I call the exterminator and a capable young man named George comes to the house. He has a bucket of bright turquoise cubes–glittering, glorious poison–and he puts three bait stations around the exterior of the house. He tells me there are typically two kinds of rats around here: tree rats and gutter rats. I have the bigger ones, the gutter rats, and he knows this by the shape and size of their droppings.
I think of the book in the bathroom, What’s Your Poo Telling You?
It’s only after Capable George leaves with my $480 that likely should have been spent on therapy or new sheets for the bed, that I start to regret my excitement about the poison. Using a glass of wine as a delivery device, I swallow the fact that I have just paid $480 to knowingly poison animals for the next 25-35 years.
I panicked. I had a rat in the bed. But still, I’ve no excuse.
I called the exterminator because I knew I couldn’t get my hands on the good stuff myself; they took it off the shelves back in the late 2000s, when science showed how the rodents that ate the poison were killing the raptors who ate them, and then the vultures who ate them, and then the bobcats who ate everything, and so on.
At the time, the Environmental Destruction Agency didn’t want to make a big deal out of all the damage that had been done, not to mention the amount of time it would take for the poison to cycle out, so it was a quiet initiative when they called the big-box stores and told them to remove the poison from the shelves. But you could still get the stuff for agricultural or commercial use. You just had to call someone.
This was years ago, but I remember when the EDA disappeared the poison because all the researchers–regardless of expertise or department–got the memo with the official, embossed EDA logo, saying that we couldn’t talk to press about anything we did or did not know about the poison, period. It seemed out of context to me; I rarely crossed paths with the EDA, being more on the tech side of things. I remember wondering why would I be getting this memo. What did I know?
I know interconnectivity is a bitch.
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Current Sh*t 