Once, sitting in my parent's kitchen, I watched a mouse drag itself across the floor. It was folded in half; a mouse trap scraped along behind it. Faint squeaking sounds flitted from its throat and its eyes blinked slowly. The whiskers trembled.

We had quite a mouse problem in that house. It was in the country; perched on a hill in a copse of trees surrounded by old farm fields. My father inherited the house and the fields from a doomsday prepper. My parents didn't want the property and tried to sell it for years--renting to irresponsible tenants in the interim.

I remember my mother receiving a frantic phone call from one of said tenants that a bear had broken into the house. "Broken in" was a generous term to the bear: the door was frequently left open and there was garbage on every surface--inside and out. No wonder no one would buy the place.

Eventually my parents gave up trying to sell and moved in. The tenants didn't leave for a while so we lived downstairs in a shared, single bedroom while they clomped around and yelled at each other upstairs.

On more than one occasion my brother and I we were waked in the night by my mother screaming about a mouse skittering across her bedsheets.

My father set up a bucket of water in the basement with a ring of peanut butter around the top and a little ramp to go from the ground to the lip of the bucket. The mice were meant to climb up the ramp, reach for the peanut butter and fall into the water; drowning.

We caught buckets and buckets of mice that way. My father would dump the bucket a little ways into the trees surrounding the house every morning. The clear water mixed with bloated mouse corpses caught the morning sun and glinted like diamonds.

At some point the tenants moved out and renovations began. Every opened wall and ceiling and floor revealed mouse shit and mouse nests and mouse corpses. They lived and died in that place.

We lived in that house for over a decade. Always, there were mice. Even as I sat in the brand new kitchen after dinner or breakfast or whatever time of day it was, there the mouse lay: gasping for breath and trembling with the approach of death.

My father disposed of the trapped, folded, dying mouse. I don't remember if he put it out of its misery or not. At any rate, it joined the others in the surrounding woods.

A mouse problem.

It seemed so obvious then: mice were bad and a nuisance and a pest and we must rid ourselves of them. These days, as I empty the traps in my own home and set fresh ones, I think of another problem I was told I had while growing up.

A purity problem.

It went something like this: I am an inherently evil being who will have feelings and desires that will fill my whole body. But because I'm not a grown ass, married man, these feelings and desires are wrong. Sinful. Malevolent. Not to be trusted.

So I was taught to set traps: 'keep your thoughts captive'. 'Bounce your eyes'. When the cute girl at school reaches out and your mind is blown because it doesn't feel real that she might think about you much the same way you think about her--shut it down. You can't act on it. Not without guilt and shame and eternal damnation, anyway.

Collect your sexual desires in a bucket, drown them, and toss their bloated bodies into the woods.

Have you seen a living mouse up close? They are timid, fluffy, shivering things. They look like they have about as much fortitude as a corn flake.

Problems.

How quickly and callously we label things.