Is it better to hallucinate mice in your home or actually have mice in your home? This is something I have been wrestling with for some days now. I’m pretty convinced I have seen a mouse several times since the weekend. My wife, who has been with me on the majority of occasions when I’ve seen the mouse, hasn’t seen the mouse. She thinks I’ve made the mouse up and that imagining a mouse running around somehow represents my fragile mental state. I think my mental state is fine, that mentally I’m pretty much tip top at the moment, and that the only reason I’m seeing a mouse running around (this happens four to five times a day) is because there is a mouse running around.
Part of me wishes that I was hallucinating the mouse running around. I think I would prefer for there to be a mouse running around inside my head rather than one running around in reality. This doesn’t represent my tip top mental state, more it’s just because I hate them.
I hate them not because they cause me to jump from time to time and spread disease etc. but because whenever I see a mouse (which is about four to five times a day), I think ‘wouldn’t it be good to get a cat, a cat would sort out a mouse’. Then I think about cats for a bit. Then I think about Cat World. Then I think ‘isn’t it a long time since I said I would pitch Cat World but didn’t. And look at all those other magazines in the Writers’ & Artists’ Yearbook that I was supposed to pitch – and said I would pitch – but haven’t. And look at the state of Pitching the World. Pitching the World’s a laugh. Pitching the World’s gone really well. Pitching the World isn’t just one almighty flap-up’.
Well, it may be a flap-up at the moment, but it’s going to be a success. It has to be, to get rid of the mice. Either I’m hallucinating mice or they’re in the house. If I’m hallucinating them, it’s down to my fragile mental state, a mental state that has declined since Pitching the World has gone awry. And if there are actual mice in the house – and there probably are – then I need to make Pitching the World into a success so that we can move out of this mice-infested grief hole into a better place.
There are other options of course – buy mouse traps, spend the weekend chasing mice around with with a golf club, take drugs to stop hallucinating – but I feel getting Pitching the World back on course is the best one.
Pitching the World 