24.10.1999
"on catching mice .ii."
Not that I actually was able to consciously follow the nightly going-ons in my kitchen.
While fate played its diabolical trick on the - yes, why not say it: innocent - mice, I myself
was firmly asleep, aided by a small bottle of cheap rhum that I emptied while working on
the script for a new video-project.
Also, I have to admit that though being utterly
brilliant in principle, the improvised realisation of my trap did suffer from a number of
serious flaws.
It were the fear-loaded squeaks and a persistent nervous sound of gnawing
and scratching that woke me up early, and I arrived but just in time to prevent the little
rodents from biting their way through the cardboard back into freedom again. Moreover they -
I counted six (6!) of them - apparently had been forced by nature to urinate excessively in
order to try and relax their anxiousness, and the bottom of the box was soakingly wet. When
I picked it up, it nearly cracked under their spastic jumpings and tumblings, but I managed
to quickly drop it and its contents in an empty aquarium that someone had left in the yard
and which I had brought back into the house with the vague intention of some-time using it
for some-thing 'artistic'.
I covered the aquarium with two of the pack
of wooden book shelves that Brian gave to me the other day, then in the middle I piled up
some hardcover books, to make absolutely sure that any other attempt by the mice to escape
would fail.
I carried the thing into the bedsit and posed it on the table, next to
Burovski's parcel.
What a piece of work!
Some-thing 'artistic',
indeed!