Of mice and men’s undies

We’ve passed the shortest day of the year and bit by bit the sun will climb the sky again. To celebrate I went shopping for a mousetrap and some underpants. Both proved instructive. Some years ago I wrote in praise of a gadget called the Better Mousetrap. I said that the house of its inventor should be identifiable by the path that the world had beaten to its door. Well, by rights that path should now be thick with weeds again, for the mousetrap I’ve just bought is better than the Better Mousetrap. It is proof, if proof were needed, that technological progress is a fact.

The new mousetrap looks a bit like a toilet, but it is the toilet of Freudian nightmare: the seat has teeth. To bait the trap you lay a scrap of peanut butter in the bowl then raise the seat in the manner of a gentleman. The seat now looms over the bowl, toothed like a shark and held by a hair trigger. The toilet of Freudian nightmare has become the Dunny of Damocles.

When musine whiskers so much as brush the peanut butter, down comes the seat at a speed that would be the envy of the guillotine. The musine neck lies over the rim of the bowl. Death is instantaneous. Through the hole in the seat you can see the musine death-mask. It didn’t even have time to look surprised.

I have placed my new trap in the garage within earshot of my study. Every now and then, as I am working, I hear the click of death and I thrill to the sound. My cerebral cortex, the advanced brain where language lives, is overwhelmed by the bloodlust of my mute amygdala, still stalking the savannah of prehistory. I stop being Joe the writer, wrestler with words, and become Herne the Hunter, beater of chests, and I go to inspect my kill.

It’s a reminder that, though technological progress is a fact, human progress is a myth. We are as we always were. Hence everything, Trump included. And it’s much the same with underpants. I favour a brand called Alpha, size 2XL. Beside the word Alpha on the waistband is a symbol of enthusiastic masculinity. In the fashion trade my look is known as plump-ironic.

But when last week I went to replenish my stock of Alpha underpants, my eye was drawn to a novelty pack of seven. Each waistband bore the name of a day of the week. I fingered them, I thought a bit and I bought them. Ever since I have wondered why.

I have not yet reached the stage of not knowing what day it is, and if I had I doubt I’d solve the problem with my underpants. And besides, what sort of sadsack would wear Tuesday pants on a Tuesday? Would you trust such a man to babysit? To walk your dog even?

So what got into me? Why did I buy them? Again I think the answer goes way back. On the garage floor of prehistory, days came and go like waves upon a beach, unnamed and unrecorded. There is neither past nor future, only the tyranny of the eternal present.

The old amygdala is fine with that but the cerebral cortex cannot cope with such futility. It craves purpose. It wants to remember and to plan. These things come only with language. In the beginning was the word and the word was Monday.

I bought the underpants out of some dim sense they might bring order to my world. They’ve not delivered, of course – as I write it’s Monday; I’m wearing Thursday – but musing on such matters helps the winter pass.