« 90 Miles from Palm Desert | Main | The Cookie Girl »
February 1, 2017
The Mouse in the Bathtub
At home, a cat prances into the bedroom, meowing loudly. I know that he has a mouse. This is how he announces his success. They all do this. This is nothing new. They're happy...proud even, with their success in hunting mice. I don't know where they get them, but they bring them in at a rate of about 1 a day.
I scoop up the mouse and put him in the empty bathtub. This is sort of a compromise. You can have your mouse, and you can eat it to, but let's not make a mess.
Surprisingly, the cats catch on to this. The mouse is now in a place where he can not escape. They can bat him around at their leisure, then go and take a break. When they return, the mouse is still there, awaiting his fate.
From the cat's perspective, this is ideal. And, fairly quickly, the cats start putting the mice in the bathtub on their own. This surprised me. I wasn't aware that they could be trained, or learn to do this on their own. But they quickly picked up on it.
From the mouse's perspective, this is not really an ideal situation. It's a special kind of hell, really. Basically, now matter what the mouse does, he's just killing time, waiting for the inevitable fate. Waiting for the cat to come back and finish him of in a horrible, surreal death. The cats will inevitably, rip him to pieces, and devour him, depositing his head on the carpet.
The Bad Lands
At first, it just seemed like we were all in this big warehouse in the desert, near the Bad Lands of the Inland Empire. It was hard to understand the difference between us and them. Some people seemed to be working with us. Some people seemed to be working on other things. In the glaring desert sun, it was easy to imagine that we were all working on the same things.
But slowly, the creacks grew deeper and wider, so that it was obvious that some of us were contrators and some of us were employees. As they hired more employees, we were moved to other areas and into different cubes. Then, as they hired more and still more, we got pushed further and further, until we were leapfrogging down row after row to get out of the way of the ever encroaching mob of new hires. They were louder and louder until eventually, we had to confront them. "Who are you? And what are you doign here anyway?"
So now, we're leapfrogged down into the barest, darkest corner of this desert warehouse, waiting our fate. Probably, we will end up in Oakland. That's the rumor mill.
And it occurs to me that I am the mouse. Living in a special kind of hell. My bathtub is the LA basin. And the cats are the 25 year old kids straight out of college that are put into management positions.
Posted by Rob Kiser on February 1, 2017 at 10:10 AM
Comments
But the difference, lest you forget, is that they will not tear you apart limb from limb, but allow you to wander off into the darkness silently.sl
Posted by: sl on February 12, 2017 at 9:02 PM