 |
version seven. http://demongin.org |
City Rat, Country Rat
In honor of the fact that rats have taken up residence on my back porch, Friday rat blogging resumes.
Friday, 2009-09-11 | Rat Blog
| Hoc erat in votis: modus agri non ita magnus, hortus ubi et tecto vicinus iugis aquae fons et paulum silvae super his foret... |
| Q Horatius Flaccus |
So, read this excerpt from a recent local news dispatch and make a mental note of how you automatically fill in the backstory:
A pet store owner has a month to rid his Pulaski County property of hundreds of dead rats, a judge ruled Tuesday.Odds are good, I figure, that you're anticipating that this particular pet store owner is some kind of Kevin-Spacey-from-David-Fincher's-Seven-style collector of decomposing animal matter; he's stacking these dead rats up in his attic as some kind of macabre monument to parental abuse or bad brain chemistry or the public schools or whatever.
...
The property is on Lead Mine Road in the Snowville community. Eight neighbors showed up to Tuesday's hearing to testify about the odor. Pulaski County Commonwealth's Attorney Mike Fleenor called only two to the witness stand. The six others nodded when he said they would provide essentially the same testimony.
"It is unbearable," neighbor Dean Trail said.
But check it out:
Nelson, who has homes in both Pulaski County and Roanoke, testified that he raises many of the rats in Radford. Others, he said, come from different companies.Basically, he's worse than creepy serial killer: he's got that (not altogether rare) dysfunction of the brain where he is incapable of separating that warm, nostalgic, Lion-King feeling that comes from the idea of composting, recycling and living like some kind of damned, dirty hippy from the mawkish and malodorous reality of stacking up the bodies of dead animals, shovelling a little high biological activity soil on top of them and kicking back with a frosty Coors Light while the lammergeiers circle down to cherry pick the best ones.
He distributes some of the rats to wildlife centers.
Nelson said he also puts some of the dead rats in troughs on his property to allow birds of prey and scavenger birds to feed.
Their leftovers, Nelson said, end up in a compost pile. He said the Department of Environmental Quality told him it would be better to compost the animals than to bury them.
This dude Nelson and his particular set of consistent synaptic misfires is, moreover, part of the reason that I do the rat blog from time to time. Basically, the idea of rats is, I think, a compelling one in that it causes so many parts of the memory and the consciousness (at least of people raised in urban environments) to vibrate sympathetically: rat stories are a kind of semiotic Rorschach and you can learn a lot from a person's gut reaction to the mention of man's most prolific symbiote.
Remember at the top of the essay where I invited the reader to fill in the blanks of Nelson's story based on the article's introductory matter? For me, it was startlingly easy--I'd almost call it automatic--to come up with the beginnings of a gristly and convoluted back story based on a few scant details about dead rats. For someone raised on a farm, maybe their first impulse was to envision something more like the actual story.
But by now you see my point.
Full article: from the Roanoke Times
