All Rats Go to Heaven

Unlike Holocaust deniers

With deep regret I must announce that I think Ratibor the Rat has gone to the great garbage dump in the sky. It’s been almost a month since I’ve seen any “proof of life.” I scattered trap-free Cheez Its (his food of choice) in front of the washer and dryer two weeks ago, and he has not emerged.

He died on his own terms; all he’d have to have done is walk into one of the many humane traps I’d laid out. He’d have gotten a meal and been released outside. But no. He wanted to prove that he was too clever to be tricked by humans. He died, probably quite unpleasantly, of starvation. But he proved his point.

When I had the gout, I was unable to climb on top of the machines to peer behind them. Now that I can, I see he’s not there. Based on rumblings from inside the machines when he was active, my assumption is he found some way to burrow into them, meaning that his corpse is either inside the washer, which has been busted for four years, or the dryer, which had been working fine but now may have a rat corpse and rat poop in the inner-workings surrounding the drum.

That dryer’s 28 years old; for the amount of dough it would cost to have some asshole come out, disassemble it, remove the corpse, sterilize the innards, and reassemble it, I might as well just buy a new dryer.

Which means I’m line-drying clothes this summer, as I ain’t spending shit.

Because I don’t spend, ever, on anything but food (or the crap we’re all burdened with like water & power bills and taxes). Because I’m unemployable, except for Takimag, the greatest employer ever, but nothing lasts forever as much as we might want it to, so I save every penny like a mutherfucker (mutherfuckers being historically famous for thrift), as I need to know I can survive if I’m rendered jobless.

I have crippling hypertension, and it’s healthier for me to hoard money than to be spendthrift and worry about survival every night.

That’s why the beers you buy me make a real difference in my life. Thank you.

My kitchen sink’s been busted for two years now. Fine, no problem. Potable water I get from Arrowhead, as I did even when the sink was fine (I don’t drink tap). Non-potable water I bring in from one of the bathroom sinks.

A few days ago I spilled some water carrying it from the bathroom to the kitchen, and I slipped in the puddle and went down HARD, thankfully on my knee. Small abrasion, no harm done. But I realized that if I’d cracked my head open, it’d be weeks until anyone noticed (when no new columns appear), as even my in-person friends know how reclusive I’ve become.

So for whatever it’s worth, I’ll try to be more careful.

That Substack poll I did a week ago yielded surprising results. Of the four choices, the Holocaust was the topic you guys LEAST want to read about. Great! I appreciate that. I hadn’t wanted to queer the results by telling you in advance what I hoped they’d be, but they came out exactly as I hoped they’d be.

The problem is, the fucking Holocaust is why I’m unemployable. I’d love to stop talking about it, but I need to cling to even the most minuscule hope that at some point I can be freed of the defamatory “denier” tag and get another book published.

What else do I have to look forward to? I’m not complaining; I chose this life. I faked my death so as not to get married and have kids (imbecilic Holocaust deniers have transmogrified that story into “he faked his death to get away from the JDL,” but no – it was a woman; the JDL guys were already long dead). I don’t have kids by choice. I live alone by choice.

But it would be nice to think that one day Amazon ends its ban of me as an author.

So, I still gotta write about the Holocaust occasionally, though I’m grateful that that’s not what most of you are here for (recently a denier retard’s been haunting this Substack, and it reminds me why I miss Twitter, like, not at all). I appreciate that so many of you voted for “Entertainment industry silliness.” I’ve been wanting to do a column about my years in casting, a profession that’s the true canary in the Hollywood coal mine regarding the deleterious effects of Covid and racial wokeism. I’ll try to get to that in the next month or so.

Thank you to all who voted in the poll!