If you can read this then you have electricity...or a charged cell phone. El Derecho or whatever the hell the storm was called that came through the other day knocked out half the power to my neighborhood. I'm fortunate because we still have power, but for some dumb reason I went outside.
Stupid.
Maybe I felt sympathetic to the dozen or so people camped out in our lobby. The high rise building, my building, is the only one in the complex that has power. So now our lobby looks like a hipster homeless shelter with surge protectors sprawled out on the floor and everyone charging their phones and laptops. It's like a very whitewashed version of Hurricane Katrina. People sprawled out on the floor sharing Triscuits and drinking lukewarm Poms.
As a show of solidarity I went outside to get the true homeless experience. I opened my car door and fire came out. It was like Backdraft. I leaped sideways to safety and everything. I looked like Bruce Willis. He wasn't in Backdraft, was he? No, that was Kurt Russell. Well then I looked like Kurt Russell. He died in Backdraft didn't he? Okay, then I looked like Kurt Russell but with a Bruce Willis knack for survival. It's hot outside.
The man on the television says that it's 97 degrees with a heat index of 104. That means that anyone, anything and anyplace outside my air conditioned apartment is dead to me. We have enough food to last until... (I'm checking the fridge)...tomorrow afternoon. 4:28pm to be exact. We have enough food to make it until 4:28pm, maybe 4:29pm if I control my pretzel consumption. I'm not sure what we'll do for food after that. There's a family of squirrels who live in the tree outside my window. It's disgusting to consider, but I'm committed to my family's well being. Not enough to go to the grocery store in this heat, but enough to assassinate a squirrel.
How do you catch a squirrel though? Not getting eaten is kinda their thing. If I could slow one down... I hurt my foot on one of my daughter's mega blocks the other night. Those things are hard as hell. A well timed shot could possibly work. I'll open the window, toss the mega block into the tree. If I'm lucky, it'll land on the branch just as the father squirrel is leaving to go find acorns. He'll be so preoccupied with the daunting day ahead of him and the argument he had with his baby mama squirrel that he won't be paying attention and he'll trip on the megablock, stumping his toe. A squirrel with a limp is pretty much a squirrel without a future. Unable to hunt acorns, he'll begin to question his squirrelhood and plunge deeply into a state of depression. He'll begin looking for hope at the bottom of a bottle. Mama squirrel will leave him and he'll find himself standing at the edge of the branch pumping his squirrel fist at the sky cursing God for being born. His children now call another squirrel "daddy." Discouraged and completely checked out of life, he'll eat one last acorn and leap to his death.
I'll be waiting at the window with a net.
That takes care of dinner for Monday. I have no clue what we'll do for Tuesday.
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