November 30, 2003

That sound in the wall was not good. That was no skittering mousy or even gallopy rat sound. That was something altogether different. Suddenly the vent that mysteriously bent open a while back seemed terribly ominous. I immediately ran and got several drywall screws and screwed it shut all cockeyed and cartoonishly like a crazy person.

I'm hoping it was just some trick of acoustics, that there wasn't an unthinkably enormous, sluggish animal slowly trying to shoehorn or reverse its hulking mass sideways through the wall. I didn't even hear any claws--just sort of a labored shoving. It sounded so big, I'd almost think cat or raccoon. It couldn't be a cat, though, because a cat would be mewing. Do raccoons have a noise?

I know there have been tribes of raccoons living under the house at various times. I've seen a dog-sized one flattening itself under the porch, and garbage bags have been dragged halfway under before getting stuck. A couple years ago, one got about an inch of Herman's ear before she killed it. Maybe a raccoon is just trying to cram itself between some of the beams in the crawl space, and a trick of sound is just making it seem as if it is somehow inside the bathtub. Not inside as in sitting there taking a little bath, but inside as in...well, inside--in a horror movie, the creature would be trapped in the fiberglass itself, the way that a ghost would be trapped in a paperweight or a demon would be trapped in a statue, you know? But that was too weird to understand, and anyway, my bathtub is way too boring to be haunted (now Rachel's bathtub might be haunted, I could see that), so I had to keep checking to make sure it wasn't really just sitting in the bathtub itself, even though the bathtub was clearly empty. I've got one of those ugly 80s molded fiberglass all-in-one shower/bath affairs from the hardware store. Could a raccoon have somehow gotten trapped in the molded hollows between the floor/wall and the unit? And now it's just forcing itself around all the sides of it, trying to feel its way back out, but it keeps missing the little hole? What a hideous thought. I hope it's not blaming me for its predicament.

The fact that I just watched Willard isn't helping my cause. Maybe it's just snuggled in there because it's cold. Maybe it's hibernating. Maybe it's a tiny bear.

Anyway, I know it's finally getting to be winter, and that means I'm going to have to start setting those menacing traps again, but I was simply not prepared for that kind of sound. I mean, geez. It's not like I live in a big dirty city or on a fracking farm or out in the wilderness.

Thank goodness I had a swell Thanksgiving and finally shook off that sinking self-pity that was smothering me, or this would have sent me over the edge.

I'd been on a big woe-is-me bender for a couple of months (somewhat tempered by the alcoholic/girly fun of Angele's wedding) when an abscess in my kidney won me a 3-night stay in the hospital earlier this month. I might not have gone in at all despite the pain & fever, if my mom hadn't called me every hour, pleading and near-hysterical. Bad thing about being a hypochondriac is that you're so accustomed to worrying senselessly about your health that you're really resistant to accepting it when you're genuinely sick. Good thing about being a hypochondriac is that you're fairly well prepared to cope with moderate illness out of years of imagining the worst. And the hospital wasn't so bad. Rebecca & Curt brought me sweets & entertainment and Suzanne brought me kiddie meals & clean clothes, and I ended up with a nice stash of emergency Vicodin remaining from my prescription.

But still, the whole thing left me all weak and kittenish and saggingly depressed, as I'd really been wearing out that old "at least I have my health" song, that nice little life jacket that floats you over the cusp of depression when you're a chronic bright-sider. I'm one of those people who bitches a lot but always Pollyannas her way through life when it's crunch time, so when I do get the honest-to-goodness blues, it's pretty crushing.

Ach. Thinking it all out again is starting to make me kind of sad. But at least my self-absorption will take my mind off that sound in the wall! See? It all works out for the best.

10.05.03