I'm Afraid of Squirrels

written by the vassar comikaze

The roots of my fear can be traced back to third grade. I was playing Mario Kart with my friend Sebastian when I noticed that the thumb he used to hold down the a-button had an abnormally short nail. I asked him what happened, and he explained that he was walking down the street eating a hot dog when a squirrel jumped on his hand out took a bite out of his thumb. Naturally, my bullshit alarm went off. I’d heard enough wacky stories by then about Olympic ping-pong playing cousins in Maryland to know a lie when I heard it. But then he bolstered his claim with irrefutable evidence; he asked his mom to back him up and she did. I was stunned. It had never occurred to me that a squirrel would front like that.

Fast forward seven years, and I’m working as a counselor at a sleep away camp. It’s about six in the morning when I feel something hit my back and wake me up. I turn around to see that a squirrel has perched itself on my shoulder: I freak out, the kid’s flip a shit, everyone is screaming and scrambling to get the fuck out of there while my friend and I are trying to hit this thing with a broom stick. We were like Agent Smiths trying to whoop Neo’s ass, and just like in the Matrix he was fucking us up. He sprung from bed to bed like The One, leaping over our brooms and causing me to emit girlish shouts of city kid fear.

Thankfully, I made it out of there alive. Not so thankfully, I hate being around squirrels and this campus is infested with them. I just don’t trust the little bastards. They’re jittery, they make creepy sounds, and they eat nuts god damn it. If this was Oregon Trail I’d shoot them for four pounds of food and feed them to Hezekiah. But this isn’t Oregon Trail (it’s never Oregon Trail!), so instead I have awkward moments with them when I walk to breakfast in the morning.

I’ll be half awake, strolling along when a squirrel jumps out of a garbage can and lands two feet from my shoe. He’ll just stand there eyeing me, contemplating whether or not he should make the secret squirrel call that summons his brethren to rush my ass. I swear to God they can tell I hate them. Sometimes they even look over their shoulder and give me an evil look, gnashing their teeth. But that’s only when no one’s around. Why can’t they be more like the groundhogs? All groundhogs do is waddle around looking for a good time. Could you hate this? Fine, he looks like he’s conspiring. But the groundhogs here are nice, I swear!

Getting back to squirrels; I hate them, I wish squirrel cancer on them, but the sad truth is that they’re not going away. We’re helpless to stop them. The one thing we can do is make their days here less pleasant. Now, I’m not proposing that we all gather in the quad and have an old fashioned squirrel beating. But if you could throw a stick at them every once in a while, I wouldn’t judge.