It started with the mouse actually. He died. I didn’t believe anything anyone told me, before that. I thought people were way too precious about things like food and water – way too cautious like it was some new form of narcissism, all this food and environmental awareness. Like I read today in the New York Times that there is a market where you can get a dozen eggs for eight dollars a dozen. Eight dollars. So I was thinking about who would buy those eggs and what would happen if they were right and all the other eggs were contaminated and let’s say we all died from contaminated eggs and who would be left? All the people roaming the earth would be the people who one, could afford eight dollar a dozen eggs and two, cared enough to buy them – or maybe two should be knew they existed because until I read the article I never knew eight dollar eggs existed. They must be some eggs. I’m just a person who doesn’t want to be killed by food. Food and terrorists. If anyone told me ten years ago that I would be afraid of food and terrorists I would have told them they were crazy. Now it’s all I can think about.
Eight divided by twelve is sixty six cents and let’s say, a dollar divided by twelve is eight cents so that’s a difference of fifty eight cents. So by not choosing to spend and extra fifty eight cents an egg I could be dead, but if I could find those eggs, and eat them instead of my bargain eggs, which by the way, I drive out of my way to buy special, I could be living with the other people who are in the know about egg poisoning. I know it’s hard to believe but fifty eight cents seems a small price to pay to stay alive. Although I imagine the other people might get on my nerves a little. But I’d still be alive. I can’t vouch for the quality of life or anything since I would imagine there aren’t many of those eight dollar eggs around and after they are gone I have no idea what you’d eat and basically the rest of the world plus all the animals might be dead except the in-the-know foodies that you pass sometimes at whole foods that always seem to have unlimited money to buy organic stuff all the time. Where does that money come from, and the time to do the research? Like do these people work, or do they just spend whatever time and money they have looking for the perfect white eggplant and non poisonous eggs because they know something we don’t know? Really, it was in the New York Times. Everyone is going to want those eggs.
So the mouse. I was home reading the mail and I got that little print out that you sometimes get from the utility company which makes you worry about all the trees they cut down to make the paper for them. This one included a little graph of some kind that said that they had decided to change the chemical composition of our water. And that as a result the levels of arsenic were going to up, but not to worry because they were still safe levels. And have a nice day.
I didn’t think much of it, and we were mostly drinking bottled water then. This was before someone told me that the bottles were worse for the environment than the water was for us, so back then we were still using bottles although this mouse, my kid’s mouse was on the tap – it was easier to fill his bottle that way. I didn’t think much about the arsenic levels, I just noted it, in the way you note things, in the “how do they decide a safe arsenic level” kind of way. So the mouse, Arthur, was a feeder mouse. Little. We saved him from being eaten by a snake. We were proud of that. He cost fifty cents although the cage and the little spinny wheel set us back about fifty bucks. Anyway, he was sweet. Ran a lot. We had to WD40 his wheel or he would keep us up at night. He was not a pet per se as much as a form of visual entertainment. So we didn’t interact all that much, except to clean the cage, and change his water and feed him. And we watched him run in circles. But after the water changed, this mouse was not the same. Really not the same. He started growing lumps. And started bleeding from his ears. And I called the water company and asked if anyone else was dying from their arsenic changes and they said no, no one. But I never believed them and this poor mouse ended up dying a horrible death. We buried him in the back yard. But I still feel bad. Maybe he would have survived on bottled water.
The water that we brush our teeth with every day killed that mouse. He was the first indication that something had gone terribly wrong.
