The Mouse House

If you've read the description of my book, or if you're unfortunate enough to know me in real life, you're probably familiar with one of my favorite phrases: rat-in-a-coffee-can insane. I will freely admit that I stole this saying from an old friend of mine, and then I turned around and added insult to injury by nicknaming him The Gangsta Jawa. See, he had this coat, and I honestly think it looked like something that P.Diddy would wear if he'd been raised by the Jawas from Star Wars. I just couldn't help myself.

Can I interrupt myself briefly to tell you that if I were a hip hop star, I'd be C-Ha? Look out, J-Lo; C-Ha's in da house!

Anyway, if I could stay on topic for more than five seconds at a time, I'd tell you that I love the whole rat-slash-coffee-can imagery. The scrabble of little paws on the metal. The shaking of the can as the rat runs in endless circles. It's the absolute picture of desperate insanity. So obviously, I use that phrase a lot.

And sometimes life imitates art, only I used to know someone named Art and don't really imitate him very much because that would be weird and borderline obsessive to boot. And I, as we all know, am completely normal. Ish.

So a couple of days ago, I was checking my email in the basement, because that's where the computer is and it helps to have a computer for the purposes of checking said email. And I keep hearing this scrabbling noise. At first, I just thought something fell off the computer desk, because I am the Queen of Clutter, but after the fourth time something "fell off the desk," I figured I ought to look into it.

And there it was. An empty 2-liter bottle of Vernors, which was NOT mine, because I think Vernors tastes like werewolf spit. And technically, the bottle wasn't empty either. There was a mouse stuck in it. Somehow, that little bugger managed to crawl inside the bottle without knocking it over, and then he couldn't get out.

I would have taken a picture, except that we STILL haven't replaced our camera after my son gave it a bath.

So we cut the bottle open and let little Mickey out of the bottle. Or Minnie. Whatever. I didn't check the mouse's gender for god's sake, because I figure that after being stuck in a bottle for a day, he/she/it probably wouldn't appreciate the invasion of privacy. It would be adding insult to injury yet again, and I'm trying to curb those instincts.

So instead, I'm using this as inspiration for a new phrase. Unfortunately, mouse-in-a-pop-bottle insane doesn't quite have the same ring to it, but I'm still evaluating some other options. Like gerbil-in-a-sippy-cup insane. That one's actually not half bad, now that I think of it...