Home Of The Black Squirrels

Awright, folks, got a doozy for you.

1. To understand, we need a background in current events and the architecture of Castle Bedlam. The "Doom Room" is simply the downstairs bedroom in the finished basement; it earned its name when I moved here, and we put the cats, Doom and Pocky, in there and let them get acquainted with the natives via the crack under the door.

2. Earlier this week, Berni was disturbed to hear what she thought was something alive in the stovepipe, the chimney pipe for the downstairs woodburning stove. But the sound went away, and she went to work and forgot about it. I was a bit disturbed to note when I got home from work that the stove door was standing wide open, and the door gasket had been clawed loose... from the inside. Still... there were no footprints. The cats didn't seem especially perturbed. There were no gory little corpses anywhere. Whatever it was, it'd probably gone right back up the pipe, right?

That was Thursday.

Today is Sunday.

3. At one point today, Berni's washing some dishes, and I'm standing in the kitchen talking with her... but over the sound of the water, I am hearing odd noises. Sounds for all the world like an angry squirrel. It took a while to hit me. I glanced downstairs, and through the Doom Room's open door. Sitting on top of a sealed storage bucket is a squirrel, blackened by soot, cursing like mad at Pocky, who is staring a hole in him. "Ah... Berni..."

She cut the water off and came and glanced, and uttered an expletive.

I cautiously went downstairs, shooed the cat out of the Doom Room, and closed the door. The squirrel dived down into the storage buckets. There was no way we were getting him out of there short of removing every storage thingy from the room ... and did I really wanna DO that? This poor little guy hadn't had anything to eat or drink for DAYS... ghod, had he been dodging cats, sneaking upstairs to get water from the dispenser? Or had he just been hiding in there for DAYS?

4. Berni was standing in the snow in her bathrobe.

"Honey... you can't stand out here all DAY..."

"If I don't, we'll never know when he leaves."

She'd opened the windows in the Doom Room, and was waiting for the squirrel to leave. I'd hung a blanket out the window, trailing down to the floor, so he'd have something to climb.

The squirrel wasn't having any of it, and remained ensconced in the great pile of storage buckets in the back of the room. Frankly, I was sort of afraid to go move them. Certainly, if he was desperate enough to cuss out a grown cat at seven feet, he was crazy enough to go for my throat if he was cornered...

She'd laid down a few peanuts, and hopefully, he'd follow the trail of them to the blanket and climb out the open window.

"But I have to stay here," she said. "What if OTHER squirrels hear him cussin' in there, and decide to come IN?"

5. Berni came in out of the cold. We had agreed that no matter how warm and toasty it might be in there, it was unlikely that outdoor squirrels would willingly enter a place that smelt of humans and cats. "We'll just leave the window open and see if he hears the outside noise," we said, "and climbs up and escapes. Surely, he wants out."

6. "Come take a look at this," said Berni, from the kitchen.

I came downstairs and joined her in the kitchen. She was staring out the window. "Does that squirrel look a bit... sooty... to you?"

There was a squirrel on the rear table on the back deck, the location of my painting station and the customary feeding point for squirrels. And sure enough, there was a BLACK squirrel sitting on the table, frantically looking around for peanuts and sunflower seeds...

Black squirrels are not native to the Denver area. Yet, here one was.

I carefully stepped outside, opened the tin, and grabbed a handful of sunflower seeds. Sooty watched me with some trepidation, and jumped into the tree as I approached. I dumped the seeds onto the table, and he was already back on the table eating them before I reentered the back door.

"Poor little guy," I said.

"I heard someone romping across the roof," said Berni. "Next thing I know, he's on the table, looking around. In the place where they usually expect to find food..."

A Taste For Pastrami

Thinking about this blogger I read.

He has a lot of food allergies; it interferes with him when he eats out, or goes to dinner with people. He was blogging about his fondness for corned beef, but apparently he can't have horseradish with it; it does awful things to his digestive system. The following day, he apparently got a zillion emails from people who apparently don't understand this; they thought that he didn't LIKE horseradish, or that he was exaggerating, and apparently half the world sent him recipes that they swore wouldn't hurt him, but he HAD to try corned beef with horseradish!

SOME FOODS MAKE SOME PEOPLE SICK, WITHOUT AFFECTING OTHERS. Apparently, a whole lot of people just can't get that through their heads. The blogger in question found this surprising and disheartening; he apparently expected People On The Internet to be different than People He Meets In Person. No. Actually, People On The Internet are so much worse.

This is no secret nor surprise to me. For YEARS, I couldn't eat pastrami. Not that I don't LIKE pastrami -- I do! But to eat a pastrami sandwich, deli style, the proper way, meant that I either had to suffer a bout of gurgling heartburn agony that verged on the volcanic, or make sure to take a slug of Maalox or something within a half hour of eating the sandwich.

I like pastrami. I don't like Maalox.

Moreover, I discovered this in my late teens, a time when MOST boys my age can eat damn near anything without ill effect... jalapeno, sausage, onion, pepperoni, and peanut butter pizza with Frank's Red Hot dipping sauce? No problem.

But a pastrami sandwich would put up a fight all the way down.

And I could make a list of people who wanted to tell me, "You just haven't had GOOD pastrami," or "I know a place that makes a pastrami sandwich that will magically not give you indigestion! It's just that good!"

And I knew they were wrong. And I didn't order the damn pastrami. And I insulted at LEAST one person by persistently REFUSING to order a pastrami sandwich while at this one place that served magical pastrami that never caused indigestion or heartburn, because I didn't have any Tums handy, and didn't feel like suffering the tortures of the damned just to show him he was wrong.

Some people just can't handle the idea that you are not simply "Them, But With A Different Face." That you are a whole different person, sitting there across the table, and that perhaps your thinking, your physiology, your philosophy, your spiritualism, WHATEVER, is not simply a reflection of their own.

And a percentage of these folks? They don't LIKE that. Apparently, being allergic to peanuts or horseradish, or simply being sensitive to pastrami... is ... WRONG. It's an INSULT. Or worse, an ABOMINATION. Or perhaps you're just delusional, and if you ever want to try REALLY GOOD pastrami...

Some folks regard otherness as the mark of the stranger. Or the enemy. Or the Devil. And sometimes, all it takes to mark you as The Other is a refusal to eat the damn sandwich.

Think about that, next time you hear someone complaining about homophobia, or transphobia, or xenophobia, or whatever. The fact that Doc Bedlam made someone angry once... for refusing to eat a damn SANDWICH, fa' potato's sake.

Some folks don't need a lot to get all het up. Your refusal to exist PROPERLY, in their eyes, is all it takes.

A Game Of D&D

I was thinking about a game of Dungeons and Dragons I played, years ago.

I was the Dungeon Master at the time, and was rather pleased with myself. I'd come up with an adventure I thought was interesting and challenging. Our heroes are visiting the city of Al-Wazuun, in the faraway land of Fateem, a place of genies and flying carpets, efreeti and court intrigue!

And the pasha had a problem he was rather hoping our heroes could help him with.

Y'see, towards the center of the great city stood a mighty minaret, a tall onion-domed tower, which had once housed a school of magic... until the wizard who dwelt there lost his mind completely, and NOW he'd cast a number of spells distorting space inside the tower... up might be down, north might be west, and a fruit hurled in a third floor window might come sailing out the front door. And periodically, he'd wander out onto one of the several balconies and hurl fireballs and lightning bolts at the surrounding buildings as punishment for transgressions imagined or real... mostly imagined.

The downtown and market districts were paralyzed. No one dared set foot outdoors. The pasha had sent in his personal guard to arrest or kill the wizard; the lucky ones escaped in the same shape they'd had when they went in. What was to be done? Can these brave and powerful outlanders, perhaps, with powers and wizardry unknown in the land of Fateem, enter the Tower of Madness and put an end to this chaos?

Well, the players were amenable. Wizards' towers tended to be rich and lootable, and the pasha was paying a reward. So they scouted out the tower as best they could, and began to make plans. Wizard analyzed the spells used to confuse the interior, and worked out that the best place to enter was via the top of the tower. Rogue prepared his sneakiest approaches and untangled his garrote, with an eye towards sneaking up and silencing the wizard. Cleric prepared healing spells, lots of them. Ranger changed his arrowheads from "armor piercing" to "maximum unarmored damage." Everyone prepped for tackling an insane wizard.

And Warrior thought about it and said, "Why don't we just level the building?"

Everyone looked at him.

"I mean, he's IN there, right?" Warrior continued. "No matter how he's tangled up space-time, he's IN THE BUILDING. If we just collapse the building with him IN it, he's DEAD, right? Drop a building on him, collect the reward!"

Everyone looked at him.

"That would make sorting out the loot sort of difficult," said Rogue.

"So? The pasha's paying us, anyway," said Warrior. "Either way, we can't lose, and the problem is solved."

"Seems like that would be sort of hard on the downtown district," mused Cleric. "That's a big minaret!"

"So we rig it to collapse straight down," said Warrior. "Controlled demolition."

"And how do we manage that?" said Wizard. "Do YOU know how that works? I don't. How, precisely, do you rig a building to collapse straight down? Particularly when one does not have access to the foundation or sub-basements."

Warrior paused to think.

I grinned. "Well, if you blow the building, I'll roll a die," I said. "Natural twenty? It collapses straight down. Otherwise, I check to see which way it falls. On a one, it comes apart and falls in three separate directions at once. Risky, I think."

"So we evacuate the downtown area," said Warrior. "Get everyone clear, THEN drop the building."

Everyone looked at him.

"And... how do you propose to do this?" I asked. "Going to go door to door? What about the people who refuse to move? Are you going to give them time to collect all their worldly possessions? Their mercantile stock? This is not a simple operation," I said. "And even if you pull it off, it occurs to you that the reward the pasha is paying is WAY less than it would cost to rebuild whatever the tower falls on."

"The pasha will pay for it," said Warrior.

"Mighty free with the government's money, aren't we?" said Ranger. "Is this just an assumption, or did you ask him while the rest of us weren't looking?"

"Look, it's OKAY," said Warrior. "We're COVERED! We're the GOOD guys, RIGHT?"

Everyone looked at him. And at that moment, a terrifying realization hit me, hard.

The game went on, of course. The rest of the group talked Warrior out of it, and a battle plan was adopted, and undertaken.

But in all the years since then, I have not forgotten about the Good Guys.

Y'see, Warrior... was operating under the assumption that to be the Good Guys was to be RIGHT. Because anything the Good Guys do, is by definition, GOOD. It's the RIGHT thing to do. Because the GOOD GUYS are the ones DOING it.

No matter WHAT the collateral damage.

And it wasn't the CHARACTER saying this. It was the PLAYER. Who BELIEVED this.

And on that day, a great deal of American foreign policy, politics, and religion suddenly made perfect sense.

The players successfully defeated the evil wizard. But the ramifications haunt me still.

Magical Mystery Tour

This is a deeply personal reminiscence, as many of you will infer by the fact that I'm sharing it with thousands of strangers right here.

I mean, a colonoscopy isn't supposed to be a big adventure. But I'm a man who's on the wrong end of 55, my doctor felt one was due, and as a fellow who's seen cancer hit unexpectedly on people who deserved better, I finally decided that this was a thing I needed to be responsible about.

So I made the appointment, and followed through. The worst part was three days of no solid food and a clear liquid diet. I mean, I know WHY, but that didn't make it any more fun; by day three, jello and chicken broth no longer sated the hunger, and I was operating on sheer willpower, grating irritation, and an intense desire to have this OVER with, durnit.

And I went to the colonoscopy outfit, wondering the whole time, "Is colonoscopies all they DO here? Wow. Someone sat in his science class in fourth grade and thought, "I wanna open a practice that charges thousands of dollars to do NOTHING but shove things up people's butts, all day long." Was THAT how it happened? And I doffed my duds and shrugged into the usual embarrassing gown, and they shot me up with anaesthetic.

And that was their first mistake. And, sadly, mine as well.

It's been years since I had anaesthetics, for fun or for reasons, and I'd forgotten my usual warnings, the ones I tell the doctors every time, and they either believe me, or they don't and find out the hard way.

Y'see, some anaesthetics don't work on me. And others do, but not very WELL. Some opiates, and some synthetics, affect me the way a glass of orange juice affects most people: not at all. They don't use Darvon much these days, for which I am grateful, because NONE of the Darvon family does diddly to me. Mom had some major back issues, and did I mention that I was born back in the early sixties, when the cure for prenatal back pain was a bottle of painkillers? A LOT of drugs just don't WORK on me.

But I had forgotten that. And I didn't tell the doctors. So they shot me up with happy juice, and had me count backwards, and it all SEEMED to work okay; I think I made it to seven before the world got fuzzy.

Trouble is, I woke up perhaps fifteen minutes later.

For a certain value of woke, that is. I lay there on my side, wondering where I was and if I cared much; I was comfortable enough. Except that my butt seemed to be hanging out to the wind. Hey, who were THESE people? What were they doing in my bedroom? Where was my wife?

A bulletin from Outer Mongolia arrived, and read: Yer at the colonoscopy clinic, fool. They shot you up with happy juice.

Ah. Well. Nothing to worry about, then. What's that on TV? It looks like...what DOES it look like? My eyes didn't want to focus.

The messenger from Outer Mongolia left with the question, and arrived about a week later: It's your colonoscopy, fool. You and the doctor and the rest of his team have it up on a big TV. You're looking at the inside of your own large intestine, as seen through a tiny probe at the end of a wire jammed up your bahonkus.

Another message showed up around then: You're having trouble focusing because you're high, ya nit. Yer high as a kite, high as a treeful of monkeys atop Mount Everest, passin' a dootchie and observing the view.

The view.

The view.

"Pan left," said the doctor. "What's that over there? Oh, all right, we're good, not a polyp. Note that on the log. All right, proceed."

I couldn't see the tech, but I could feel him doing SOMETHING back there, and the view in the pink cave on the screen straightened and began to move forward.

I was enchanted. "It's the PINK CAVE SHOW, starring the BIG PINK CAAAAVE!" I thought to myself. "Hey, are there goblins in there? Or a dragon? (mental snicker) Butt goblins and ass dragons, woohoo!"

The probe continued ahead, and I watched, rapt. I became aware of a woman sitting near my feet, typing on a laptop, as well as the doctor, up near my head.

None of them had noticed I was awake.

I became aware of how surrealistic the situation was... I was watching a TV show being broadcast from inside my own abdomen. It was like... taking your own head off to get a better look inside it! How weird was THAT?

With some effort, I could focus on what the doctor was saying. They were looking for polyps and anything that seemed precancerous, and not finding anything. That made me happy. Meanwhile, I was hypnotized by the grandeur of the mighty caverns we were all traversing together.... the USS Optiprobe, exploring the Bedlam Nebula... while Captain Doctor made verbal notes for Nurse Uhura, and Scotty was back there doing something with the probe to make it go...

I was overcome with the power of this technology, and its extreme usefulness in having a good look at something that's normally pretty hard to see... Going Where No One Has Gone Before! What was a large intestine FOR, anyway? Oh, yeah, said the messenger from Outer Mongolia, and he skipped off and brought back an old reference from college biology that snapped sharply into my mind: the large intestine's main job is reabsorbing water from fecal matter, conserving the H20 and recirculating it into the body, as opposed to wasting it on getting the stuff out of the body.

It was amazing. This little tube of flesh, not even big enough to manage a golf ball, but on the big screen, it looked HUGE, like a subway tunnel... no, like Carlsbad Caverns, majestic, dark, and secret, yet no further away than inside my own middle. No one had EVER been here, unless you count me, and even I'd never SEEN it before! And for a while, I lay there, enjoying the trip while one neuron nattered on about polyps, and another one recited a biology lecture from forty years ago, and yet a third tried to track what the doctor was saying...

Abruptly, the screen changed. The tunnel was blocked. What WAS that thing?

"And that's it," said the doctor. "Anterior sphincter. Trip's over, magical mystery tour is done. Log it and begin probe withdrawal."

I was a little disappointed. I'd been enjoying the ride. How long had I been WATCHING, anyway? But perhaps now Berni and I could go out and I could get some solid food. Magical mystery tour is over. A GUIDED tour. Good thing there was no tour bus (mental snicker)...

Magical mystery tour.

Magical mystery tour.

An obedient neuron ran off and retrieved the song from long term storage and put it on PLAY for me.

Did I mention that none of the medical team had noticed I was awake? I would learn later that I was the first person who'd ever woke up on their table.

"THE MAAAAAGICAL MYS-TER-RY TOUR IS WAITING TO TAAAAKE YOU AWAAAAY, WAITING to take you AWAAAAAA-AAAY!" I belted out, aloud, in my best Paul McCartney impression.

The doctor screamed, jumped, and dropped his iPad.

The nurse jerked hard, almost dropped her laptop, and barked a bad word. "Holy @%$#, he's AWAKE!"

I heard a crash behind me; I would later find that the probe tech had kicked himself backwards, startled, and had fallen backwards onto the floor, along with his chair.

Strangely enough, none of this seemed hugely important, although I did greet the medical team; good manners, after all.

At which point, I then continued with the rest of the song; it seemed important to do so, for some reason. "ROLL AAAAAAHHHP! ROLL AHP FOR THE MYS-TER-RY TOUR! SATISFACTION GUARANTEEEEEED!"

I do remember that a rather rattled doctor put his hand on my shoulder and assured me that everything would be fine, just fine; I wondered why he was pressing on my shoulder. Was he afraid I was going to jump off the table? Meanwhile, the tech scrambled to his feet and began reeling in the probe line. Meanwhile the nurse frantically checked the time stamps on everything. Nothing was wrong. By all rights, I should have been out cold. Instead, I was wide awake, albeit quite stonkered, and doing a Paul McCartney impression.

I do remember being a bit irritated with myself. I have a fine singing voice, but I don't sound a thing like McCartney.

I also can tell you now that if you held me at gunpoint, I couldn't remember all the words to "Magical Mystery Tour," but blitzed out of my mind that day in a colonoscopy clinic? Never missed a beat...