Poison apples may be my best shot at the Best Writer award

I’m not the best writer in the state. I’m not even second best. 

I’m third.

Considering how many writers live and work in Michigan, third place doesn’t seem too bad, right? That’s what I keep telling myself.

But somehow, at the Associated Press awards banquet I attended with co-worker Cory Smith earlier this week, that third place felt like the “Almost Winner” prize on the old Bozo television show; you know, that prize they gave to the spazzy kids who couldn’t get the ping-pong ball to land in a bucket from 14-inches away. Not exactly a mark of distinction.

My Reality Check column (the one you’re reading now) got a Big Number One, all the proof I needed that the AP judges are brilliant discerners of talent and excellent arbiters of all things literary. So why didn’t I win the Best Writer award, the one I was lusting after like a teenage boy lusts after the head cheerleader?

Well, apparently, there are two writers who are better than me. This is difficult for an egomaniacal narcissist such as myself to accept. Suddenly, I understood exactly how the Wicked Queen felt when her magic mirror informed her that Snow White was not only fairer, but also younger and more likely to land a handsome prince.

If I knew how to make poisoned apples, I would send a couple to the two writers who placed ahead of me, thereby increasing my chances of taking the top spot next year. But I don’t have that recipe.

Oh, sure, I could try to write better this year than I did last, but that seems like a lot of work and anyone who knows me at all can tell you “a lot of” is exactly the type of work I avoid whenever possible. Besides, what if I did work really hard, wrote my little heart out, and then STILL lost to those other two writers? 

I’d be tempted to try that apple myself. So that’s out.

To compound the anguish I felt over my Almost Winner status, my co-worker took home an unheard-of FIVE out of six first place awards for things like Best Multi-Media Journalist, Best Feature Photo, Best Video, and Most Inflated Head of Any Journalist in the Room.

Cory’s a hard guy to hate, but I did my best anyway, as I sat there clutching my third place certificate in my sweaty little hands, all the while worrying that his stack of engraved plaques might tip over and crush me beneath their ponderous weight. 

Yeah, yeah, I did get a first place for my column and any rational, normal person would be thrilled with that. Maybe if I hadn’t been sitting next to Cory — who basically pulled off a coup unseen since “Lord of the Rings” swept the Academy Awards — I might have felt better about things.

He’s my bud, though, so — as I did with the two writers who edged me out — I feel I should congratulate him. 

Here, Cory, have an apple.

Committing mouse murder should be quick and unacknowledged

There’s an old saying to the affect that if you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door. Like a lot of old sayings, this one is full of it.

A penny saved is still just a lousy penny. A bird in the hand is likely to leave a little “surprise” on your palm, while the one in the bush will never be a problem. All work and no play make one Bill Gates and filthy, filthy rich.

Old sayings are dumb.

But it’s the one concerning the mousetrap I find most disturbing, mostly because a few manufacturers (of mousetraps) seem to have taken it to heart, inasmuch as they keep trying to build a better mousetrap. When there is NO need.

The perfect mousetrap was perfected long ago. It consists of a small, wooden rectangle upon which is affixed a spring-loaded thingy that — when activated by the force of a mouse trying to chew stale peanut butter off another thingy (I apologize for the technical jargon) — snaps closed and provides said vermin with a quick and (I hope) painless demise.

It’s one of the world’s most elegant and lethal machines and I’m surprised it hasn’t been enlarged and implemented in human warfare. It’s doubtful a well-trained soldier would go after a suspicious dab of peanut butter, but put an apple pie or falafel in that thing and who knows? Wars could be won or lost according to which side had the better bakers.

But I digress, especially when I try writing these columns after my second glass of wine before dinner.

My point is, there’s no reason to improve on the “classic” mouse trap. It works, you can get four of them for a buck if you know where to shop and mice, for whatever reason, haven’t yet evolved to the point they can’t see the danger coiled up there like a python in that little spring.

Still, manufacturers, being the greedy jerks they are, keep trying to find more expensive, less effective versions of the mousetrap to sell to unsuspecting rubes like me.

Because of my cat, Friday — who is to mice what Arnold Schwarzenegger as “The Terminator” is to women named Sarah Connor — I have no rodent problem. But I did at my last house, which was over 100 years old and rife with rodent-friendly entryways.

So I set out traps. But not the good ol’ tried and true traps — the new-fangled “be merciful to the mouse” traps. The kind with glue, that capture the mouse but don’t kill him. (Or her. I prefer to think of mice I’m trying to kill as “him” rather than “her” because of my upbringing. In my family, we did not kill girls of any species.)

At the store, that seemed merciful indeed. In practice, it left me with a squiggling, wiggling, panicky, screaming (yes! mice scream) rodent that I was forced to dispatch myself. In person.

I am not emotionally equipped to kill a small, helpless critter unless driven to it by great need or great hunger of which I have neither.

I wound up taking the one mouse I managed to catch in a glue trap out into the woods and freeing it by cutting away the glue trap around it’s tiny, mousey feet. I have no idea if the thing lived or died, slowly and painfully out there in the woods with little pieces of glue trap still clinging to its feet, but the guilt will haunt me forever.

If they really want to make a better mousetrap, they should come up with something that completely atomizes the rodent to the point that the user (me) is unsure if a critter ever was even caught.

I want to kill mice. I just don’t want to know I’m doing it.