hard to enjoy any of the mildly successful implementations of my premeditated sentences, given that said premeditation was clouded with the thoughts of not only cliches and infelicitous metaphors and failed conceits, but also a stew of cat stomach juices and vomited mouse skin. Judge less until the hour of your own judgment, reader, is another thing I wish someone like Kierkegaard had said so I could reference the quotation here.

I guess I should say, in the interest of honesty, I don’t actually know for certain that it was poor Big Brother mouse that cowardly cat puked onto the floor. It could have been a third sibling I didn’t get the chance to meet prior to dismemberment, and perhaps poor Big Brother is right now cowering in a crack in the floor or in one of the walls upstairs, shivering in time with Baby Sister back by the telephone pole (unless of course the owl’s already deposited her tiny fragile bones into another regurgitated pellet on my driveway), hoping his mother will find him and return him to what he imagines is the nest full of his soft, warm siblings, and growing weaker and hungrier by the hour.

I told you it got worse, I warned you, so don’t - you know what, never mind. Just try to make yourself think about hats instead. It’s for the best.