sonnetscrewdriver:

About ten to twelve years ago, I was stuck in a cycle of working October to January and then spending the rest of the year unemployed.

One of the things I would do to pass the time during the lean months was visit my friend at his flat every Wednesday. We’d go to the local supermarket and buy a bottle of bourbon and a whole chocolate birthday cake and have the same awkward conversation with the cashiers where we had to sheepishly admit that we weren’t actually buying them for birthday-related reasons every. Single. Time.

So one week, I get to my friend’s town early because hey, I’m unemployed. I only have to be somewhere at a specific time once a fortnight, so my perception of time and punctuality is completely fucked. So I decide to pass the time until my friend gets home from work by sitting in the park just around the corner from his flat.

Now, the squirrels in this park have a pretty sweet gig going on, whereby they get fed all the goddamn time by humans, so they’ve come to regard any human as a potential food dispensory and will have absolutely no problem indignantly climbing up you if you sit still for long enough without feeding them.

At the time, I had very long braided hair down to my waist, and I usually wore a long coat to cover my disgusting human body. I sat down in the park, and the benches were the kind where there’s a bit to rest your back on, a bit to rest your butt on and a gap in between them, so I sat down and swept my coat’s tails through the gap like some kind of fucking concert pianist and then settled back to watch the coots in the pond absolutely kick the shit out of an army of filthy marauding seagulls.

About five minutes later, I feel something tugging on my coat, and then JESUS FUCKING CHRIST THERE’S SOMETHING IN MY HAIR AND IT’S HEAVY AND SHARP AND WHAT THE FUCK IS IIIIIIIIIIIT???!!!!!??!?!

It turned out to be a squirrel who’d decided to climb up the back of my coat, presumably in the hope I had a bag of peanuts balanced on my frigging head or something, but had FUCKING SOMEHOW gotten itself inextricably tangled up in the interwoven tumbleweed supernova that was (and is) my hair.

Interesting side note: These are not the circumstances I personally would have chosen in which to learn that the grey squirrel has a surprisingly human-sounding scream.

So, from my perspective, all I know for sure is that there’s SOMETHING going apeshit in my hair in the region of the nape of my neck, scratching the fuck out of my neck and shoulders and screaming like a solid gold death metal hellbastard. So I, not unreasonably, am on my feet, whipping my head around to try and dislodge it, or at the very least see what the fuck it is and whether it might be poisonous, and that’s when some kind of fucking counter-directional pendulum effect kicks in and I cop about 500g of terrified arboreal rodent travelling at speed square on the bridge of my nose and I hit the fucking floor like a sack of shovels, because while squirrels may look all fluffy and adorably podgy, those little fuckers are nearly entirely solid muscle. Or maybe they are typically little squashy bundles of furry butter and I had the bad luck to get the squirrel equivalent of fucking Ivan Drago or something.

So there I am, lying on the floor like I’ve just been fucking shot, nasal cartilage newly reconfigured into the letter Z and blood pouring out of my nostrils like a broken toilet in Elisabeth Bathory’s house. My squirrel friend has managed to extricate itself from my hair and run away, apparently none the worse for reducing the central feature of my face to a jagged red pulp with the broad side of its torso.

And the people.

Oh, the people.

The surprisingly large number of people who all bore witness to my Sciurus carolinensis-flavoured embuggerance.

They are absolutely killing themselves laughing.

One woman literally pissed herself a little bit. And the worse thing about that was that she still came out of it looking better than I did.

So I haul myself to my feet, knowing that there will ever be a tiny corner of a local park that will be the last eternal resting place of whatever had remained of my dignity, and groggily stagger ‘round to my friend’s house to clean up and try and force my nose back into a shape that doesn’t have any 90-degree angles in it, resigned to the knowledge that I will most likely end up being some kind of local legend.

AND THE WORST FUCKING PART about all of this, is that occasionally I will tell someone this story, and they’ll go “…is that true?” like WHY THE FUCK WOULD I MAKE THAT UP??! I DON’T THINK IT’S AN EXAGGERATION TO SAY I DON’T COME OUT OF THIS STORY LOOKING PARTICULARLY FUCKING SUAVE, DO I?

This isn’t one of your ‘and then the whole bus applauded’ kind of stories, where the object of the story is to make the person telling it look like some kind of memetically witty badass. Like, what kind of social kudos could I possibly hope to gain from a story wherein an animal roughly the size of my foot managed to make me look like I’d decided to fight Tony Jaa using only my fucking face?

But let me just add that if I see any of you fuckers making sarky comments like ‘it’s true, I was the squirrel’, I’m going to invent the world’s first (I’m guessing) squirrel-firing crossbow and then hunt you down like the fucking Predator.