Here’s a fragment that I started and hadn’t finished. Now I’m finishing it and adding part 2. Because the problem it laments continues…

Haven’t I written enough today already? 10K to completion of a novel draft, and then some malarky to a spunky monkey with a blog. But the gem of the past few days shall not go unblogged. The good lord in His infinite wisdom took the snarker Hithchens and the ranter Breitbart, and a vacuum occurred in the bloggosphere. I was writing a checque to a down on her luck muse when I noticed that there was another species present in my house. Me, I’m homo sapiens, light on the ‘homo.’ Mumbai and Chanel, they’re Felis  Catus, straight up. The interloper was grey squirrel, slinking around in that jerky way they do.

This reminds me of a scene from my past. I was in a no pets apartment in Rockville, Maryland, shacked up with a crazy Russian woman for whom I’d trashed my marriage. (Mistake. Me totally bad. She totally sexy, but totally nuts. And she had a kid.) So to spruce the boredom, I took to feeding the squirrels on the balcony. They like their nuts. I brought home a bag of peanuts and sprinkled a few on the little porch. I closed the glass doors and watched the squirrels que up to get the nuts. One would be on deck grabbing the nut, and another would be waiting on the branch for that squirrel to grab the nut and hop to the exit branch. Meanwhile, down on the ground, 3 floors below, the prior client would be munching on the just grabbed nut. While halfway up the tree, was the incoming, awaiting takeoff clearance. It was like the Dulles Airport of squirrel feeding. Soon, I was going through 25 pounds of peanuts in a week.

I decided to up the ante one afternoon. I made a path of nuts that led inside the apartment. I opened the glass doors, and waited to see how this would play. Sure enough, a squirrel hopped on to the deck and entered the living room. The squirrel in the ‘incoming’ tree hopped on to the deck, noting it empty. The squirrel in the living room noted that its exit path was now blocked, and that the squirrel on the deck was thinking also of coming in for the nuts. This is when it really got nuts. Squirrels can run around on walls as easily as they can run along the ground or up trees. If you didn’t know that already, you know it now. The two squirrels, trying to occupy the same squirrel space at the same time, flew into squirrel frenzy, making a racetrack out of the apartment’s walls. Things on the walls, such as clocks, pictures, Russian knick knacks, all of these things came off the walls as they were scrambled over. Total meltdown on Twinbrook Parkway until squirrel a exited through the open door, chased out by squirrel b. I never repeated that experiment.

So I was being respectful of my indoor squirrel. I was moving carefully, trying not to upset it. I closed it off in the room I knew it was in. I made a path to the opened back door. I locked the useless cats, who were sleeping through the squirrel visit, in their separate rooms. When I returned to the squirrel occupied room, the critter had vanished. It knew a lay of the land I knew not of.

So that was part one. It turned out that the squirrel is not visiting, it is inhabiting.