snail stomper, squirrel hurler

I made the move to Burbank last weekend, and let me strongly recommend never moving your entire life to the Valley in a Honda Civic. The damn thing won’t accelerate when I have too many pairs of shoes in the back let alone 900lbs of books, clothes, and furniture. It also didn’t help that it was POURING the entire time I was dragging IKEA furniture piece by piece from my second story apartment. Not only was everything waterlogged, but the garden snails decided to congregate on the sidewalk for their annual “mill around on the sidewalk and tempt fate” party. As a result, moving sounded like this “ahhh, this furniture is huge and heavy, but I can mana ::CRUNCH:: ge. ::CRUNCH:: ::CRACK:: ::CRUNCH::” It was nauseating.

But I made it, and while unpacking I found several rented DVD’s I thought I lost. Blockbuster charged me a small fortune for these movies and for some reason the words "you're destitute" flashed through my brain in such a persistent pattern when I found them that I decided to drive to my old neighborhood for a credit on my account.

So I’m driving back to West LA and it’s at this point, while stopped at a crosswalk, that a man walks across the street with a cup of coffee in one hand, his morning paper in the other, and a dead squirrel poking out from between the pages. This raised several questions: Why does this man have a squirrel hanging from his morning paper?” Will he eat the squirrel for breakfast? What kind of breakfast can you make with squirrel? Does it taste good in oatmeal? What if you use a lot of brown sugar? Does he do this every morning? Has he been fattening it up? Did he wait till Sunday so he could bludgeon it with a bigger paper?

Squirrels are rather popular these days. My internet-savvy co-workers showed me a video clip called “squirrel hurler”. In the clip, unseen nature lovers-- I’m going to go out on a limb and speculate they're bored male teenagers-- build a small catapult at the edge of a lake and load it with food. The unseen nature lovers wait for a squirrel to wander onto the platform and release the catapult. I’ve overheard several people watching the clip, and the first thing out of their mouth as the squirrel hurtles toward the water is always “can squirrels swim?” There’s a tense moment after the splash and everyone breathes a sigh of relief when it pops up, dog paddles (squirrel paddles?) to the edge of the pond and sprints into the woods.

Maybe the man crossing the street hunted and killed his Sunday paper squirrel in the hopes of testing his own animal hurler... an ocean version perhaps?

And then the light changed, as lights in intersections often do, forcing me to leave the man, the squirrel and all my unanswered questions at the corner of Barrington and National. I think I'll miss West LA.