rats

So I was watching this giant rat (as you do) the other day (by the way this shits on bird watching and should definitely be a thing) and it brought back a rat related childhood memory. When I was a kid my brother and I basically had a rat collection. Like seriously we had a lot of them. My dad made them a big cage but most of the time we carried them around in the pockets of our clothes which in retrospect is fucking gross ,but back then was like a totally legitimate way to transport and house them. Although we had a whole bunch of them we each had a favourite. Mine was a big white and brown hooded rat called Rodney, named after some infamous rat character in a book we used to read over and over again, because we didn’t have a TV because apparently Jesus didn’t like them. (Interestingly I am now 32 years old, have figured out the whole Jesus thing is a crock, but still don’t own a TV.) My brother’s was a girl rat called Anna-Maria, who’s fur was as black as her fucking soul (spoiler alert).

As much as we loved our rats and looked after them as best we could, (to be honest I think they eat their own shit recreationally so they don’t need much additional support) they always tended to get some kind of fucked up respiratory illness and die. Not having the sort of parents who took rats to the vet (fair call), we just kind of learnt to accept that this was (generally) how they went, except for one who was seemingly pregnant for way too long and despite being male, but in fact was housing a giant tumor. Anyway, when they got The Lung Thing, as we called it, they were pretty much gone. My Dad was (and still is, should the occasion arise) both practical and innovative in his methods of pet disposal, and once he was certain that The Lung Thing had set in (as in they’d been wheezing for longer than a week), it would be time for him to ‘put them to sleep’. He would take the invalid/ victim and put them in a shoe box that had an exhaust pipe shaped hole cut into the side of it, (enough said) and once that process had been completed they would spend a varied amount of time in the freezer, dependant on the proximity of rubbish day. My brother and I would have a brief cry and move on with our lives with the remaining rats.

We didn’t get particularly upset over these deaths because we were used to them. Our parents were never the type to bullshit us and say that ‘Grandad has gone away from a long, long time’, or that they had to give our pet dog away to a special Dog Zoo that didn’t allow visitors. In fact one of my most horrific childhood memories is coming home from school to our dog lying dead in a pool of blood in the backyard. Yet another involves my mum buying old chickens for $1 each (this price still astounds me), and literally chasing them around our suburban property with an axe. There is a photo of me around four years old, sitting happily in a pool of blood and holding a handful of chicken entrails. (So like, if I ever end up killing someone, is it really my fault?)

Anyway, we were kind of not too bothered by death as kids, or I wasn’t anyway. 

Until Rodney got The Lung Thing. 

I still remember hearing the first signs of wheezing from him, encased in the pocket of my sweatshirt, and an icy spear of terror pierced through me. It wasn’t long before Dad heard it too, but kindly let him live longer than the usual week sentence because he was an undeniably special rat. Now the fucking gross thing was that before Dad could take him for his last voyage via the car exhaust, my brother’s rat must have sensed that he was in a bad way, and started eating his tail, while he was still alive. This was obviously quite a lot more traumatising than the carbon monoxide method I was accustomed to, and I still remember how fucking sad he looked with a bloody bandage wrapped around his half eaten tail, while that cunt Anna Maria paced menacingly in the back of the cage. In retrospect it seems odd that we didn’t just seperate them. 

Anyway, this irrelevant and kinda gross story about rats got me to thinking, once again about death and life and its meaning and if there is one. I’ve mentioned before in these things that I used to believe in God. Now I’m not gonna get into a whole anti religious rant here because each to their own and a lot of people I love and respect are religious and that’s their perogative. I think that my main issue with it though is that it (can) stop people from really owning their shit and being accountable for their journey. If this isn’t IT, and there’s something else after it, then why would we give our best effort every day that we are here ? It would be like going all in on a weightlifting comp, knowing that there was a far better and much more important one the following day (the obvious analogy). I remember when I was a kid my Grandma constantly telling me not to bother doing stuff or starting anything because ‘the Lord will be back soon anyway’. What the fuck kind of lesson is that to teach a kid ? Like hey, may as well not try being good at anything ever because your efforts are pointless and we are all going to Magic Land anyway. To this day she has not made an effort to make her life better or enjoy the years that she has had, and this is actually really fucking sad. In fact it’s so sad that I can’t even really think of anything funny to say afterwards to soften the blow (which is my usual strategy, if you hadn’t noticed). 

I saw this quote once that went ‘fuck God, believe in yourself’, and as aggressive as this is , it’s kinda spot on. Like, if I do some dumb shit thing  (which happens extremely frequently) I gotta be able to own that thing, acknowledge my mistake, and fucking LEARN from it, not be like ‘oh dammit, Satan again.’ And in the same vein, if I achieve something fucking phenomenal, which to be honest I really believe that I can and will, I don’t want some mystical cunt getting credit for my work. It’s kind of a cop out isn’t it ? Like I know that we live in this overly modest (and yet dick pics are a thing somehow) society where being proud of your achievements is for some reason the most obnoxious thing ever, but I kinda feel like that’s a massive amount of crap. Whether you believe there’s something else after the shoe box with the hole in it or not is entirely up to you, but I don’t think that should stop anyone from living their life as though there isn’t, and let’s be honest, whether you do or not we are all heading for the rubbish bin via the freezer, so may as well give everything that comes before it a solid fucking crack, right ?