Jesus of the driveway

So we got rid of our rats by boarding up the holes they were coming in through. Easy. The thing is, the agency had already put down poison for them so yesterday we got the spectacle of one slowly expiring on our driveway, and I couldn't scrape together the balls to kill it and put it out of its misery. I couldn't stop thinking about it - how it would feel when it heard the birds, or smelt a cat walking by; how its little animal brain was dealing with the pain. It gave me a bit of an existential crisis to be quite straight with you - that something as precious as life is so easily taken away because one disease vector (us) didn't want another disease vector (the rat) to be alive anymore.

Completely honestly, it gave me a total Jesus moment - it's a powerful religious story, when you get a reminder of how shitty, brutal and commonplace death is, to be told that someone who was God let himself be killed by people for no particularly good reason. Other religions are fearfully death-y of course, but I don't reckon there's ever been a deathcult quite like Christianity, in the sense of it being a religion where you are told that your God chose to share the worst fucking shit that could ever possibly happen to you, or to any animal, just to show how much he loved you.

In that vein: I question the relationship people have spent the last 100 years drawing between the advent of scientific explanations for things and the petering-out of religion in developed countries, which only seems to apply to Christianity while everyone in the world is getting more or less clever, and which assumes, I think unreasonably, that most people have a high degree of familiarity with the scientific explanations, or even an awareness of them.

I think it has more and more to do with a universal unwillingness to consider death as the end of you. Every religion makes its peace with the idea of its proponents rolling on and on into the grave, and most of them even deal with the idea of the extinguishing of you-as-a-person; even the Christian idea of heaven, depending on who you listen to, means an existence totally in harmony with God's will, rather than happily sitting around on the clouds playing harps and eating Philadelphia cream cheese, and certainly rather than continuing to be yourself up there.

I think, rather than ascribing our irreligousity to scientific explanations for things, it can be ascribed more to our utter unwillingness over the last century to admit that the Self is fragile, mortal, and will one day be utterly annihilated in both existence and memory. Christianity does offer some pretty mixed messages on that one, I'll admit, but at its core it's a deathcult ruled by an all-encompassing holy spirit and frankly doesn't leave a tonne of room for the cult of individuality, and it doesn't leave room for a society that will watch death played out balletically in its films and movies, but doesn't let its old people or sick people die at home.

Anyways, now there's a dead rat on my driveway and I'm trying to get the F-word to deal with it because it's gross.

The pleasures of the subtropics

Aw gross. There are fucking rats here. Up until last night I'd been holding out hope that somehow all those little turds that looked just like rat turds were actually from the tree frogs, and then I went into the kitchen and startled a great big fucking brown rat on the counter - agitated the poor thing so much that it fell off. Anyways, that tipped me off as to where they were coming in from, and hopefully how to keep them out.

We called the agency, who just sent round a guy to put down poison, which is gonna mean nothing but stink and, eventually, poison-immune rats. You simply cannot rely on a slow-acting oral poison to exterminate a community of animals whose life cycle is based on large litters and high mortality, evolution is working too fast. And frankly I don't want to exterminate the poor little assholes. They're cute. Aside from being revolting disease vectors, they're quite nice animals and they don't deserve to die, and if they are going to die, some animal should get lots of pleasure from killing them.

Our neighbours told us our predecessors dealt with the problem by keeping a carpet python. Those are supposed to often come up into the houses around here after the rats - theirs was a wild one they got a permit for, and they took it with them when they left. I sort of hope that a new one moves in (the locals have promised me that we'd only get carpet pythons in the house; the highly poisonous snakes hereabouts, the brown snakes, apparently "don't climb". Hmph. We'll hope for the best).

I think we'll deal with the problem by fostering cats. I miss Lexie fucking terribly but she is doing really well at Sugarplum's now, and it's agreed by all and sundry that it doesn't make sense to move her here. But I don't want to replace her, and the F-word doesn't want us to permanently take in a pet before we have some kids, so we are trying to get into a local cat-fostering programme.