Do Rats Suffer From Anxiety Too?

With pipes like these, who needs enemies?

It’s been a long slog of late, with lots for me to obsessively worry about.

In addition to the usual pandemic-related concerns, I’ve had to deal with a rat infestation, a heater ducting collapse, a major plumbing replacement, rising gas prices, tiered power consumption rates, burgeoning grocery costs, and just where to get the money to pay for all of it.

At one point, while I was patching the holes the rats used to get into my home, I looked up at another, as-yet-unpatched hole to see a rat staring at me, its cold, unfeeling gaze challenging me, laughing at my hope of ever banishing it and its brethren from my abode.

It freaked me out.

It also made me wonder, do rats suffer from anxiety too?

Normally, such a question would make me more likely to empathize with the rats, but as I’ve mentioned in a previous post, their squealing, scritch-scratching antics in my walls ensured no degree of empathy would ever be achieved.

And now the question is moot – all those rats are dead.

(That’s right, baby, you didn’t see the “bone crusher” traps coming, did ya!?)

Surprisingly, instead of this genocide causing guilt-ridden insomnia, I now sleep soundly through the at-long-last silent nights.

But I wake up every morning flooded with worries about what can and probably will go wrong during the coming day, first and foremost being, “Will the rats come back? And if they do, just how angry and vengeful will they be?”

After the rat question asserts itself, other terrors manifest. War in Europe, ongoing shortages, raging inflation, drought-induced water restrictions. It seems there is no end to the sources of ennui I find in my life.

I try to be creative, find ways to save money and stretch how far the flagging value of the dollar will carry me and my family. But I am thwarted at every step.

With the drought, for example, I first tried to save water by taking Navy showers, letting the lawn die, and only flushing the toilet when the contents were solid.

But that wasn’t enough to curb the size of the water bill.

So then I switched the toilets over from water to oil, thinking, “Ha! That should save some precious H2O!” But then oil and gas prices shot up, leaving me with an expensive and now utterly useless sewage conversion.

Even worse, the toilets are extremely difficult to clean now. That oil sticks to everything!

I try to remind myself that it’s not all end of the world, even if it feels that way every morning when I wake up.

I’m still gainfully employed and can work from home most days, so that helps with the gas expenses. Sure, I’m terrified the company might be teetering on the edge of insolvency, and I’ve been called to deal with separate crises over the last two weekends, denying me any sense of time off, but the checks haven’t bounced!

Yet.

The new plumbing is working, except for a mistake where the hot and cold hookups got mixed up in one bathroom and so the plumbers have to come back to fix that. But hey, at least I don’t dread the pipes will burst every time one of us gets in the shower!

Most days.

I’m still hyper sensitive to the sound of dripping and rattling, but I am getting better about that.

And usually by the time I’ve had that first cup of coffee, the fears have receded and I can recognize that they are (mostly) irrational.

But post-coffee, it’s time to check the news. Sure, COVID seems to be going in the right direction, but apparently that was all the excuse Putin needed to stop social distancing and invade Ukraine. Now I’m left wondering how long until WWIII.

And that fear, unfortunately, doesn’t strike me as terribly irrational.

But maybe gas will get so expensive no one will be able to afford to fuel their tanks and fighter jets and this will all peter out.

I mean, can you really see plant-based munitions and an all-electric armored column taking the place of lead (and depleted uranium) bullets and fossil fuel engines of war?

Sorry, Tesla, there just aren’t enough charging stations for that work.

At least, not yet.

Great, something else to worry about.

 

Working together, we can end the scourge of Vivid Imagination Syndrome

Imagination is a curse.

What’s that, you ask? Did the indie author just call imagination a curse? Isn’t a vivid imagination a writer’s bread and butter?

Sure it is. But bread comes in a variety of types, and butter is perishable.

Sometimes imagination is a slice of warm sourdough dripping with whipped butter, taking me on an amazing journey that I’ll be forever grateful for and eager to relive.

Mmm, warm buttered sourdough…

And sometimes it’s chunky rancid butter spackled onto a stale Dutch crunch roll, curdling my tongue and leaving bloody gouges on the roof of my mouth.

Gouges that take several days to heal, and then I have to deal with that annoying flap of dead skin until it finally falls off.

Shudder.

A vivid imagination is all roses and scented oils when I get something good.

When the perfect plot twist manifests.

When the ideal line of dialog materializes from nowhere.

When a new character comes to life and demands, demands to be written on the page.

But then, then I see a penny on my car seat.

What do the non-writers, or the ‘mundanes’ as I like to call them, think when they see a coin?

I’ll tell you. They think, “Huh, that penny must have fallen out of my pocket.”

What does someone afflicted with VIS, or Vivid Imagination Syndrome, think?

I’ll tell you. And in this particular case, since it actually happened, I can tell you in iron clad detail:

This is the moment the shiny, glowing-with-radioactive-energy penny dropped.

Huh, someone broke into my car and left a penny on the seat.

But they were careful to hide the fact of the break-in, leaving the windows and locks intact. How did they do that?

And why? Why so careful to hide their criminal trespass?

It must be a trap!

Is that penny radioactive? Are they trying to kill me with buttock cancer?

And who? Who would want to kill little ol’ me, a beloved indie author with almost no readership?

The Missus? Is she trying to kill me? She does have a key to the car. But we’re happy.

Or are we?

Maybe it’s a government organization. They have the resources to break into a car undetected. But why me?

Is it because I’m destined to save the world, become a world-renowned hero who parlays that fame and recognition into the Presidency of the United States? And they, whoever they are, want to prevent that?

Possibly.

If not that, could it be my involvement with that shadowy writers’ collective, [REDACTED]?

Or is it [REDACTED] because they finally found out I’m working undercover for [ALSO REDACTED]?

Or is this whole radioactive butt-cancer penny just a red herring to distract me from a car bomb wired to the ignition?

This thought process goes on long enough for the Missus to call me and ask where the hell I am and why I’m taking so long to get home.

Aha! So it is the Missus!

Do you have any idea how long it takes to remove all four tires from your car, inspect the wheel wells, put all four tires back on, check the engine compartment and under the seats for bombs, and then safely dispose of a possibly radioactive penny?

Not as long as you’d think – I’ve gotten plenty of practice and keep tongs, a lead-lined bag, and a penny-holding rack in the trunk for just this sort of emergency.

The rack because you can’t let radioactive pennies get too close to each other – they may achieve critical mass.

And that’s just what I need, a smoking lump of drippy, radioactive copper (and zinc if the penny was made after 1981) in the back of my car.

This is the curse of imagination. Time lost inspecting cars and the like for traps, and money spent on tongs and lead-lined bags that, if I’m really honest with myself, I probably don’t need.

Plus the Missus is usually pretty steamed by the time I get back home.

Is it because I’m late, or because the assassination attempt failed?

And this affliction is not limited to pennies on car seats. Oh no.

When I sat down at the communal computer to write this post, I noticed the seat was warm.

Was it because the Missus had just been using the computer? Or is it because the seat is slowly irradiating my bum?

If they find my body with a shrunken, mostly missing ass, you know what happened.