Woody Allen, “Selections from the Allen Notebooks”:

Getting through the night is becoming harder and harder. Last evening, I had the uneasy feeling that some men were trying to break into my room to shampoo me.

Have I mentioned before that our apartment is upstairs from a hair/beauty salon and spa? It’s nice to be able to just go downstairs for a haircut. As this salon occupies the building’s whole first floor, it turns out that the scurrying co-workers we’ve been seeing up here on floor two have of course been making appearances down there as well, perhaps in greater number, or so we hear.

This news conjures up an array of comical if harrowing theoretical scenes — say, ongoing operas of hairdressers and masseuses and mid-perm grandmas and chic yuppiettes in waxus interruptus shrieking atop chairs, as adrenalized rodents loopy on aromatherapy vapors blinkeringly attempt to negotiate floors heaped with hair clippings, all while dodging airborne scissors, combs, hot stones, cappuccinos, etc.

We learn that the salon owner has dragooned the property-management clowns into calling in a pest control technician* to address the problem on a building-wide scale. And indeed the mice’s appearances and noises seem to be dwindling. Sunday is our first mouse-free day in weeks. Neither hide nor hair today either. Tentative huzzah.

Whether this drop-off is due to the pest control service’s ominously unspecified treatment, or our own charmingly futile deployments of poison and peppermint oil, or my project last Wednesday night of spending hours sealing up the cavernous mouse holes behind our fridge with barricades of steel wool and great cocoons of duct tape, or simply the waning of winter — it is not for us to know. Anyway, with luck I can stop harping on the topic of mice for now, and can instead gear up for bat season.

* I only find out a couple of years ago, from Robert Sullivan’s Rats book, that nowadays the term exterminator is often avoided in the profession, given that the word is felt to promise the impossible.

Marcus Aurelius: Death: a release from impressions of sense, from twitchings of appetite, from excursions of thought, and from service to the flesh.

Twain: It is a solemn thought: Dead, the noblest man’s meat is inferior to pork.

Yesterday: our monthly sojourn across the border for a few hours in America. Laura buys clothes. I buy whiskey, herbal remedies, and grits. (Her: an eggplant-purple party dress and some Army-surplus PJs. Me: snooty spirits both Kentuckian and Tennessean, a few bottles of Saint John’s Wort, and a carton of twenty-minute Quaker grits. Refills all!)

We dine as per usual at Rotund Robert’s. I depart from the usual Southern-style Memphis Pulled Pork sandwich and instead try the entrée version, the non-sandwich pig meat dish. Somewhat unsavorily called Pulled Pork Butt. Verdict: I miss the bun.

Vonnegut, Bluebeard: “My soul knows my meat is doing bad things, and is embarrassed. But my meat just keeps right on doing bad, dumb things.”

Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows:

‘What’s up, Ratty?’ asked the Mole.

‘Snow is up,’ replied the Rat briefly; ‘or rather, down. It’s snowing hard.’

The Mole came and crouched beside him, and, looking out, saw the wood that had been so dreadful to him in quite a changed aspect. Holes, hollows, pools, pitfalls, and other black menaces to the wayfarer were vanishing fast, and a gleaming carpet of faery was springing up everywhere, that looked too delicate to be trodden upon by rough feet. A fine powder filled the air and caressed the cheek with a tingle in its touch, and the black boles of the trees showed up in a light that seemed to come from below.

A strange, somber, end-of-March nighttime snowfall happening outside. The weather people say two inches’ worth will fall while we sleep, though so far it’s mostly melting as it hits earth. Dusting parked cars and lawns and making the wet streets wetter. Virginia Woolf, The Waves, Neville speaking: “Each day is dangerous. Smooth on the surface, we are all bone beneath like snakes coiling.” He continues:

Suppose it is winter. The snow falling loads down the roof and seals us together in a red cave. The pipes have burst. We stand a yellow tin bath in the middle of the room. We rush helter-skelter for basins. Look there — it has burst again over the bookcase. We shout with laughter at the sight of ruin. Let solidity be destroyed. Let us have no possessions. Or is it summer? We may wander to a lake and watch Chinese geese waddling flat-footed to the water’s edge, or see a bone — like a city church with young green trembling before it. (I choose at random; I choose the obvious.) Each sight is an arabesque scrawled suddenly to illustrate some hazard and marvel of intimacy. The snow, the burst pipe, the tin bath, the Chinese goose — these are signs swung high aloft upon which, looking back, I read the character of each love; how each was different.

I survive my first encounter with Canadian dentistry. My twenty-eight teeth get their much-needed cleaning and are now stunned into a satisfying ache. Zero cavities or other problems, miraculously, considering I’ve somehow forgotten to visit a dentist in five years, possibly six. (Disgusting, I know. My half-decade since 2003 has been … distracted.) Only twenty-eight, as my wisdoms got yanked out years ago. From Emily Dickinson’s “This World is not Conclusion”, a slightly creepy bit of dental poetry:

Much Gesture, from the Pulpit —
Strong Hallelujahs roll —
Narcotics cannot still the Tooth
That nibbles at the soul —

Ishmael, aboard the Pequod: I looked round me tranquilly and contentedly, like a quiet ghost with a clean conscience sitting inside the bars of a snug family vault.

The internet teaches me an apparently widely-recommended co-worker deterrent: strategically-placed cottonballs moistened with a drop or two of 100% pure essential oil of peppermint. Mentha x piperita L. Strong, strong stuff. Supposed to nuke the rodents’ noses, send them packing posthaste. Peppermint is of course a natural remedy of antiquity, with many uses. Ancient Romans anointed their swords with it, to make their self-stabbings feel extra fresh. Ancient Greeks: for catamite aromatherapy. Ancient Egyptians: for making skunky mummies smell sensational. As it happens, we have a 30-mL vial of this essential oil already in the house (for housecleaning purposes), so I give it a whirl. Kaboom! Our abode is SUDDENLY MINTY.

The late Sir Arthur, last lines of 2001:

A thousand miles below, he became aware that a slumbering cargo of death had awoken, and was stirring sluggishly in its orbit. The feeble energies it contained were no possible menace to him; but he preferred a cleaner sky. He put forth his will, and the circling megatons flowered in a silent detonation that brought a brief, false dawn to half the sleeping globe.

Then he waited, marshaling his thoughts and brooding over his still untested powers. For though he was master of the world, he was not quite sure what to do next.

But he would think of something.

Satirical rogue #1: Jane Austen, S&S:

Though nothing could be more polite than Lady Middleton’s behaviour to Elinor and Marianne, she did not really like them at all … and because they were fond of reading, she fancied them satirical: perhaps without exactly knowing what it was to be satirical; but that did not signify. It was censure in common use, and easily given.

Satirical rogue #2: Michael Flanders, introducing his and Donald Swann’s musical revue At the Drop of Another Hat:

Wandering around, things have come to a pretty underpass here in England while we’ve been away. It’s small wonder to us that satire squats hoof-in-mouth under every bush. — The purpose of satire, it has been rightly said, is to strip off the veneer of comforting illusion and cozy half-truth. And our job, as I see it, is to put it back again.

More fucking insomnia. Unable to sleep, reading Sense and Sensibility at four in the morning to pass the time. Was already halfway through it. In this instance I confess that I hope the book will put me to sleep. It doesn’t. Classics!

Mitch Hedberg:

I hate dreaming. Because when you want to sleep, you want to sleep. Dreaming is work. You know, like there I am laying on my comfortable bed in my hotel room. It’s beautiful. Next thing you know, I have to build a go-cart with my ex-landlord.

James Richardson: As hard as other people are to talk to, I’m glad I don’t have to sit next to myself.

La Rochefoucauld: At times we are as different from ourselves as we are from others.

Mark Strand: When I am with you, I am two places at once.

Lichtenberg: Whenever he spoke every mousetrap in the neighborhood snapped shut.

Last weekend’s magnificent snow-a-thon drives more mice into our place, or else emboldens the ones already on the premises. Nothing too out-of-hand (no Why does the floor move? situations), but the tiny beasts’ cameo appearances are getting a little old, especially after the past few weeks of relative rodential quiet. A few chase scenes ensue early this week. We buy more snap-traps. We attempt to seal up entry points. We of course clean. We buy a couple of of those silly ultrasonic-pitched rodent-repellers, on whose effectiveness the jury remains out. And we finally take off the kid gloves and buy poison. (If Laura and I weren’t both allergic to cats, we would obviously have a much simpler solution.) We start jovially referring to the mice as co-workers, since during the day, while I’m working at home, they are the only other warm-blooded life forms I have around. Plus it lets us say things like: I stopped by Home Depot and picked up some co-worker poison. And: Kill any co-workers today?