Shut Your Beak…

I have a dream. Not a particularly important one about African Americans joining the middle-class, or anything like that. Just a dream in which the misery inflicted upon the USA – and various other countries – by our current ‘President’ is wiped out when social misfit Barack Obama travels back in time and punches Katherine Harris in the face, just before she cheats countless black Floridians out of their votes.

She misses her bus, Al Gore is elected, and Obama returns to the present, less nerdy and probably a nice, electable shade of white.

Pretty cool, huh? There’s a movie there somewhere.

Since I became a ‘contractor’ at my previous employer, my life has been replete with the time to do stuff. Fun stuff. In fact, basically, I’ve been skiving off for about three months now.

Most of that time has been spent worrying about trivialities such as money, food, children and Family Guy. But, as someone once said, fuck that. So I went to do something else.

Something, ideally, dangerous.

Not that I have a death-wish. I just wanted to do a few things now that I probably won’t be able to do if Jen and I ever get married, or we move to bloody Florida, or I drop dead tomorrow.

So, in the last week alone, I won decent money in Las Vegas playing high stakes no-limit. Nerve wracking stuff.

I ran – and half killed myself – climbing 960 feet in the first one and a half miles in Death Valley, before continuing too long and having to ask French people for cold water on the way home. How embarrassing.

I jumped out of a perfectly good aeroplane at 12,000 feet above Moab, and it turned out that skydiving brought out the foul-mouthed Scotsman in me.

I caught up with some friends in Aspen, and went a little off the deep-end on beer, wine, vodka, Red Bull, Jagermeister, Scotch, and milk. Not sure how dangerous that really was, because I can’t remember if the squealing brakes were for me or for a prairie dog.

And in a couple of days I zip off to Mexico to, errr, talk to a friend about timeshare.

Any way you look at it, this is two weeks of excellent adventure.

Best of all, my unavailability at my ‘job’ might cause them to disengage from our relationship. If so, the old time/money equation does begin to figure, but the former has suddenly manifested itself as the more enjoyable of the two.

Wake up… time to die.

Nah. I just thought that would be a cool pay-off, but even though the sentiment is right, y’know, because I’m doing dangerous things that could hurt me and so on, because I have time off, there wasn’t another Blade Runner reference in the entire story, so it wasn’t actually that clever.

Sorry.

Until recently, I kept a list of the three things that kept me sane. Each of them provided a foundation for normality in my life, a platform just a few inches above the water that ensured I didn’t have to go off the deep end.

Of course, this is a lie. I did no such thing. But if I had, then the three rock-solid truths in my life might have been:

1. Any Will Ferrell movie can be condensed into a two minute trailer which will explain the plot, feature all of the jokes, and provide all the confused shouting you really need.

2. Only enormously fat, ghoulish people who, as I have mentioned elsewhere, are on a sinister quest for discount Cheese-Wiz, shop/roam the aisles at Wal-Mart.

3. Dead squirrels do not extricate themselves from my pond and wander off into the wild blue yonder.

Yet my faith has been shaken by the crumbling edifice that was point three.

Before I went on vacation… dead squirrel in big hole in the yard where badly-constructed pond used to be.

On returning from vacation… no evidence whatsoever of said deceased rodent.

For the life of me, I cannot imagine what happened. Assuming that it didn’t clamber out of its own volition, I am left with the conclusion that someone – or something – removed it.

A local cat? Desperate to feast on rotting tree-hugger? Or a lazy and not particularly picky fox?

No, I think the answer is more devilish. I think the other squirrels hoisted the victim out of the hole and took him to a secret location where they buried him. I think the bushy-tailed little fuckers are a lot smarter than they appear, and gather and intern their dead compatriots so that they don’t fall into the hands of scientific researchers, who might discover their apocalyptic plan and foil it.

Just look at the squirrels in Charlie & The Chocolate Factory – evil little beasts intent on murdering children. Or that squirrel on YouTube that has injected its malicious subliminal message into millions of viewers.

Think I’m the first to notice? Think again. Go to this site to see the corroborating evidence against these murderous tree-dwelling denizens.

We must unite against them, take down this lunatic fringe of the rodent world, dash their plans for… why am I writing this?