our 82nd weekly open mike

Let’s see what happens when your host (me) has nothing to say. Step right up, speak your mind, tell a story, sing a song, whatever.

5/30/2026

Anything goes

itsdougholland.com 
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Jacque had the day off and so did I, so I finally accepted his long-nagging invitation to return to his shared house and watch more of I, Claudius. Thought I’d also be seeing Jacque’s wife and their fresh-squeezed baby, but they were visiting the baby’s grandmother, so it was only us two guys.

I tried to be a pal by asking Jacque about the baby, but the question made him grimace. “Let’s talk about… anything else,” he said. We talked about baseball and old movies, but not much of anything else. Mostly we stared at the screen, for six more episodes of Masterpiece Theater on VHS.

The more I hang out with Jacque, the more I like I, Claudius. He made some fine tomato sandwiches, though, with slices of real tomato (not the bland watery red blobs from Safeway) and lettuce, onion, and cucumber, and mayo and mustard, all on toasted rye bread. Two of the best sandwiches anyone’s ever made for me without me having to pay, and if that ain’t friendship then I don’t know what is.

♦ ♦ ♦  

Sam sold the news, but his death isn’t newsworthy. There was nothing about it in Saturday’s Chronicle — no story, no obit, no nothing — and I keep looking. Nothing in the overpriced and ad-stuffed Sunday paper, nothing in yesterday’s Chronicle or today’s Examiner.

The man was a fixture, sitting atop the 16th & Mission BART station. Seven days a week, he was a genuine cornerstone of the neighborhood, and if the neighborhood was Pacific Heights he’d merit an obituary, but the neighborhood is Scumville, and the papers don’t much cover the Scumville beat.

At the store across from his newsstand, I asked the cashier, “Do they know anything about what happened to Sam the news guy?”

“Oh yeah,” said the smeared-lipstick girl, “I heard he died.”

I don’t want to be too nosy or macabre, but I’m curious about Sam’s life now that he’s dead — how many years did he spend in that green box? BART’s only been there for thirty years, but my impression is that Sam was there first, and they built the subway under him.

I’m curious about how he died, too. If he slipped in the bathtub and cracked his skull that’s one thing, but if he got shot at the newsstand, that’s something else. Being a street vendor myself, I’d like to know.

Someone who’d frequently loitered at the newsstand was standing at Sam’s green wooden box, still padlocked. I recognized him from the many times I’d seen him talking with Sam, so I interrupted his moment of silence with, “Do you know what happened?”

He didn’t know what happened. Nobody knows, when the guy who sold the papers, the guy who always told you what happened, isn’t there to tell you what happened.

We agreed that Sam had been a great guy and that it sucks he’s dead, and then the stranger walked off to catch his train, and I stood there for a moment, looking at the green wooden box, still padlocked.

Should’ve seen it coming. My room is a mess, which means whatever you imagine’s a messy room, multiplied exponentially to infinity.

For at least a couple of years now, my habit has been to take out only the trash that stinks, tossing anything else — empty boxes and tins, non-food garbage, clothes I’m tired of, old magazines, junk mail, everything — over my shoulder and onto the piles. A few weeks ago, noises began emerging from the piles, and now the noises come every night.

It’s not the first time I’ve shared quarters with rodents, so I didn’t cower in the corner and shout “Eek! A mouse!”

Didn’t do anything, except think about what to do. Maybe I should clean the room? Nah.

Maybe I should invest in some mouse traps? Yeah, that’ll work, so I bought the no-kill variety because I’m a nice guy, vegan and all.

Baited the traps with fresh peanut butter, then waited patiently. And waited, because no-kill actually means no-catch. The noises continued, and hantavirus be damned, but I wasn’t particularly aggravated or inconvenienced sharing my quarters with critters… until one night, asleep in my recliner, something walked over my feet.

Thought it was my cat, before remembering that the cat died a few months ago. Almost convinced myself that a dream had scurried over my feet, until something scurried over my feet again the same night, in the other direction. The second time, it was while I was sitting there thinking the first time had to have been a dream.

Still hadn’t seen the vermin, but I’d been hearing them every night, and now they were literally walking all over me, so something had to be done.

Catch-and-release had accomplished nothing, so I bought a kill trap, but not the old-style snap trap that breaks your fingers, and not the newfangled glue traps because killing a mouse is one thing, but killing it slowly over days of starvation and dehydration is unnecessarily cruel.

Instead I bought a better mouse trap, or so said the package. It’s a mouse-size box that needs batteries, and when a mouse waddles inside and nibbles the bait it gets fatally electroshocked. It’s dead, but dead quickly.

Same as the catch-and-release trap, though, the electroshock trap trapped nothing, and after several impatient nights, I learned why when I turned my head at a rustling, and a croissant-sized rat stared back at me. Oh, hello. And my, what big bigness you have. My room has rats, not mice, and they’re far too large to fit inside the traps I’d bought and baited.

So I traipsed back to the hardware store, and bought a larger, rat-size catch-and-release trap, but same as the smaller one, over the course of several days it caught nothing.

Also bought some Grandpa Gus’s Rodent Repellent Spray, and a Home Haven Ultrasonic Pest Repellent. With the rat-war proceeding on several fronts, it’s hard to say whether these products worked. My impression was that Grandpa Gus’s flimflam had no effect, but the ultrasonic attack helped, somewhat.

The room still had rats, though, so I traipsed back to the hardware store, and bought another electroshock trap, but larger, needing C batteries instead of AA’s.

The next morning, a flashing light atop the device told me a dead rat was inside, and again the morning after. Every morning, and every time I came home, another rat corpse got shaken into a large jar, which was emptied into the dumpster every second morning.

Eleven dead rats later, my room had become quieter overnight, but not quite quiet. At least one rat remained, and it was a frisky one.

All the other rats, now dead, had mostly hidden while they were alive, content to scurry and gnaw on cardboard. This one, though, was out of the closet. Several times over several nights it ran a frickin’ sprint from the piles behind me, across the narrow strip of floor I walk on, before diving into the shallower piles under a table on the other side. Inside those smaller piles, it ran in a rush along the same path every time, and then I heard it gnawing on something (haven’t yet discovered what), and then the gnawing stopped, and the rat made the same rushed trip in reverse, out of the small pile, across the (relatively) clear space, before disappearing into the large piles behind me.

Ten minutes or an hour later, all this would be repeated. Over the night, this wacky rat made half a dozen rushed round trips into the small piles by the door, then into the big piles behind me. Then came silence for a while, but later, more crazy runs and gnawings and silences.

I’d never heard of rat behavior like this. Was my rat insane? Was it suffering from bubonic plague? Based on the noises and watching it run its rat-race so many times, I was pretty sure that my room had only this one rat, so I repositioned the electroshock trap to be a temptation on the rat’s repeated fevered run, but it ran right past. Next, I put it exactly where the rat kept running, and it altered its route to go around it.

My theory is that this rat — let’s call it Ahab — had been witness to a friend or relative rat’s electroshock death. Ahab was smart enough to know what it was, and wasn’t going to go inside the trap, ever.

Interrupting one of its sprints, I shouted “Hey!” at the rat, and it stopped and stared at me. We looked at each other for a few seconds, and you know what? Rats are cute. Those eyes! Those ears! Those whiskers! Cute, but unwelcome in my room, sorry.

And this one seemed angry. After our staredown, Ahab simply continued its run, in the same direction it had been headed, but when it had looked me in the eye, I’d seen no fear. If anything, I’d seen a challenge. The rat seemed to be saying, “Hello. My Name is Ahab Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.”

Thought about all this while pooping at 3AM that morning, but nothing was decided until I’d wiped and flushed, opened the bathroom door, and saw a rat in the kitchen. Ahab, is that you?

It was directly in front of the refrigerator I share with Dean. When it heard the bathroom door open and saw the light, it turned and glared at me (again?), then darted across the kitchen floor, directly toward my room, where it slunk under the door and vanished inside.

Being an idiot, until that moment it hadn’t occurred to me that my room’s rats were shared with the house, and vice versa. We’ve always had occasional mice and rats, but was that one of them in the kitchen, or was it Ahab, out exploring? All rats look the same to me, so I couldn’t know, but the kitchen rat had gone under my bedroom door, and I didn’t want the house’s rats coming into my room, nor my rats infesting the house.

There’s a generous inch and a half of clearance between the floor and the bottom of my door, so to prevent rats entering and leaving, I’d need to block that space. The internet told me about devices that block rodents from passing under doors, so come morning, I stopped at the hardware store again, and bought a rat-stopping door guard.

Then I rode the bus to Mom’s house, where I spent several hours. That’s my daily routine, since Mom’s hospitalization. She’s mentally and physically feeble, and lives with my sister, who takes care of her, so I pop in for a few hours daily to give my sister a break.

When I returned home in the evening, my housemate Dean was in the kitchen, where he often waits to annoy me. Cheerfully, he said, “I saw a rat in the kitchen, and it ran under your door.”

“Well, that’s unpleasant,” was my reply, and that’s all I said.

Here on the blog I am public, writing about anything that seems writeworthy. In real life, with real people, and especially with my human housemates, I am the opposite — intensely private, saying little about anything and less about myself.

Dean, specifically, is a mega-mondo-extrovert who never stops talking, so saying anything to him about rats, Ahab, or the mess in my room would be like issuing a press release. I’d prefer my housemates think of me as the guy who doesn’t talk much, not as the guy who shares his room with rats. So as Dean talked and talked and talked about his lifetime experience with rats and rat traps, I excused myself into my room, and closed the door while he was still talking.

Following the instructions on the package, I installed the under-the-door guard on the inside side of my door. It went on easy, stuck firm, and I was pretty sure that aspect of the rat problem had been solved. There’d be no more coming and going of rats under my bedroom door, right?

Then I sat in my recliner and surfed the internet most of the evening, emerging from my room at 9PM-ish to pee. Dean wasn’t in the kitchen, thank Christ, but a hundred short pieces of green fabric were on the kitchen side of my bedroom door — pieces of the carpet from my room. Ahab or some other rat had been clawing or gnawing under the kitchen side of the door, trying to find a way under the rat guard — and I hadn’t even heard the noise.

The carpet in my room had bald spots when I moved in, so I wasn’t concerned about the damage. Much more, I was concerned that the carpet bits would announce that my room has rats. Dean might see the carpet bits, mentally connect them to the rat he’d seen dart under my door, and he’d want to talk about it with me, and talk with our other housemates, and especially talk with our landlord, who’d then come knocking at my door. Nothing good could come from that.

A broom and dustpan lean on the kitchen wall, so I quickly swept away the carpet bits, flushing them down the toilet to ensure no questions asked. Had to flush the evidence because, yes oh yes, Dean often talks about what he sees in the kitchen trash and recycling.

Set my alarm to wake me hourly through the night, and arose like clockwork to sweep and flush away fresh carpet bits. At 2:30-ish, I watched as the carpet under the door moved, being gnawed or clawed from the kitchen side, so I opened the door and a rat ran away in a panic. Ahab, was that you?

Guess rats are kinda smart, because it remembered the angry monster — me — who’d opened the door. For the rest of the night, the carpet was undisturbed, and my room was silent.

Opening my door and saying “Boo!” to the rats is not a viable defense, but I wasn’t sure what else to do.

Come morning, I left very early for my daily visit with Mom. I always spend at least three hours with her, and this day would be that minimum and no more, which would have me home again by noon or so.

I was hoping there wouldn’t be carpet bits outside my door, because I didn’t want to hear Dean say, “What’s going on with the green stuff outside your door?” Or worse, “I saw a rat chewing and scratching at the carpet under your door…”

Returning home at 11:30, argh, carpet bits were all over in front of my bedroom door, along with white bits of plastic. At first, I thought the white flecks were chips of rat teeth, but no. Ahab had not only clawed or chewed through the carpet, he’d bitten through the cheap plastic door guard, leaving white bits intermingled with the carpet’s green bits, and carving a gap exactly the size and shape of a rat hole from a Loony Tunes cartoon.

My good luck was that Dean was elsewhere that morning, cooking at the Hilton Park Hyatt Saint-Regis Four Seasons Marriott Ritz Carlton Hotel downtown, where he works and never stops telling people he works.

Further good luck: sunlight gets through at the door’s bottom, but the carpet damage and rat hole through the door guard are not noticeable from the kitchen side of my door. It doesn’t even look rat-suspicious. Nobody would guess.

I swept and flushed the cloth and plastic, then immediately walked twenty minutes to the hardware store, because walking was quicker than waiting for the bus. I returned with a box of ten rat-size glue traps.

To my conscience, an apology: Glue traps are awful, cruel, inhumane, but you know what’s worse than glue traps? Rats. And having everyone in the house mad at me about rats. And having Dean alert the landlord about me and the rats and the mess in my room. All that’s worse than glue traps, so I set one inside my room, right next to the rat hole in the door guard.

Then I sat in my recliner and surfed the internet for ten minutes, until Ahab started screaming. I hadn’t expected the trap to work so quickly. Rats are mostly nocturnal, but it was 1:00 in the afternoon, which further shows how welcome and at ease Ahab must’ve felt sharing my quarters.

Leaning forward, I had a clear view of the rodent’s demise. It had somehow flipped the glue trap upside-down, so the glue was all over the rodent’s backside, but within a few seconds it contorted its body like a corkscrew, leaving its face and arms glued next to its back. Oof, that had to be uncomfortable, and I felt a twinge of sympathy for that dirty rat.

As the struggle continued, the glue trap ensnared a Fritos wrapper from the floor, a long-ago yogurt container, and an envelope with a bill from last year’s hospital stay.

Well, I’d gotten what was hopefully the last rat in my room, but now what? I’m not coldblooded or kindhearted enough to hammer Ahab’s head, but I couldn’t just toss rat and trap into the dumpster and let the animal die slowly over days of dehydration.

To get it out of my sight, I stuffed rat and trap into a small box, along with the stickied trash and the bill I’m in no hurry to pay. The box jiggled less and less as Ahab got more and more stuck, and I continued pondering what to do.

Rat and box would fit in the microwave, and it probably wouldn’t take long to zap Ahab dead. But no, that would be crueler than dehydration. Also, it might stink up the kitchen.

A few of my downstairs housemates own cars, and I could ask one of them to drive over the box. But no, that would involve speaking with them, which I’d rather not, and about the rat, which I’d definitely rather not.

I could slip the box under a bus’s back tires. But no, the driver might see me in his mirrors, think I was planting a bomb, and 9-1-1 me to the cops.

As I pondered and slept, Ahab remained in the box overnight, and by morning, the box would only jiggle when I jiggled it first.

Slipped it gently into my backpack, and Ahab and I rode the bus together, toward Mom’s house. She lives in Renton, and my bus makes a stop at that city’s famous library over the river, so that’s where Ahab and I stepped off the bus.

After removing the box from my backpack and collecting some small rocks, I undid the box flaps and poured the rocks in, avoiding eye contact with the rat inside. Then I walked halfway across the library, stood above the Cedar River, and kerplunked my nemesis over the rail and into the waters below.

The river runs beneath the library, so I couldn’t watch the box sink, but Ahab was probably under the water before the box was under the books.

♦ ♦ ♦

That would be a tidy end to the story, but tidy isn’t true and the story isn’t finished. The next night at home was quiet, but the night after, the debris behind my recliner sounded of rustling and gnawing again. Haven’t seen a rat since dropping Ahab under the water, but one’s in my room. Maybe more than one.

Hantavirus thrives where people and rodents are in close proximity, so I’m considering the purchase of a better anti-rat guard for under my door, metal instead of plastic. The metal ones cost a hundred bucks, though, and jeez, I’ve already spent at least $200 on rat traps and repellents and such. Rats are expensive!

Surrendering to logic, I’ve finally begun cleaning this room, giving the effort half an hour every morning. I’ve begun the task before, and never kept it up past the second or third day, but it’s been four mornings now, and still I’m cleaning, because every time there’s a rustling in the rubble, it’s a reminder.

Maybe this time, I’ll stick with it and get the room all sparkly. Already I’m taller than the piles behind my recliner, which is progress. At this pace, the room will be reasonably clean by Christmas. Until then, I’ll keep fresh batteries in the electroshock trap, and buy more glue traps, as necessary.

5/29/2026

itsdougholland.com
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