chickpeas just as nice as rice, mice say

i've had it up to my tits with the mouse/mice/meece in the new pad. we shared a peaceful co-existence long after brutha spied the mouse peeking out from a rollerblade. the mouse droppings hit the fan when doogie* (the recently-xned mouse) scurried past blake's bare foot. i received a frantic call at work letting me know that the mouse wasn't such desirable pet material any longer, that we had to get rid of him-- screw humane traps. after carefully reading all the mouse traps, i bought a pack of live mouse traps, even tho i had no idea what we'd do with doogie once caught. we've gotten lots of helpful suggestions-- from my farmer uncle-- to catch him in a glass jar, for he couldn't climb it and we'd have 'im good. for release, there're duelling opinons-- some say he wouldn't last more than 20 minutes in the frigid out of doors, while others say he'd find a warm place pretty damn quickly and be okay. just think-- all the mice in the city right now are probably inside. how fucked is that? i picture them scuttling around warehouses, restaurants, garages and homes constructing nests with our lint and hair, scrambling after our crumbs in our cupboards and on our floors and chewing holes in bags of grains. where would we release doogie that would give him a fighting chance? we've considered dropping him followed by a bag of rice down the barrel of the army tank "hellfire" behind the fence at the neighbouring armoury. letting him go in the bengal lancers horse barn. sneaking him into a friend's house who has a cat and calling it "nature." i'm almost fresh out of reasonable ideas. but lately, doogie's been leaving me on edge. i think about the tiny brown motherfucker pretty frequently, and it interrupts my digestion. i realize he's just doing what mice do-- chewing their way through walls, finding soft scraps to make nests out of, eating other people's food with as much wreckless abandon as if it were theirs, fucking and making rodent progeny, and defecating on virtually every surface of everything in your house. but it's beginning to piss me off. signs accumulate. i'm running out of containers to store my food in. i didn't know mice liked chickpeas. last night, as i was chilling and listening to type o negative while letting my gut settle after a delicious feast of lentil, kale and mushroom stew, i rose for a glass of water and heard the familiar sound of tiny rodent teeth and claws. i summoned nathan, and we tried to decide if we'd formulate a plan to catch him, then got too exciited/nervous and hauled open the cupboard door. altho i'm too small to see in the cupboard, nathan reported that the mouse quickly darted to the back of the cupboard. then, in a flurry of self-destructive anti-instinct terror, doogie flew out of the cupboard which caused nathan to jump back just in time for both of us to see doogie land avec a thud on the hood of the fan, bounce off onto the edge of the stove then scramble/fall into the space between the edge of the stove and the wall. at this point, we were keeling over with laughter and surprise. we thought we totally could have had him, had we been prepared, but realized we probably couldn't've prepared ourselves for the 800-speed hilarity. doogie was still on the loose, but probably so fucking spooked (do mice get spooked?) that he wouldn't come out again tonight. spooked and fucking satiated. on closer inspection of the corner of the bean cupbpard, we saw that doogie'd been gnawing on a bag of organic chickpeas and shitting enough to rival the mouse equivalent of the halifax harbour. mother...fucker. i saved the mess to show my brother as a grotesque trophy prize. tonight entail much cleaning, more trap-loading, and steel-wool plugging of as many mouse-possible holes and cracks as we can find. can you believe that mice can fit thru holes the diameter of a dime? that's so absurd. so i ask the downstairs neighbours if they'd ever had mice, and they said that yeah, they have, they do and they're living and breeding in the walls. they seem theym scurrying around the kitchen periodically. one works (the neighbour, not the mouse) at a bakery, and says that on a full moon, the mice will eat garbage bags even tho there's lots of bread around. hooray for batty mice on full moons. hooray for ethics that keep me from using normal victor traps with personally-sharpened edges or leaving them warfarin milkshakes at every corner. hooray for the mutually assured destruction tactics that have just been initiated by the other party. i won't be watching when blake sets a snap trap under the sink.

*after a round of 90s trivia this morning, we began calling our mouse doogie, after the breed of super-smart mice genetically bred in the late 90s.