Has anyone figured out yet what “Threat Level Orange” means? And is it really necessary to card me for requesting alcohol on an airplane flying over the fucking Gulf of Mexico? Maybe there’s some connection. Word has it, terrorists are sucking down minature bottles of pinot grigio to get their nerve up. Better check their IDs.
Well, I do have a beard.
Anyway, it’s raining in Costa Rica. Now, back to your regularly scheduled blogging.
At the moment, things are complicated. This week there are visitors, a graduation, and oh yes, I’m moving to a foreign country in five days. That being the case, the blog will most likely fall silent for a bit, only to be reborn in Central America, where I will regale you with tales of exotic fruit, passionate people, and cultural foibles, all while beating some sort of drum and chanting out the lyrics of Manu Chao’s complete body of work.
Or maybe I’ll just drink rum and abuse Christopher Hitchens from a safe distance. Stay tuned to find out.
All day the traps remained untouched. I sat at my desk, working, and a few times I saw a scurrying movement. But there was no tell-tale snap. I worried that maybe the rat didn’t like peanut butter. It was, after all, a New York City rat, so perhaps I should bait the traps with falafel, or fried chicken, or something vegan.
Ona suggested I feed him what the rats in the subway eat. Used batteries? Dirty needles? Hobos? Clearly, I needed some advice.
That night we were out to eat with some friends, among them a New York City native named Max. I asked Max the rat bait question, and he thought for a moment.
“Rotting meat?”
I quizzed him a little more until he leaned forward. “If you really want to fuck up that rat,” he said, “get some copper wool. Then crawl around the baseboard of the apartment and plug every little hole with it, every crevice. You gotta get everything. Then when they try and chew their way into your apartment, pieces of copper break off, they swallow them, the copper fucks up their insides and they bleed to death.”
The downside was that the rat would probably die in the walls and smell for a few days, but whatever, I pointed out that dead bodies dry up sooner or later. We ordered some more drinks.
It wasn’t until the next morning that I took a bleary-eyed look at the traps and found that the peanut butter was gone. Completely gone. The triggers were licked clean, and the traps remained unsprung.
So he did like peanut butter. Maybe it was time to see how he liked copper wool.
Mayhew: Ain’t writing peace?
Barton: Well, actually no, Bill. No, I’ve always found that writing comes from a great inner pain. Maybe it’s a pain that comes from the realization that one must do something for one’s fellow common man to help somehow ease their suffering. Maybe it’s personal pain. At any rate, I don’t believe good work is possible without it.
Mayhew: Hm. Well, I just enjoy making things up.
(And at the risk of ruining a perfectly good quote, I would add that every writer needs to watch Barton Fink. It’s a parable about the life of the mind.)
(Previously: Epilogue)
The rat was sitting there on our pile of dirty dishes, hunched over, nibbling leftover tidbits of fish and rice. Cheeky wouldn’t be the word, because I don’t think the rat was particularly trying to insult me. He was just eating.
“Fucking…”
I picked up a clubbed object and walked over to the sink, not trying to be sneaky. He knew I was there, I just wanted to see what his plan was. The rat didn’t move much, but he did slip behind a tea cup - not like he was running away, but just to make sure I didn’t have a good shot. Then he kind of climbed under the dish rack, hopped onto the stove, and disappeared into one of the burners.
One by one, I clicked on the burners. He really was good. And possibly cheeky. I saw a flash of grey as he slipped down an electrical cord and behind the refrigerator.
Rat: 1. Me: 0.
I walked out of the kitchen, stroking my chin. I have this idea that catching a rat is a thinkin’ man’s job. He knows I’m here, and I know he’s there, and the important thing is, who holds what cards? I thought about it, then started poking around.
I found two of his cards right away. The hole next to the radiator pipe is one of his ways in and out. Meanwhile, in a corner behind our couch is another hole, chewed in the carpet. In a pinch, I could block the holes, thereby cutting off his escape, then flail around the apartment in a rage until I found and crushed his little body.
That would be one way to do it. My gaze fell on the traps I had dropped on a chair. Perhaps better to start there. When I was a kid, my dad always baited mouse traps with peanut butter, both because it had a strong smell and because the mouse couldn’t pick it up and run off – it had to lick it off, nuzzling the trap little by little by little until WHAP!
I baited the two mouse traps with peanut butter and placed one by the radiator pipe in the bathroom and one behind the refrigerator. I went a more traditional route with the rat trap, baiting it with cheddar, then placed it (safely) behind the couch.
Then we waited.
We were watching a movie when the trap behind the refrigerator went off. I dashed over to take a peek. Could it be this easy? No, it couldn’t. The trap was sprung, but the peanut butter was still there, and there was no little furry body. The rat must have brushed it when he walked by.
So I learned a little more about his route. But the rat learned that I was setting traps.
1. Salon.com - “You can’t stop the outsourcing tidal wave with a fork”
Money quote: The government could slow things down by granting subsidies to American firms to help compete with overseas companies. It could provide them incentives to buy locally. But, in the end, it can’t stop the flow of work and money from traveling around the world.
Clarinda [a typesetting company] was founded in Iowa when it served publishers in New York and Chicago because the technology of the day — trains and trucks, telephones and fax machines — allowed Midwestern states to be the outsourcing outposts of their day. At the time, the big cities were mourning the loss of their “printers’ rows.” Much of the desolation that was SoHo in New York was caused by manufacturing leaving the city for the hinterlands. Only decades later did it rediscover itself as a mecca of art and fashion — a rebirth that came on the back of the economic growth of the entire country.
2. Radar magazine: “Adam’s Apple: Adam Moss is America’s most celebrated editor. So why is New York magazine such a bore?”
Money quote: I noticed a curious thing about the “Sex and Love” issue that helps explain much of what ails New York: The central characters—not just the writers, but the people being written about—were all people likely to run into one another at a book party. The sex diaries featured both a publishing assistant and a magazine editor. Katie Roiphe, a New York City writer, wrote about her own life. Ariel Levy, a celebrated New York writer—and occasional Radar contributor—wrote about her wedding. Caroline Leavitt, a New Jersey (close enough) writer, wrote about the break-up of her marriage. These are people who are ostensibly supposed to take journalism’s reflective surfaces and turn them outward to the world. But Moss asked his writers to turn them inward.
There is a rat living in our apartment. Technically, you could say we discovered it last Friday, when Ona came out of the bathroom with a look of perturbation on her face. “What is it?” I asked. “I saw a thing,” she told me.
“What kind of a thing?”
“It was like a thing,” she said, gesturing. “Like this, and black. It moved like swhhhhhup!”
A little bit later, while brushing my teeth, I saw the thing too, and it was a thing, and it was long and black, and it rushed down a hole by the radiator pipe. It wasn’t clear what we were dealing with, but I left anyway on a weekend trip I had planned. When I returned on Sunday, Ona told me she had heard something rattling around in the kitchen at night.
So Friday was technically the first time we saw the rat. And there were a few more sightings of the thing on Monday, flickers of movement out of the corner of the eye. Tuesday, however, we confirmed both the identity and the presence of the thing when I saw it make a lengthy dash and duck into a hole behind our love seat.
It was small. Dark grey. Pink tail. Slinky rather than zippy. We had a rat.
When it comes to rats and mice, I’m somewhat ambivalent. Having grown up with all manner of rodents - from gerbils to hamsters to guinea pigs to chinchillas to, well, rats – they don’t really bother me, and are much preferred over, say, tropical centipedes.
If left to myself I’d probably try to domesticate the damn thing. It would be like White Fang, a touching process of building trust with cheese and love, until one day the rat would save me from a house fire, or marauding claim-jumpers. I explained my plan to Ona, and for the briefest instant I saw in her eyes the spark of divorce. So it was off to the hardware store to buy traps.
Now, I’ve heard rats are very smart. Why else would scientists keep them around? Once, a particular rat hunted by New Zealand scientists evaded traps, dogs, and poison, then swam through 400 meters of open water to reach a different island. (One hopes they gave him a nice retirement package.)
I knew, then, that I was potentially up against a difficult adversary. Still, I wanted to start basic: three Victory traps, one of the rat variety, and two of the mouse (it is a small rat). At home, I dropped the traps on a chair and forgot about them, started tapping away on the blog or other such nonsense. Then I heard a noise in the kitchen. I looked over.
And there it was.
Today’s elaborately staged announcement that the FBI thwarted Terrorists intent on killing and maiming US servicemen at Fort Dix should send a chill into hearts of all red-blooded Americans.
Or maybe it shouldn’t.
Because looking at what these guys had planned, I feel pretty goddamn safe. First of all, they were going to attack a military base. Bright. We don’t have all the details, but apparently their plan was “to purchase rocket-propelled grenade launchers then use them to fire at Humvees at Fort Dix and ‘light the whole place up,’ Chris Christie, the United States attorney in New Jersey, said today.”
Great idea fellas. I mean, rocket-propelled grenades, you can just pick those up at a hardware store, right?
One of the suspects, a Mr. Mohamad Ibriham Shnewer, was reported to have told a witness “that they could kill ‘at least 100 soldiers’ using rocket-propelled grenades and other weapons, and that the witness was urged to help lead the attack because he had prior experience in the Egyptian military.”
Oh, come on dude, don’t hold back. Tell us how many you can really kill. Wait, never mind, Shnewer had a plan: “They would use a map procured by Mr. Tatar, who used to deliver pizza there, the affidavit said, and the attack would begin with a strike that would cause a power outage.”
Sounds professional. And it was, because they not only watched training videos on the interweb, they “collected weapons including handguns, shotguns and semi-automatic assault weapons, and trained on firearms in the Poconos region of Pennsylvania.”
I’ve trained on those very same firearms in a corn field in Illinois, several times. Such “training” generally involves shooting things. Of course, I didn’t have any connections to international terrorist groups.
Of course, these guys didn’t either, so they couldn’t actually be trapped in the web of illegal wiretaps the Bush administration has set up. Instead, the dastardly scheme was tripped up when these cunning Terrorists took a video tape to a video store to have it dubbed onto DVD, a tape which contained images “that the F.B.I described as firing assault weapons in a ‘militia-like style while calling for jihad and shouting Allah Akbar (God is Great).’”
The video store clerk called the Feds.
All that to say, I’m very happy they caught these losers. But the “Clash of Civilizations” has turned out to be kind of a disappointment.
There’s an almost good story in the New York Times about an Iraqi sheik who’s had his house commandeered by the Americans. I say “almost” because among the heart-rending pathos of the sheik’s visit to his old mansion - the wistful remembrances, the garden smashed by Humvees, his “sandals scraping against the tiles he had laid” - one question is never raised: How in the world did this sheik get rich enough to own such a beautiful house?
In a simple policy discussion, that would be irrelevant, but this isn’t policy, this is pathos. Should I really feel sorry for a Sunni sheik who’s lost a mansion that was in all likelihood the fruit of his loyalty to a brutal fascist dictator?
Of course the sheik mourns Iraq’s good ol’ days. He wasn’t the one getting gassed.
I really, honestly, think my head just exploded. Last night at the New York Public Library, there was a debate between Christopher Hitchens and Al Sharpton over the question of the existence of God. The event was moderated by the Dean of Harvard Divinity School Slate.com’s editor, Jacob Weisberg.
Now, take a minute to go clean up the shit in your pants from laughter and/or outrage, and then we’ll unpack this event. Ready? Good.
There’s a blow-by-blow account of the interaction over on the New York Times, so I won’t rehash the whole thing. Just, you know, be careful if you read it, because you’re bound to shit your pants at least once or twice more. Probably the juiciest zinger came from Sharpton:
“At the end what is refreshing is that you are a man of faith,” Mr. Sharpton told Mr. Hitchens, to much laughter, “because any man that at this point has faith that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has more faith than any religious person I know.”
Ouch. After the opening jibes, it more or less devolved into the following exchange:
Hitchens: God is an asshole.
Sharpton: That’s not an existential argument.
Hitchens: Religion does horrible things!
Sharpton: That’s still not an existential argument.
It’s funny that even though Hitchens wrote a fucking book on the topic, Sharpton more or less cleaned his clock, proving once again that you should never trust an avowed Trotskyist and former Nation columnist to make logical arguments. I do find it hard to swallow, however, that Al Sharpton was the most articulate God-believer to be found in all of New York City.
But anyway, all of that is beside the point. The real purpose of this event was to make a scene by inviting two ridiculous culture-war blowhards under the same roof, and then having the thing moderated by the ultimate scene creator/contrarian, the editor of Slate.com.
New York Public Library? Or Fox News? I report, you decide. But I really think that, even at the highest levels, our culture is screwed.