A few minutes ago, armed with only a broom, I went monster ape-shit on a mouse in our apartment. I have never willfully never killed an animal before.

Partly there is a primal satisfaction, 10 minutes later I’m still bristling and shaking with adrenaline. Virtually no guilt, which surprises me. At one point I had the mouse pinned and was working to channel my inner caveman to finish it off, I was looking for help from that deep remnant of prehistoric hunter at the foundation of our genes. “Be a man, be a man, be a man,” was recited under my breath several times.

The actual killing involved a series of frantic slapshots of the mouse against the front door. The now-unconsious mouse (I didn’t check for a pulse) was then scooped into a small cardboard box. The box was closed, shaken vigorously and sealed in a plastic grocery bag. That grim package was then sent nine stories down our building’s trash chute.

The decision to kill the mouse was made because I’m a parent now. Lila is crawling and I was not about to have her sharing our floor with filthy, potentially disease-ridden rodents. And it’s not like you can just ask them to leave or give them a portion of the house to call their own. Years ago in another apartment I spent a lot of time devising complex and non-lethal mousetraps. One caught a mouse within 15 minutes of setting it up. Somewhere I have many, many hours of videotape of those traps in action. Those mice were released in Tompkin’s Square Park.

This whole episode will probably give me nightmares for quite some time.