Visited by a Mouse

Last night a large mouse/rat came out into the living room & paused to stare at me for about 15 seconds. It's strange being eyeball'd by such a critter. My dogs didn't stir at all. I know LeNoira June (my littlest Mutt) is terrified of them. It's strange because she'll take on a bull in the field without the slightest reservation. Come Tuesday, the exterminator is coming out to cease our dilemma. I hate to do this, but they're eating all the insulation, making nests of all our clothes, eating up our home. That is what happens when an abode sits practically alone in the wildness of the woods in Southern Louisiana - everything goes back to nature swiftly. We'll keep the pups over at the In-laws for a week to assure they don't find any slaughtered mice & take them up in their jaws to play with them, thus getting some of the poison. That's our only concern. The exterminator wanted to use glue traps but we won't allow such torture. Those things are like Gitmo. I hate them & have sabotaged a number of them at various restaurants & health food stores I've worked at. It's the slow kill by starvation. Aren't we inhumane enough as a species without them??? I keep thinking the exterminator will look like William S. Burroughs - he'd held such a vocation as he opened his lunchbox for The Naked Lunch.

The Spy Who Came In from the Cold (1965)

The Spy Who Came In from the Cold (1965)

The use of black & white sets the perfect tone for this spy drama that leaves a viewer with a cold feeling well measured by the doubts of the Cold War. I saw in this movie why Richard Burton IS considered such a powerhouse actor. His face tells us so much! His inaction confesses a will struggling between good-conscious & just doing his job. Supposedly disgraced as the ex-Section Chief controlling agents in East Germany, Alec Leamas (Burton) seems worn out - can't pay for groceries or rent, can barely keep a job in a library, & is hopelessly down in the bottle. All he has left to sell to anyone asking are secrets. Intelligence secrets the East Germans are anxious to pay for.

Or is it all a scheme? Something developed by Control back at the Circus with the other British Spy-Masters? Is even Leamas being played? What is real? Or does reality, the concrete, ever exist once a person ties on the apron of being a spy? A very delivered story worth all the popcorn you can pop in the microwave.

Unless you don't care for spy vs. spy. Then look at it as a mortality tale. One that tells much of a man trying to find his way in a convoluted society & even more muddled human world. Where truth & certainty are double wrapped in packing paper & sent away to an undisclosed address...