MB is out of town for the next several days. I always have anxiety the first night he’s gone — I mean, I already know I will barricade the bedroom door and load my gun tonight — but right now, I’m sitting here, eating a brownie and writing, all while cozy in my sock monkey pajamas. They comfort me. They make me think of my own sock monkey when I was a little girl, dear old Funny Baby, who lived most of his weary life with his tail wrapped around my thumb which I then jammed into my slobbery little mouth.
Oh, but not that the pajamas are made of sock monkeys. No. Let me be clear. That would be lumpy and give a person scoliosis, or worse, that acromegaly thing I’m always quivering in fear about. No. There are sock monkeys on the jammies. And they’re busy, doing various things, gettin’ it done: one seems to be drunk on a beach, sipping from some umbrella drink in a coconut; he’s the shiftless party monkey. You do not want to be around the drunken monkeys when they start flinging their poo, I tell you, based on, uhm, well, my vivid imagination of just how awful that would probably be. Another monkey seems to be bowling. Yet another is baking a pie, which I think we can all assume is a Poo-Fly Pie. Another one is driving a roadster and, uh-oh, watch out, another is slipping on a banana peel, pippa. I assume this is the drunk monkey moments after that coconut umbrella drink. Wow. The secret life of monkeys, right here, on my jammies. Who knew sleep wear could be so educational or that I could get so tipsy from one glass of wine?
Oh, true story: Several years ago, a student of mine who used to work at a zoo in the South told me about this one particular psycho orangutan in their enclosure. Seems he liked to chase and catch the squirrels that scurried about the enclosure, then bonk the poor squirrel’s head on the cement, knocking it out, and rush over to the nearby pond to dip the squirrel in the water until it revived. All so he could do it again moments later with another unsuspecting squirrel.
You know, do you really need to say “unsuspecting squirrel,” Trace? I mean, just how much do these critters suspect in general? Are they like little bushy-tailed Columbos looking at you with that one glass eye, always wanting to ask you “just one more thing” before they go? No. No. In my experience, they suspect nothing.
I mean, one assumes. One hopes. Well, one isn’t really sure, is one?
And …. I’ve just given myself the subject of my nightmare tonight.
Suspicious squirrels.
