Squirrels! Inspired by... Squirrels!

Aaron gave me a creative writing exercise to stimulate my writing. I wasn't originally going to post anything with profanity, because, well, who knows if my Dad will randomly decide to re-visit my blog on a whim one day. Don't want to shock the old man!

But as those odds are pretty slim and as my creative writing almost always contains profanity (the exception being my fairy tale of course), I've decided to just surrender it to the fates and post my creative writing.

Tonight's task- write a story that contains the following three things:

A Non-domesticated animal
A book
Non-mechanical tool

Here's what I came up with!

*Disclaimer* These creative writing ventures are rough-drafts, impromptu and just off-the-cuff, they will never be perfect, they are 'rehearsal' for writers.

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Squirrels.

The bane of the yuppy casual summer gardener. Those fidgety furbags, those brazen bastards, those sneaky sons-a-bitches.

See squirrels aren’t too much of a problem for seasoned veteran gardeners, oh no, because a seasoned veteran has long since passed that moral threshold of what is and is not considered ‘humane’, at least when it comes to mother-fucking squirrel mother fuckers.

But yuppy gardeners, the novice weekend warriors who decide to go as green as popular trend dictates, the ones who nod emphatically at Oprah’s assurance that growing their own produce will be better and taste better and make them feel better about their white, suburban guilt? Those are the same folks who are careful to buy organic, emphatic about fairly-traded, and who obsess about “cruelty free”.
They refuse to live off the tortured souls of their animal brethren. They devote their bleeding hearts to bleeding their pocket books dry in the endeavor to be eco-conscious and kharmic-ly ahead-of-the-curve.

Until they meet and square off against one of mother nature’s cutest looking douche-bags and general ruiner of your positive energy output. The god-damned squirrel.

Somewhere in the back of their habitually aloof yuppy brains these casual first-time garden dabblers made the comfortable assumption that squirrels eat nuts, frolic about in bemusing squirrely ways and bring bemused smiles to one’s face as one sips chai on the back patio, curled up in the sunshine with the latest vegan cook book under one’s all-natural canvas sun-brella made by Himalayan nuns, the profits of all sales going toward the upkeep of their blind-children orphanage somewhere near Nepal.
But squirrels are not some dewey-eyed, fuzzy cuddly incarnation out of a Disney film put on this planet to gambol about adorably for the purposes of our wistful viewing pleasure.

They fuck things up. They fuck up your plans, your hopes, your dreams for your grand summer garden. They eat everything you want the most. They purloin your strawberries, abscond with your tomatoes, contaminate your pumpkins, thieve your prettiest blossoms, shit in your lettuce, trample all the basil (and you were going to make a caprese salad for brunch today!), dig holes in your snap pea beds and generally wreak all kinds of havoc everywhere.

But they don’t stop there! They won’t be satisfied until they somehow tear a hole in your way-too-expensive all-natural canvas sun-brella from the nuns for the orphans in the mountains, until they knock over your over-priced artisan garden ornament purchase at your local non-profit fundraiser, harass your high-strung miniature pure-bred carry-around-in-a-faux-leather-handbag-dog into fits of frenzy, and inevitably find any and every way around all your clever squirrel-proof bird feeders and eat not some of, but every single morsel of organic, fair-trade, all natural bird food purchased with the hope of having a story-book like population of larks and chickadees and bluebirds flitting around your summer haven. They’ll also tweak off the sweet nectar in your hummingbird feeder- for which you overpaid, because do you know what that special nectar is Yuppy Gardener? It’s sugar water with red food coloring.

But the yuppy gardener will inevitably be impotent in their rage. They will fume and feel vaguely betrayed by these cuddly little cuties—not believing that they could be such complete assholes, but left with devoured strawberry patches as irrefutable evidence to the contrary. And the yuppy gardener will inevitably ask themselves “but how do I stop them?”- it will seem a task not dissimilar to stopping a wave from breaking upon the shore.

Because the answer isn’t pretty.

Oprah and Martha don’t get into the nitty-gritty of gardening. They focus on all the exciting bits- the planting and the sprouting and then the harvesting and the delicious recipes for your bountiful yield! They never seem to caution: Oh, and watch out for those jerk squirrels, they can be real mother-fuckers!

No. This yuppy will be ill-equipped for the task of “dealing with” meddlesome squirrels. They will want to, in their barbarian heart-of-hearts, they will want to take a club or an axe, or a hammer, or any other primitive tool and bash the little fuckers into proverbial smithereens. But they will not, can not bring themselves to violence. They reconcile themselves to the truism that “that’s just what squirrels do.. heh heh heh, that’s just squirrels being squirrels I guess!” and with a fixed but too-tight smile they will go out and buy some yuppy gardening book to seek answers. Cruelty-free, liberal, progressive answers that somehow persuade the squirrel to abandon their crime-wave against the garden and turn to more useful and productive occupations.

When the book fails to yield results they will buy expensive sharper-image type gadgets, high priced, high-tech and highly rated online, designed to dissuade squirrels but never harm the squirrels.

When this endeavor too, inevitably fails, the kharmic-ly balanced, compassionate vegan will begin to resent and loathe and fume and plot violent things against the squirrels. They will fantasize about the hammers and knives and also poison and traps and they will salivate.

And they will do none of it. They will surrender their harvest to the bullies, having wasted hundreds of dollars in seeds and fertilizers and pots and trellises and shovels and god knows what else Martha stewart convinced them was essential for their garden, and they will invest an equal fee into shopping at their local farmer’s market instead and get their caprese salad that way.

But they will never again smile at the precious caprice of frolicking squirrels. They have been bested and that wound will sting for a long time to come.

Fucking squirrels.