I love
squirrels. Usually. But not today.
Yeah, yeah, I don't daylog but I'm meming, wank wank, but I had to log this, and it doesn't belong anywhere else. We live on the edge of a wooded area - lots of squirrels, a fox, one time we even saw a deer eating the flowers in someone's driveway. The squirrels are cute, funny, we feed them bread, sometimes biscuits (one time we fed custard creams to a fox, it was hilarious, he buried one in a custard-cream sized hole in the garden). But they've never been at all threatening. I mean, how could they? They're squirrels. They're tiny, fluffy, cute little things.
Anyway.
So I've just left the flat, heading to the train station to go to work. I'm in a hurry, so I'm doing that half-run half-walk that terminally unfit office shinyarses like me do, huffing and puffing as if I'm actually doing something strenuous, and up ahead of me, on the path, is a squirrel. I smile. It's really close, I've never been that close to one before. It spots me coming, and skitters off. It stays on the path though, as I'm running for the train, so for a minute, it's like I'm chasing the squirrel. I start laughing at the absurdity of it all, and my day is made that much brighter.
But then the path curves, and the squirrel has nowhere to go. It tries scrabbling up the fence, but its claws can't get any purchase on the plastic. I guess it felt trapped, cornered or something, like a rat. That's the only explanation I can come up with for what happened next.
With nowhere to go, the squirrel turns to face me. It snarls, actually fucking SNARLS at me, a squeaky, hissing noise that would be funny if it wasn't suddenly a bit weird and scary. I stop, worried.
And then it comes for me.
I yelp, turn around, and run, I'm that freaked out.
So the squirrel is now chasing me. How fucked up is that? I'm being chased by a squirrel, and I know it's stupid and silly, but for some reason I'm shitting myself with fear, running like the hounds of hell are after me and not some tiny, chittering squirrel, all my friends are going to laugh at me when I tell them, what must all the neighbours think, looking through their twitching net curtains, they think I'm bloody weird anyway because I don't make them fucking cakes or try to fuck their ugly inbred mutant daughters, but hey, if I survive at least it'll make for an interesting writeup, all these thoughts are running through my head until the final, most terrifying thought of all - what the fuck is the squirrel going to do to me if it catches me?
Just as I think this, the squirrel runs up a wooden fence, into the trees, and vanishes. I can still hear it hissing angrily. I pull myself together, gather my thoughts, and head to the station, just missing my train.
That's not the weird thing.
Last night, I had a dream about squirrels, that they were eating my face off. Sure, it's not quite the same, but isn't it a bit odd that I would have that dream, the night before a scary encounter with one?
That's still not the weird thing.
The weird thing is, last week I was reading some prophecies by some olden times fruitcake called Moloch, can't remember the webpage and I can't find it now, but there was a line that went something like "The raven shall bown down and afear the nut gatherer", or "The raven shall be afeared of the nut gatherer", something like that, I remember laughing at the time at how silly this whole prophecy thing is. But check it out: the nut gatherer is obviously the squirrel. The raven? That stupid fucking node called Ralph that keeps getting chinged, for some bizarre reason, like that other stupid fucking unfunny writeup that I won't dignify by linking to it. The definition in Ralph is "name given to the raven". My handle here is RalphyK. The raven (Ralph, RalphyK), shall be afraid of the nut gatherer (squirrel).
So not only do I have a nightmare about squirrels the night before getting attacked by one, but some mad old geezer hundreds of years ago predicted the whole fucking thing.
Now that's weird.