I wasn’t a fool. I went into this whole thing fully informed: you do not sing out of your range. Don’t even try. It’s not funny to sound bad, it’s just awkward — for everyone involved. Awkwardness and other people sounding bad had, in fact, been my main reasons behind avoiding karaoke for all these years in the first place.

“You should come with us to karaoke tonight!” Nick said. He had since quit working to become a full-time partier, but occasionally stopped by to use the wireless. “Every person you think is totally cool will be there. Also, Sharlene and I will be singing Meatloaf’s “I Would Do Anything For Love, But I Won’t Do That” as a duet. And we might choreograph a dance to go with it.”

“Uhh . . .”

“Oh, and it will be in a private room.”

“A private room? Like in Lost in Translation?”

My eyes clouded over with charming scenes of midnight sparkling Tokyo, sparse dialogue, strong drinks and Bill Murray crooning into a microphone as a group of beautiful blonde and black-haired twenty-somethings giggled.

“Yeah, like in Lost in Translation.”

I thought about this. I thought about this long and hard. And then I realized, you know, if you sing “Crazy” by Patsy Cline you can’t go wrong. You could sing any song by Patsy Cline and basically be all right — I mean, you sing along with her in the car all the time and sound amazing — aaaaaaaand you know all the lyrics! Convenient. Years of research had shown, Patsy Cline was totally in my range.

“Do you think they have anything by Patsy Cline?” I asked.

“Dude,” he said, “they have, like, every freaking song.”

My roommate’s always been the one afraid of the mice, not me. I’ve openly mocked her about it. “Hey,” I’d nudge her jovially like a quarterback, “I uh, I noticed that your cereal box seemed to have been thrown in the sink with your bowl and spoon, what’s up with that?” She’d mumble something about maybe she thought she saw a mouse when she was in the kitchen this morning, and so she’d just chucked her breakfast materials and ran.

“Haw haw,” I would say.

I’d check our humane traps, giving them a little shake and nudge to check for the weight of a body: I took a live one in my gloved hands and set it free in the park. I planned on naming them witty, carefree names: Beasty, Lucretius, Joyce Carol Oates. I thought they were just adorable and frightened, small, harmless, doe-eyed.

And yet, somehow, alone in our apartment tonight and packing up my things, when I opened the sink door and saw a mouse skitter away from the garbage can, I did not react as if it was adorable or frightened. I recall my mind processing these reasonable thoughts: “look, there is a small, furry mouse. It will not hurt you.” But then suddenly I realized I was letting out a blood-curdling, Looney-Toons variety scream and jumping ten feet in the air.

I have never screamed like that before in my life. It was an authentic scream, it came from the heart. It was the kind of scream that, in the wild, said to other mammals in the vicinity “I am being murdered: come quick and help, or flee with your children.” I stood there for a moment afterwards in a kind of shock, adrenaline coursing through my veins. I could still feel the sound of it echoing through my body. “Christ.”

Thankfully, we are in Boston, and no one — not the mother downstairs, or the boys next door, or the people across the street whose car I helped move last December — questioned a thing. I resumed packing.

I’d always thought that people who went on whale watches were suckers: inexplicably compelled to pay twice the cost of zoo admission, just to see one lousy animal. And not even the animal in its entirety, just whatever the damn tease chose to show — the arch of the back, a flip of the tail.

No thank you, I thought. I’ll take my twenty-five dollars and make one hundred quarters, to put into the feed dispensers for the goats at the petting zoo.

Oddly enough, all it took to change my mind was the sound of them: that mournful bass echoing through a thick sea. I first heard it in a radio piece about Humpback Whales a few months ago, and actually had what they call (and, for the record, have copyrighted) “a driveway moment” in front of my desk. I sat there with headphones on, staring at my computer screen with unseeing eyes. The sound conveyed such massive power and sadness! I imagined a forty-foot long shimmering grey mass of flesh gliding evenly beneath endless seawater, the small grey eyes heavy-lidded and unfocused, as its giant pink maw floated open soundlessly. What could it capture in such a thing?

Two summers ago, I’d been on a sailboat on my way to Cape Cod, and I’d never even thought of them. We’d spit cherry seeds over the side of that tiny, rocking boat, and their red meaty shells had drifted slowly down, down. Maybe one of them had bonked a whale in the head. If the whale had noticed, and had become angry, maybe it could have torpedoed its way up from the dark cobalt waters in a whirlwind of destruction, soundlessly open that maw, and chomp! Our tiny sailboat gone, as if it had never existed. Somewhere unseen, a seagull would caw in our memory.

Adventure! Intrigue! I made it my mission to go on a whale watch as soon as possible.

I keep meaning to post “my whale story” which isn’t even so much of a story (in the sense of Something That Happened) as it is . . . I don’t know, Raffi on an acid trip. In the meantime, tangible things: pictures.

They’ve all come to look for America.

You can see more pictures of the awesome LaSalle family on boats (and — hey! — even one picture of a part of one whale) here.

I have a fantastic idea for a movie, and I just had to write you. I think it’s really up your alley. Are you ready for this? Here’s just one of the scenes that I know would really grab you:

So it’s a black, starless night in New York City, and a man and a woman are becoming acquainted in front of a dingy red apartment door. They seem to be waiting for something. The woman is repeatedly knocking, and they are staring at that door like strangers in an elevator: overly focused but affecting an air of aimless distractability, their eyes suddenly following the slight movements of lint on the floor, water dripping down the stained walls, then back to that door again, over and over.