MY PARKINSON’S DIARY
MY PARKINSON’S DIARY
EMPTYING THE CHANGE PURSE
Wednesday, February 11, 2015
January 22-23, 2015
Putting my money where my mouth is, I reckon, and giving you crap. I hope not anyway, but willing simply to start typing and see where she goes. Because if I wait for the muse to be in town I'll wait a lonnggg time. Is there any greater sin than boring your reader? I would typically think not, but it could be that not emptying the contents of the change purse that is your mind on Thursday morning 10:36 could rival it.
So what do we have here? Any thing worth looking at more closely? A silver Franklin half dollar? The sentence "It's Bonny" from the opening story in Jane Gardam's chronicle of English country life, The Hollow Land? The way I found myself saying "Bully, Bully" to Gus yesterday in the voice my brother Richard used to taunt the family Beagle, Duffy, when pretending to act as bullfighter? Nope. None of those, I'm afraid, will suffice for an item worth examining in greater depth. All righty then, the gangsta squirrels of Dewey St. it is.
You see, it's like this: when I walk Gus at noontime, about four blocks (of twelve total) in, we come around the corner onto Dewey St. and about two or three houses in, there is this pine tree with a bird feeder that those rascally squirrels have adopted as their own. I suppose I might provide a bit of background here about how stone-cold crazy squirrels make Gus as a general principle, but really, is that really necessary? I'm just going to speak for Gus here and say that the little pricks deserve to die, each and every tail-twitching, run-in-circles one of them, but none more so than the little vagrants who frequent this particular pine tree.
And what is their crime you ask? For what reason have these wovable widdle wodents earned such eternal enmity? Simple: they don't give a shit. Which is to say they completely ignore the dog which has obviously gone into total stalking mode at the mere sight of them in the yard. No, they just rumble their fat asses around in a bunch of fucking bird seed, for crying out loud, and it's as though they're saying we don't give a shit about you, barking creature walking by the similarly ineffectual man, we got fat to put on, so we can sleep (almost) all winter.
Which is exactly the grounds on which I call them out as November yields to December and December to the shortest coldest days of winter, and we see their candy asses less and less. "That's right you big, tough gangsta squirrels of Dewey St.," I will say as we have gotten to the point of the year when they can't be bothered to come out of their nests. "That's right, sleep it off, you fat fucking fur balls, my dog and I are gonna take a walk right here in the middle of winter, but that's OK, you have a nice hibernation. Don't let us interrupt you."
We'll show them won't we, Gus, I'll say, much as Milner says to Toad at the close of American Graffiti. "Yeesh, what a night," responds Terry, and you would almost think for a minute there that they weren't doomed. But that's a piece of change from the coin purse that will take us far from where we need to go, which in this case was just a series of paragraphs from A to B to C to D to E and OUT.
“I'm just going to speak for Gus here and say that the little pricks deserve to die, each and every tail-twitching, run-in-circles one of them, but none more so than the little vagrants who frequent this particular pine tree.”