Blame it on my wild heart

There is a mouse in the apartment. It seems to be lying in wait, listening nightly for the last click of the cathode to occur, until it can safely crawl from whatever recesses it is hiding in, to eat crumbs off of the floor and revel in its nighttime dwelling. I imagine this tiny creature hiding out behind the counter, biding its time as the Comedy Central channel segues into another program, impatiently checking out the clock until two minutes of silence occurs, beckoning it to come out from its hiding place, and eat microcosmic food particles that have fallen onto the floor.

We have purchased a "humane” mousetrap from the hardware store, which looks like some kind of absurd plastic coffin, and which the mouse has deftly avoided thus far, despite the veritable gourmet of care packages we have left inside for it to eat. I picture him rolling up, driven by pure olfactory intrigue alone, before taking one look at the trap and heading for the hills. "No way am I stepping foot in that thing," he thinks to himself, as he checks out the more assessable crumbs scattered all over the floor. And who would blame him? So transparent is the coffin-so insidious of a device-that we may well write MOUSE TRAP on the side in red Sharpie and sign the mouse up for literacy classes. Which it clearly may not need.

Fruitlessly checking the trap has become one in a succession on a calculated list of things to slog through on a daily basis, the reordering of which might just send me into a Rain Man-variety fit. I need these things, a continuum of events which offer the placebo-effect of order and OK-ness, so I don't freak out about my life and jump off a bridge. (Which begs the question, what would occur if one of these things were accomplished successfully? What would I do if I actually did catch the mouse? And where would I relocate it, to carry out its future days of meandering?).

In addition to totally failing at catching the mouse, I cannot seem to find a job in any tangible way, although many favorable reviews of my persona have been given. "You really do just seem to have a nice way about you," I have recently been told in a job interview. "Yeah," another interviewee chimed in, "You do seem to carry yourself well." I chortled, not knowing what to say in return, shrugging my shoulders in the aw-shucks mannerism of a southerner, which I am totally wont to capturing after so much practice.

Sadly, all of these spurious character affections are belied by my actual resume, which is so paltry a document, marked with such vast chasms in employment history and useless skills listed--that all of the great posture in the world could not compensate for, and in the end adds up to more of the same, scuttling around the apartment, like a mouse.

_________________________________________________________________________

2.

It had seemed like a horrible idea, but I had to retrieve the stray mail which kept arriving to her apartment, and so I walked to El Smelldog’s on her day off from work last week. She had compiled the envelopes with my name on them, and put them into a plastic bag which had at one time contained the detritus of items from a shopping trip to Walmart.

Smeller met me at the door and handed me the mail, which she had tied up into an absurd little bow at the top of the bag and presented to me like a gift. “Thank you,” I said to her. “I know it’s a drag.” Which could have been a vague generalization about the chore of collecting my mail or any number of things. It had seemed like the kind of thing I might write on a T-shirt with a Sharpie, attempting futile connection with my fellow humans or alienate myself for all time. “I know, it’s a drag.” –Ryan Kemp

Smelldog and I had had a falling out sometime last fall, and since then an icy chasm of limited communication had occurred between us. It was probably the natural result of inhabiting a small space with me for any extended period of time-the natural disaster equivalent of being my roommate, tectonic plates of the interaction colliding until so much damage had occurred.

I still was not sure what Smeller was so upset about, but in retrospect it could have been any number of things: the night she emerged from jail and came home to find me naked in the living room, wielding a 40oz bottle of beer, with something tantamount to a party going on upstairs; the bitter and unspoken resentment directed toward me for having taken the “better” room. Or any number of things at all. But despite these things, she invited me in, to catch up.

On first glance the apartment seemed different, slightly skewed from my perspective, like familiar environments tend to look after not seeing them for an extended period of time . There were new curtains and furniture. A picture hung on the wall which looked like it may have been purchased at the yard sale of a now defunct funeral home- a painting of still life flowers, which ominously hung over a purple velvet couch that looked like it may have belonged to the Jimi Hendrix Collection of household furnishings.

In addition to the newish-seeming surroundings, there was an accompanying new roommate, who greeted me cordially, as he made his way to and from, shaking my hand in between cleaning all available surfaces with a cloth, the new roommie, Version 2.0.

Smeller and I talked between marveling at the manual dexterity of her new roommate, who had clearly been recruited from an online website specializing in robotic housemates. Occasionally, as if to verify that he was not a robotic cleaning machine purchased online, he would interject, inserting tidbits of unessential information into the conversation which made me wish he had stuck to the task at hand.

The new roommate made me look bad, contextually. He was a fully functioning citizen, who had a job, and cooked and cleaned. For all I knew, he may have conducted Sunday prayer sessions with the local youth group on weekends. Which contrasted horribly with my presence as a housemate, prone to disappearing for days on end, only showing up long enough to eat Smeller's groceries before disappearing again.

I bid adieu to the new guy, and Smeller walked me to the door. There was an awkward pause where I tried to figure out what sort of punctuation mark should denote this encounter. In the end, I opted for a hand wave, feeling particularly squeamish about hugs, and sauntered off in the direction of the exit, dangling the plastic Walmart bag between my fingers.

Things had seemed OK for The Smell. And that was something, at least.

3.

My car has recently been stolen. Among the many automobiles which may at any given moment be situated in my neighborhood, it seems remarkable to me that my rather modest machine would have been the one chosen. But compliments of the exquisite thief, he decided to take my car, with the help of a fifteen year-old accomplice.

The event occurred as I was entertaining a night of fruitful debauchery, elsewhere. And so it occurred to me with great hilarity when I received the call from the Albany police detective that night.

“Ryan Kemp?” the detective conjectured out loud in the phone, “This is the Albany police Department.”

There seemed to be a hint of satisfaction in the police detective’s voice at having caught the thieves, and I thanked him for a job well done, before hanging up the phone and thinking it was all very funny. “My car got stolen,” I said mirthfully to Sare, like the more jovial equivalent of Nicolas Cage's character in the movie "Adaptation." “Isn’t that fucked up?”

Now, months later, with sobriety setting in and the broken window repaired, things seem less funny than they may have felt that night, and unfortunate for everyone involved. The theft was carried out by two fifteen year-olds, whose joy ride in my car lasted approximately twenty-five minutes before they were caught driving with a broken window, shards of jagged glass sticking out every which way, as they weaved in haphazard patterns around the neighborhood.

More compassion I would have had for the thieves if stealing my car was part of some pact, where they were caught en route to the nearest outbound highway, headed for some undetermined destiny which my car could never transport them to. But, in the end, I just could not get behind this very pointless act of cruising aimlessly around their downtrodden neighborhood, and listening to the local FLY 92. (Although hints of their well prepared statements of the prevailing Zeitgeist were taken in the form of my broken CD collection scattered all over the car).

A letter has recently arrived in the mail, on which appears the scrawled and illegible scratch of a now incarcerated fifteen year-old named James. “To Whom It May Concern,” it reads. “I apologize for what happened that night. I wasn’t thinking. But can you accept my apology and (what) I learned from the bad choice I made that night?”

“I promise to continue to improve on the negative to create the positive things happening in my life,” it continues. “My hope is if ever we do meet, you will see the better person I have become. I send my deepest apology.”

He signed his name at the bottom, followed by his last name, which was blotted out by the coarse smudge of a dried White-Out pen--so as not to be identified, and have the ass beat out of this fifteen year-old with the embittered rage of retribution.

But, OK, James: You have fucked up, at such a young age, making my own transgressions at the age of fifteen seem infinitesimally small by comparison. And you have fucked me particularly, because my insurance company did not want to pay for the damages incurred. Additionally, you will probably have to partake in some really lame community service-oriented events like picking up scraps on the side of the highway every weekend for the remainder of your youthful existence. If it was up to me, the punishment would have come in the form of constructing a manual of more creative acts of subversion. Or the mandatory penalty of formulating more of an outbound route.

But things happen, James. I get it, bro. I accept your apology, as illegible as it may be.

_____________________________________________________________

4.

Spring has arrived, the common themes of hope and jubilation magically manifesting in the minds of the general populace, dotted by the occasional good weather pattern, illustrated by Tim Drawbridge on the local news. Except for today, which has shown by with cold rain on the day I am scheduled to walk to the hospital and give blood.

I hustle through the bad weather and then look at this same imagery reflected back at me on the LCD screen in the doctor’s office waiting room, the zoomed out shot of my city on the area weather segment, which is all looming fog and grey doom amongst the office buildings. Albs, New York: the apocalypse is upon us.

Distracting me from the looming apocalypse is the nurse, who comes into the waiting area and calls my name to the room of waiters, who are looking at copies of Good Housekeeping Magazine and Modern Men's Manual with the home address of some doctor torn off of their covers. “How’s it going?” she asks, as she proceeds down a hallway with a clipboard that contains information about me. “OK,” I tell her, shaking the rain from my still totally soaked rain jacket.

She leads me into the designated blood-giving area, and instructs me to sit down in what is the oversized medical equivalent of a La-Z-Boy recliner which you might put in your living room if this piece of furniture were not covered in an opaque vinyl material. “Cool chair,” I say to her, slapping the arm-rest for effect. “Yeah,” she says, “The older patients don’t like it, though, because it’s hard for them to get up out of.” And I can see that.

She takes my blood, and then double takes the outfit that I am wearing today, which happens to occupy every spectrum of blue on the color wheel. Which might reflect a total lack of caring on my part or a very calculated leaning toward conceptualizing myself as a smurf-like cartoon character, which makes things easier and less Intense in some roundabout way.

“Blue is your color,” she says to me. Which, when you objectively examine the facts, seems irrefutably true.

_________________________________________________________________________

5.

So many weeks later, the resident mouse has eluded the plastic coffin, no matter what variety of treats we may be sticking in there. (Which have been along the lines of the cliché offerings of gourmet cheese. Which begs the very logical question, is this an alternative lifestyle-living mouse, and does it not consume dairy?).

I had even considered constructing a DIY-variety trap after consulting various manuals online. Some of which range from the insanely elaborate to the less foolproof offerings, with hand drawn diagrams shown. Although, in the end, none of these things seemed particularly plausible to me. No; I imagined that one day the gray coffin would have to do the trick.

A couple of calls on the job front. It probably won't be long, now.