slowpencil__notebook_

ice age

(NOTE: The following is an semi-accurate recreation.)

When confronted with the purported foolishness of saving yet another scrap of junk, our protagonist defends himself thusly…

“How can I explain my behavior? Have you ever heard of a creature called a squirrel??”

“You mean a packrat?” our naysayer mutters under her breath.

“Well a squirrel runs around collecting nuts and other goodies that it thinks it will need as a regular, ongoing preparation for winter, right? Well my winter just hasn’t come yet! I mean I’ve had cold spells every now and then, but that winter is going to come. Does that make any sense?”

”...”

“And what about the summers?” inquires a clever young Dutch man.

“Well, they are quite lovely here in San Diego. But a squirrel does have to eat a bit during the summer as well as the rest of the year. Some of the food is used, I mean I do use some of this stuff, but one has to focus on preparing for the winter.”

“So what was this thing that started all this? What were you talking about?” asks the bright-eyed Belgian post-doctorate mechanical engineer.

“Oh this little can thing here with the little plastic resealable lid.”

“And what are you to use this thing for?”

“Um, well, You can put things in it and… for like art supplies and… well, it won’t spill because it has this lid and it’s just neat. And I have a bunch of these that I’ve saved, sort of collected already…. hmm. ”

”...”

Staring at the tiny can in his paw, our protagonist mulls over the realization that he prevents slipping from his lips or from the grip of his worry-ridden mind: A squirrell with a constant and regular cycle of seasons is not troubled with changing trees. Our friend’s ice age will not have time to arrive before the squirrelly fellow is driven from his roost and faced with gathering his goodies and seeking out a new tree.

1 August 2002, 14:07 ::

does this mean that squirrels are obsessive compulsive?

or is this to defend an affinity for (need i say obsession with) warehousing found objects, potentially useful items, old magazines, plastic containers and action figures, and so forth?

— rmckaggis 2002-08-11 15:34 #
Funnily enough, just this afternoon as I was laboriously rearranging our bedroom in the best Amy Gehner fashion, a brother squirrel grabbed up the cute but fucking unreliable Michael Graves telephone (plucked off the sale endcap at Target). I commented that it could go in the next Goodwill gathering, but brother squirrel said no, it would be a collectible someday, so he’d be putting it in a box somewhere upstairs (next to the Mt. Olive Herald 1982-87 archive and under the bag of empty film containers).

[shudder]

— elbee 2002-09-21 20:30 #

commenting closed for this article

< back | next >