Cleaning out my car

I have another morbid story about an animal. This happened last summer, right before I left Huntsville for the Take Control 2009 Tour with Casey and eventually Bubblegum Octopus. Before I left my apartment and felt the freedom of unattached, constant movement, the universe had one more example of my wretched insignificance to show me.

My car had gotten abhorrently messy. I was cleaning it out - careful to dodge staples and thumb tacks that had lodged themselves into the moldy carpeting and impacted wads of food bags. After clearing swath after swath of hellishly mildewed socks, promotional cd cases and old out-of-state speeding tickets, I turned my attention to the glove box. I popped it open. The owner's manual for my truck fell out onto the floorboard. It landed on the hairy grey interior lining, which had long since been denuded of its rubber mat. I started pulling everything out and onto the ground.

I noticed something falling from the glove box's neighbor. The air conditioning unit had coughed up some mysterious payload. Between the foot-resevoirs of the two front seats, there is a raised area where the stick shift pops out. A small object plopped onto this median. I turned my attention towards it. Before me was a tiny, thinly-furred, barely mobile, infant mouse. I nearly jumped back in horror. I wasn't even sure if its eyes were open - though it looked like it was out of the pink, near-fetal state that tiny mammals are born into. He was kind of wallowing on the gray median. It didn't even look like he could crawl forward. His pitiful face, tiny, plaintive paws and needle-thin tail caused a nearly-painful surge of melancholy. Another adorable animal, who for nothing other than blind chance, would probably die horribly. I grabbed my hand into the air conditioning unit, casting concern aside in the hopes that his family would also fall out. There was nothing. The little guy was all alone in the world. I decided I could not take him on tour with me. I had seen attempts to nurture way-too-young baby animals invariably end in death - The baby bird my mom had given a bath, accidentally freezing him to death even as she continuously layered him against the non-stop shivering - A lizard dying during childbirth, my father patiently on-hand to receive each stillborn creature - The other bird, starving to death as we failed to give it proper nutrients. It sucked too much for every party involved, and I didn't want to put an animal in a situation like that. I couldn't leave it on the street, either. A tiny mouse with barely any locomotive ability would be condemned to starvation, being eaten alive by ants or picked up by any bird - if it was lucky it would be dead when being eaten.

No, the best thing for me to do was to kill it then and there. That was what my ass-brained mind - panicked from this discovery and from the need to evacuate my apartment in mere hours - came up with. I was near a dumpster, in a little brick alcove that a derelict could have easily converted into a home. I found a styrofoam bowl and put the mouse inside. There was a spare cinder block by the dumpster - I hoisted it upward, preparing to crush the mouse in one painless instant. As I watched it squirm pathetically, and finally stumble a couple inches, I realized that I would never be able to crush a baby mouse to death with a huge brick. If staying alive was a worse fate, then I didn't have the pragmatic, worldly strength to deliver ultimate and deadly kindness. A friend of mine once recounted how he had found a salamander trapped in a mousetrap in his garage. It was dying, and he actually went through with his honorable and hellish duty - choking with tears as he literally brought the hammer down. That might have been a little more clear cut than a seemingly viable mouse with no family, but I felt the same terror.

I guess for every insanely colored sunset or incomprehensibly-tall mountain range there is an abandoned baby mouse or gazelle being torn apart. The natural world, and by that I mean every aspect of life, not just trees and shit, is like a haunted house. Except instead of rubber masks extended off of poles from closets, there are things that really can scare you. You know something is
going to pop out, but it's hard to be totally prepared and steeled to the infinite possibilities.

I took my car to the body shop down the street and had them blow out the air conditioning unit and all the other panels. There was nothing - not even nest fragments. The little guy was an orphaned survivor. The next day, he was gone from the spot I had left him. Whether it was living and scrapping on its own, or more likely, was picked off by a bird, I was glad at least it was not being treated like alive carrion by a swarm of some kind. But I can still see him there in that bowl of my misconceived aid - I probably always will - squirming hopelessly amidst a sea of terrors. He was like me, and I should have taken him in.