The Nutria

During my single days in Austin, I ran around with a girl named Chris for a while. She was one of those people whom you meet and everything is just electric from the get-go. Hard to describe. It was intense, this friendship of ours. Worked together, hung out together, deprived ourselves of sleep together. She was exceedingly cute, and like any single guy who has a cute female friend, I wanted to fall madly in bed with her.

We had a couple of passing but frank conversations about our mutual attraction. She was living with a guy named Judd, who was either oblivious, stoned all the time, or both. But supposedly he was the impediment.

Still, one night Chris and I ended up down by "Town Lake," which for some reason is what the section of the Colorado River that passes through Austin is called. A gazebo sits by the bank. I'm sure some of you are familiar with it.

Anyway, it was about 11pm or thereabouts, and it was a quiet, cool night. We sat there in the gazebo, and I got that funny feeling in my stomach like every oblivious guy gets when it's clear to even him that an opportunity may soon present itself. Judd schmudd, I was ready to seize the reins and make one of my rare, possibly ill-advised moves on this girl. That is, I was going to lean awkwardly close to her and hope I didn't have arugula in my teeth.

But from the water came this SOUND, this awful splashing splorting sort of mucking sound. It took a minute of peering into the darkness to see what all the commotion was, but then we saw it: A 20 pound rat had emerged from the water, and was rooting around in the muddy bank, caring not a wit about me and/or my libido.

I stared at this critter, then glanced to my left to see the power plant closeby, and for a moment I considered the sci fi B-movie prospect that this was a mutant rat. Had to rule that out pretty quickly since Austin's is not a nuclear plant.

In truth, it was a nutria, a critter I'd never seen before. Turns out they're aquatic cousins of the rat, imported from South America by the guy who started Tobasco hot sauce. Had the little buggers in a pen, but a hurricane caused a flood that let them out and BOOM, they're spreading through the south like kudzu.

Pay close attention when I tell you that almost nothing spoils a horny, er, romantic mood like the sight of a cat-sized wet rat sloshing noisily in the riverside mud. Suddenly my best-laid plans weren't getting laid after all, and we left the scene still just friends.

A month later this girl named Kelli Thomerson moved to town. We'd dated briefly and quite unsuccessfully once before back in my hometown. We gave it another try in Austin and, 14 years later, we're still together, having been married for 12 this coming May.

Now, if the nutria had not deposited itself within smelling distance that night and I'd succeeded in kissing Chris, I quite likely would not have been single in order to go out with Kelli a month later. So really, it's not too much of a stretch to extrapolate the nutria's effect to the extent that I would not be married to Kelli today if he'd not been there that fateful night.

Explaining that one to the kids someday is going to be fun... for me at least.

***

Loathing the fact that I have to be at work today. I wanted to call in: "Uh... I have malaria. Can't work today. See you tomorrow."

So get this: Despite these facts:

I loathe this job
One, maybe two managers and the department director dislike me
I once slammed my fist on the desk during a review
I sit here for 40 hours a week with headphones on and talk to almost no one save for Hood
My phone is on "send calls" most of the time

...I'm set to receive my fifth achievement recognition tomorrow. See, despite all the negativity surrounding this job, I'm actually fairly good at it. This fifth doo-dad will get me a $50 gift certificate to someplace. A restaurant, I think. And considering how mgmt here feels about me, I fully expect it to be for Saul's House of Arsenic.

***

Just what the hell IS Neil Young's "After the Gold Rush" about anyway? Getting high and UFOs... well, it actually makes perfect sense now that I look at it that way...

***

Tuesday... ugh. Hang in there.