January 5, 2023 - Redbug, AL
I wasn’t planning to eat the little vermin, though it still triggers the hunter-gatherer in me to be outsmarted by my prey. Their little dark blue turds inside the trap leaves me fuming for a moment only to become introspective, acknowledging the strange, primordial rage of the failed hunter buried in my genome. The mouse hadn’t “outsmarted” me. He was utterly stupid. But how had he known it was a trap?
Since the age of 13, I’ve been a homeless vagabond wanderer, seemingly stuck between 33 and 36 latitude. I tried planting roots repeatedly, moving back and forth across the U.S., but some strange synchronistic sequence of sadistic serendipities always forced its way into my life with a shovel to dig me up and toss me somewhere else.
Redbug is the closest thing I’ve known to home, my childhood friend’s cabin, my sanctuary of the southeast built in the 1970’s next to a spring-fed pond on 80 acres of wilderness near the Alabama-Georgia line. It’s where I’ve always lived when there’s nowhere else to live.
There’s a sacred ecosystem at Redbug. During summer months, the distant sound of coyote’s howl signals the frogs and crickets to perform their nightly symphony around the pond, little brown scorpions roam the cabin, and a pair of monogamous Canada Geese fly in each year whom I trained to eat bread out of my hand. I leave food scraps out for the armadillo and opossum my possum I named Whitman. I befriended a blue heron this spring, though she’s very skittish and only comes around to fish. Turtles are hard to spot, but they give themselves away with the sound of plopping into the water ahead. All year round the hawks hunt from above and the wolf spiders hunt inside the cabin. If I capture the wolf spiders and put them outside, the brown recluses take over, so I allow the wolf spiders to roam. This winter it seems, the gigantic copperhead snake who lives out back is keeping the mice to a minimum.
Last winter I caught and released twelve mice and accidentally killed one by suffocation. I drove them miles away so they couldn’t find their way back. Mice do have some sense of direction but aren’t able to travel miles across interstates to get back to their previous homes.
I fully acknowledge that after releasing a mouse outside, being impelled unto unknown terrain, predatory birds probably snatch them up in moments. That’s the life of a mouse. That’s nature. At least the mice have some chance of survival out there. And I’d rather be eaten by a huge hawk than to have my spine cracked and slowly die in a metal trap. Snatched up by a hawk, at least I’d die flying through the air with huge talons piercing my flesh. “Weeeeeeee!”
The mouse I accidentally killed last year really killed me. I was truly distressed for days imagining myself suffocating to death in a small container. I had meant to only leave him in his tiny, transplant container for an hour or so, but I fell back asleep and left him in there for hours. He was one of the noisy ones, and I was trying to sleep. That’s my excuse, at least.
It’s not karma which motivates me not to kill or harm animals. It’s compassion. It’s the Oneness of all things accepting its Self as it is. Compassion is acceptance. That thing you see in your dog’s eyes staring back at you, that’s you seeing yourself as you truly are. It’s not a thing any more than my body is a thing, but I embody that thing. Or else, that thing embodies me.
I live in a society with selective compassion towards animals, saving dogs and cats while torturing cows, pigs and chickens en masse. Selective compassion isn’t really compassion at all. To see yourself in some things but not others - that’s not really compassion. I see the Self in snakes and spiders and creepy, crawly things, too. And I see myself in the mice. My copy of the Bhagavad Gita does have a picture of a man who was cruel to animals being reborn as an animal being tortured by humans. I don’t think this world punishes us for our animalistic instincts, rather life rewards us for overcoming them. Alluring innocence isn’t for the sake of saving the world, but to save myself.
I don’t identify with my diet just as I don’t identify with my penis, my skin color or sexuality. I don’t patronize people for eating what they like, but I don’t eat animals, and I know why I don’t eat animals. We do consume their pain. It’s much subtler than most of us are aware. But eating tortured animals does have an effect on the human system, whether or not scientists or nutritionists are willing to study the subtleties of this existence. If there were an experiment which could qualify human temperament, I’m certain people with red meat diets would show common side effects generally perceived to be “negative.” This goes beyond the shallow confines of “good” and “bad” and “right” and “wrong.” Just like everything else, if I find out something’s slowing me down, I drop it. (Truly, I find diet to be an entirely boring topic anyways. This will likely be the only writing in which I mention it.)
In response to carnivorous humans professing, “You kill plants when you eat them, so what’s the difference in killing plants and animals?” Firstly, no I don’t necessarily kill everything I eat. When I eat of the apple tree and throw the core of the apple into the woods, I play a crucial role in the apple tree’s cycle. I live and let live. The tree is left standing, having fulfilled its intention. Perhaps a possum comes upon the apple core I threw into the woods, eats it, shits it out on the other side of the pond into a perfect fertilizer for the seeds. And perhaps a new apple tree is born. That’s the perfection of this existence.
But sometimes it’s necessary to kill things. A friend of mine was given the opportunity to ask one question to His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama. He asked, “When a mosquito lands on your skin to suck your blood, do you smack it?” His Holiness said, “Absolutely.” Jain’s are long-known to keep from killing even the smallest of creatures. And it was said that Gautama the Buddha called off a trip through a muddy wetland in order to keep from killing earthworms. Darwin, too, was quite fond of the lowly earthworm’s role in the symbiosis of all life on Earth.
But earthworms don’t suck my blood. I’ve killed a lot of mosquitos, ticks, bedbugs and red bugs (or chiggers, the cabin’s namesake). And how many bacteria did I kill this morning while brushing my teeth? My very own skin cells are dying every second I’m alive. In fact, this body I currently occupy is dying with every moment.
When a virus tries to take over my body, do I save the virus by allowing it to spread to others? Do I let a bacterial infection multiply in my body in order to save the bacteria? Fuck no. We must draw the line somewhere.
I grew up with hunters. If I had hated every hunter in Northern Alabama, I wouldn’t have had any friends growing up. I used to join them sometimes. I was allowed a small pistol, despite not having a gun license. I didn’t shoot anything other than cans.
I hated the killing of ducks and geese. It seemed so pointless to kill such beautiful creatures when the only edible parts of the duck were two breasts, and it was barely a meal. These duck corpses sat on my childhood friend’s porch with their brightly colored, exotic patterns like a pile of dead rainbows piled up knee high, frozen together by the winter. My friend took pride in pressing his fingers into the bird’s chest and ripping out both breasts with his bare hands to throw on the grill.
An old family friend of the owner of Redbug comes out to hunt deer on the property sometimes. He’s instructed to text me before he comes out to hunt. About a half hour before he comes, I run into the woods with pots and pans banging them together to scare the deer away. The property’s big enough that I don’t usually see him, but sometimes I lay on the car horn for awhile. “Run, deer! Run away!”
My grandmother, whom heavily identified with her Cherokee ancestry, once told me if she could be reincarnated as an animal, she’d like to be a deer. In her neighborhood, deer were as common as squirrels, tamed by generations of living in communion with humans. Grandma would sit on her porch and watch the deer play with the rabbits. It really did appear as though the rabbits and the deer played together.
But there’s something honest and natural about hunting full-grown deer or elk during hunting season, especially where they’re heavily populated. Hunting season is not breeding season, so nobody’s killing Bambi’s mom. And knowing how many of the deer are killed in car accidents every year, it behooves of me to see how or why no one would make use of the animals by eating of their meat. One of those bucks will feed a family of four for an entire year, with sausages, jerky and frozen meat.
I’m not going to be eating any meat in this life, but I understand the omnivorous mode of existence. Hunting isn’t the problem. If everyone who ate meat was forced to kill the animal, fillet the animal, and celebrate the animal’s life with a feast, there’d be no problems.
The problem is torture. The tiny chick being pumped full of hormones, crammed into a tiny cage in a windowless room and shipping out a few weeks later as meat; the piglet who never sees the light of day, spends her whole life gnawing at the cage wherein she’s unable to move her body or her head. That’s sick shit. And that’s commonplace. That’s the American meat industry. If you knew where your meat came from, you wouldn’t eat it.
It’s unforgivable the way my country treats animals. My fellow countrymen’s willful ignorance is the problem. “When good men do nothing…” The truth of slavery is the vast majority of Americans never owned slaves, but nearly all of them participated in an economy which relied upon slaves, and most of them remained silent. Vast majority of Americans don’t torture animals, but nearly all of them eat the tortured meat, and nearly all of them remain silent. Your silent participation in the torturous meat industry is an unforgivable sin which will come back to bite you in the ass.
Killing a bug is not the same thing as torturing a bug. The same is true of all animals and humans. You may not be aware of the subtle aspects of nature, but I assure you, we all suffer the repercussions of inflicting suffering upon each other. The intention of cruelty echoes loudly through time and space. We share that collective karma.
Contemplating the mouse’s utter ignorance, I wondered how had he “outsmarted” me? The mouse doesn’t use scientific method to deduce logical decisions. He sees food, and walks towards it -UNLESS- he smells something awry. The mouse uses his intuition and his sense of smell, not his cognitive abilities to make decisions.
Seeing mice turds all over the countertop where I no longer leave my clean dishes, the thought certainly crossed my mind, “When I catch you little mouse fucker, I’m gonna kill you!” But when seen up close, all I want to do is ogle their adorable little cartoon characteristics, grey fur with little tufts of white, tiny pink noses, curly whiskers, disproportionately large ears and eyes staring up at me, begging for mercy.
“You?! You’re the thing about whom I’ve been in a pissy hissy huff?! I don’t want to kill you, stupid thing. Roar! I’m a humble giant, see! Roar! Boo! Woof! Hooooooooowl! Gutchy-gutchy-goo. Ticklish? Gee golly, George, they sure are small.”
I swear these mice all have different personalities. Some of them sit in their trap shivering, shitting on themselves, scared shitless. Some of them run back and forth, tirelessly banging on the walls, making all kinds of noise. Some are fearless and others are completely debilitated by fear, and they all have different expressions, different characteristics, different tendencies.
After being caught, only one mouse actually escaped me as I was transferring him from trap to trashcan, my much larger temporary storage container which allowed ample air for breathing. The same mouse whom escaped was recaptured the following day when he literally walked into the exact same trap in the exact same place after I had cleaned out the trap.
And so, in my ongoing experiences (or perhaps experiments) with mice, they’ve proven repeatedly to be utterly stupid. But, clearly they use their sense of smell to signal distress. I’ve deduced this via scientific method, see, because if I don’t wash the trap, they won’t go inside of it. Whether it’s in urine or feces or some other bodily excretion, clearly the mice smell the previous mouse’s distress.
But there’s more! I’ve found repeatedly that if I wash the trap with the same-smelling cleaner I used before catching mouse #12, mouse #13 won’t go into the trap. When I use different-smelling cleaner, he waltzes right in.
Do you understand the implications of this? What this implies is that somehow mouse #13, whom I just caught last night, remembered the smell of the cleaner I used last winter. I used the same cleaner this winter. I left the trap out for days with peanut butter inside of it. I put the spoon next to the trap with the tiny bit of leftover peanut butter still on it. The mouse licked the spoon dry but didn’t go into the trap. He smelled the cleaner.
Then I doused the trap in white vinegar, a smell I haven’t used previously, and within hours, mouse #13 went into the trap. Isn’t this phenomenal? One could argue that it’s entirely genetic, and mouse #13 is the offspring of one of the mice #1-#12, but that couldn’t be possible.
Think about it. I caught mouse #1-12 immediately after they smelled the smell of the cleaner. One got away but was recaptured the following day. None of the mice ever came back to this area again, so they never had more offspring around the cabin, and if they did have offspring, all their offspring were already born by the time their parents had smelled the cleaner.
Is it possible these mice have some kind of sixth sense or collective smell? They’re so stupid, they’ll walk right into the exact same trap in the exact same place, repeatedly. The same mice will make the same mistakes repeatedly, but they’re somehow able to communicate with their fellow mice certain smells… telepathically?
I know, you think I’m stupid now. I’m not a fan of grandiose conspiracy theories which can’t be proven or disproven, but experiments with mice are cheap and easy. It’s certainly possible I didn’t clean the trap well enough the first time through, and mouse #13 smelled the distress of mouse #12 before I used vinegar to clean the trap, but this kind of thing happened last year too. I’m not able to repeat these experiments with larger test groups, but I’m willing to bet that in those mazes scientists use with mice, the scientists are not cleaning the mazes after each experiment. I’m willing to bet mouse #1 leaves a trail of scent behind him, signaling “right way” and “wrong way,” and it only grows stronger with each mouse in each experiment.
My tiny test group could be a coincidence, perhaps. But one scientist comes to mind: Rupert Sheldrake. He’s often laughed away by the bimbo-bullies of the so-called “scientific” community, but I think Sheldrake was onto something with morphic resonance… something… real. If you run one experiment in Belfast, one in Budapest, and one in Boston, all using the exact same species of mouse in a scent-based study, you may find that mice in all three cities are communicating via “collective smell.” Associate the smell of ginger with something distressing in Boston, for example, and the mice in Budapest will be more likely to avoid ginger.
Or you could just say, “That’s bullshit” and “It’s not scientific, so we’re not going to study it.” But avoiding scientific experiments by precluding them based upon assumptions of “unscientific” isn’t science, dumb-dumbs. After forming a hypothesis, you have to do the experiments before deducing its empirical probability with such zealous certainty. How do these assholes get away with calling themselves scientists? So much of so-called modern “science” isn’t science at all. It’s mile-high skyscrapers of scientific theory built upon foundations of assumptive, un-ironic leaps of faith. I know I’ve previously used that phraseology, but it’s perfect for summing up the inexpiated ignorance of modern scientists’ materialistic, nihilistic faith.
We’re all transmitting all kinds of shit to each other all the time. What a mouse transmits to other mice is about survival. What humans transmit to other humans is something much greater, much more menacing. We’ve gotten ourselves into a much greater trap.
The World Speaks
Later that morning, January 5, 2023 - Redbug, AL
This morning, after I finished writing the afore, I drove mouse #13 to a wooded area to release him. While driving down the country road, a squirrel ran into the road, hesitated, ran back and forth, and - bump - I hit it. I couldn’t have written it this way. In my attempt to save one tiny creature’s life, I took another tiny creature’s life.
This is a very rare occurrence in my life, hitting animals in my car. In this life, I remember hitting only one other animal, a bird, when I was in my twenties. I had just turned up the song on the radio, Tom Petty’s, Learning to Fly. I was singing harmonies, “I’m learning to fly, but I ain’t got—” splat, I hit a bird.
I wouldn’t have written it this way. If I were creating this story from scratch, it would’ve been much more complicated and complex, much more pedantic and pretentious. The truth of this existence is as much irony as I can handle in this existence, and the truth is, the two times I hit animals in my car was: I killed a bird while singing a song about flying and I killed a squirrel while driving to free a mouse. What the fuck?
There’s that cosmic force at play. As I hit that squirrel, I thought of Arjuna on the battlefield and Krishna’s solace. There’s no way of avoiding life, and there’s no way of avoiding death. As long as I’m imperfect, I must act out my role in this cosmic play, and no matter how hard I may try to “save” things, we’re all in this entropic dance together. Destruction is inevitable. Life and death are unavoidable. Leela is at play.
This kind of stuff happens to me often these days, morbidly ironic synchronicities. This reminds me - last year, I drove as far away from humans as humanly possible, off a dirt road in the middle of Bankhead National Forest, to a secret, secluded spot very few people know exists, a little makeshift campsite next to a little lagoon.
Knowing it might rain, I decided I didn’t want to sit up in the tent all night and went to sleep in the car. I was agitated by my circumstances, frustrated with humanity, and longing for some kind of synchronicity. In a desperate bid for guidance, I begged the world - or God - to give me some kind of sign.
I rolled down the window in the driver’s seat, enough to breathe, and as I was drifting off to sleep, I had this visceral memory of another Steinbeck book, not Of Mice and Men but the book The Pearl. I distinctly remember the image of the family huddled in silence in the wilderness when a stray bullet hits the little baby in the head. Why did I have this image in my head when I fell asleep?
Around midnight, I awoke suddenly to the sound of a single gunshot. Before I was awake, I was already screaming out the window, “Nooooo!” Lying with the seat back in the driver’s side, I felt the pressure of the bullet hit my left leg which rested on the driver’s side door. In that moment, I knew I had been shot, but looking down I saw no blood. I was in shock. I sat in silence believing it was a dream. A huge thunderstorm broke out all in the same moment, and between the trees of the heavily wooded forest, I saw several flashlights in the distance moving towards me.
“Who shoots a single bullet into the woods in the middle of the night?” I thought. It was so bizarre. It occurred to me, whomever they were, they were now searching out the location of my scream. I didn’t want to stick around to find out who they were or why they shot one single bullet in the dead of night or why they were wandering through a thick forest in a huge thunderstorm. It would be more reassuring if they were some drunk hillbillies shooting randomly into the woods. One, single bullet was much more ominous.
I pealed out down the mud road through rain so thick I could barely see. Lighting filled the sky. I turned onto a gravel road and accelerated faster, incessantly checking the rearview mirror to see if I was being followed. I drove faster and faster through the storm, finally turning onto an asphalt road and out of the national forest.
When I came upon a rest area next to an interstate, I finally pulled over and parked the car to recover my sanity. “Am I insane? There’s no blood. I’m clearly not shot. Was it all a fucking dream?” I got out of the car and looked to see a huge bullet hole in the driver’s side door exactly where I had felt it hit my leg. My little blue Suzuki door had stopped the bullet. I presume the bullet is now still lodged between the outside and inside of the door.
I had asked the world for a sign, and there it was. What did it mean? I know what it meant to me. What does it mean to you? Perhaps it can’t be said in words. Perhaps this sound is too big for words and too subtle for logic and language. You choose how, why, when and whether or not to listen. Whether or not you’re listening, the world speaks.
We’re all communicating with each other all the time. With every action, every thought, every emotion, there exists a cosmic sound which reverberates forever. Every ripple from the moment of the Big Bang onward is bouncing around like echoes in an endless cavern. We’re all entangled in the same existence, mice and men, and when we allow ourselves to just acknowledge the profundity of it all, the world speaks. It can be a gut-wrenching noise or the perfect, cohesion and majesty of a symphony orchestra, depending on how we react to the sound of the world. Whether we choose to listen or to ignore the sound, the world speaks.
