Tippy the Thirsty Squirrel

If I didn’t have to fuck, I would move to Montana.  Get a cabin; get some acreage.  Out there you can own a pond.  Maybe; I have no fucking idea.  But I’m pretty sure you can get a place on  a fuckton of land with a breathtaking view of snow capped mountains and possibly a creek running through it where you can flyfish, if you’re into flyfishing.  Huge meadows, maybe lightly forested, that bloom in the spring with tiny delicate wildflowers. Songbirds massing on trees to pick berries in the fall; stopping through on their way to Panama.  Elk.  Deer.  Wolves maybe.  Bears.  Maybe one nosy and mischievous bear with whom you are constantly in an arms race as he finds more and more fiendishly clever ways to get into your garbage and you find more and more Rube Goldbergian ways to keep him out, and you secretly respect and take delight in such an adversary until one day he mauls your dog and you have to just shoot him.  Then he becomes an awesome rug for your hearth.  His face snarling in the firelight, even though in life he just looked a bit curious and dumb like a gas station attendant who hasn’t done math in fifteen years trying to figure out a piece of long division.

If I didn’t have to fuck, I’d move to Montana.  Cold clean snows, a big garden; big blackberry patch like you would find in the woods when you were a kid and come out looking like the Passion of the Christ.  A wife who would home can these berries.  Scold me for eating too many fresh; that’s a jar of preserves you’re gonna miss in the winter.  I will look up guiltily with my lips purple and give her one of those chimp grins with seeds in my teeth.  Incorrigible. She’ll playfully bat me with her wooden spoon, which she has boiled to prevent botulism.  My wife is no home canning slouch.

Little towheaded kids running around, swimming in the creek; I have given them a very serious lecture on staying away from rattlesnakes.  Dad is usually jovial so it’s a little scary when he’s serious. The rattlesnake is more scared of you than you are of him.  Freezer with an elk in it.  My wife is sick of elk jerky; we all are.  We are sick of elk stew and elk fritters and elk salad and elk whateverthefuck but it’s going to be the better part of a decade before we are done eating this god damn elk.  Elk chili.  She is sick of conscientiously braising game meats so it’s not like biting into a fan belt when you try to eat it.  Just once she would like to fry something in a pan for five minutes and be done.  Just once she would like to order some fucking Chinese, but it’s the god damn Pony Express out here.  There are no Chinese people in Montana.  A guy would have to haul those little paper cartons over a mountain pass on a mule to get Chinese food here.

But yeah… just a cabin in a big field surrounded by flowers and animals.  Big clouds at sunset; big thunderstorms.  Once I find a woman I’m going to take her away there.  Live on a little compound.

That’s what I want.  A wife and towheaded kids and we can talk to each other and then do the rest of our talking on the internet.  Because the things that make me happy are the sky, plants, and animals.  The squirrel who drinks from my cat’s water bowl, who tries to get her paws on the rim and her little head at water level but just ends up tipping the bowl over and drinking the runoff– work beats the shit out of me, and I’m always hung over, but this ne’er-do-well thirsty squirrel makes me smile every time.  A hummingbird drinking from a flower.  Hawks circling and they do that “screeeeeee” just like on TV, echoing through the canyons as though life were returning from a commercial break on Northern Exposure.  Things that make me smile are squirrels and flowers and hawks; things that make me miserable are offices and traffic and phones.  Liars and hacks; hustlers; loud pushy cruel Hollywood jerkoffs.  Give me a rural mountain pastor with a secret small penis humiliation porn stash every time.

Now all I need is the wife.  Someone who shares this dream with me.  Wake up with the dawn, look out at the meadow, smile at our towheaded kids, fresh trout from the stream for breakfast; live a simpler life.  Someone who wants to get rid of this corruption of the spirit with me and sit on the porch and sing and talk in the twilight; you home can the berries and I’ll protect you from the wolves.

Tags: montana, squirrels