ARNOLD THE SQUIRREL
★★★★★ (2 out of 5)
Hello, and welcome to my week-by-week review of everything in the world. Today I am reviewing Arnold the squirrel.
When I was in grammar school we had a pet squirrel in the class. Our teacher, Mr. Schafenberg had captured the squirrel on the playground. We named him Arnold because that was the name of a classmate who had died earlier in the year. Mr. Schafenberg was driving Arnold (the child) home after a track race and somehow Arnold got stabbed. The police never figured out what happened. When Mr. Schafenberg found the squirrel, he was convinced it was Arnold reincarnated.
I don’t remember a lot about Arnold the Squirrel but I found this review I wrote of him at the time. (I apologize for recycling old material.) I’ve edited only to correct spelling.
Arnold is ugly and his fur smells. He poops pellets and they look like weird raisins. Whenever I try to pet him he runs to the corner of his cage. I don’t think this is really Arnold who died. If it is dead Arnold I don’t know what his problem is. Today I got to school early and I saw Mr. Schafenberg kissing Arnold and singing to him. I don’t know why he likes this squirrel so much, it can’t even do any tricks.
Arnold the Squirrel died a few months later, coincidentally the same day Mr. Schafenberg hung himself in the gym.
Please join me next week when I’ll be reviewing Paul Simon.
4 responses
Damn. The dead boy, the dead squirrel, and a suicide? This is only slightly more depressing than my adviser telling me today I have to re-take Statistics.
G’Day Ted, where is the review of agriculture? I have a paper due on that topic and was waiting all week for your review to get a lead. All I have now is a Michael Pollan podcast which is kind of long and too detailed. I feel sorry for your teacher though, maybe he got sick of marking people’s papers, a bit like Mizzgiven’s adviser maybe? In fact, Mizzgiven, if your adviser gets a squirrel, drop Statistics before you become one. G
Dear Ted: It would be really cool if you set up some kind of way for us to vote on things that you could review. Naturally you wouldn’t need to give our votes any thought when it comes to what you actually choose to review, but at least we’d know what other people are thinking about and see where it takes you.
In the meantime, one time a squirrel climbed into my apartment bathroom window. It was cuddling in the bathtub with my cat. A guy who worked in the building came up with a baseball bat and scared it back out the window. Or maybe he killed it and flushed it down the toilet. The cat had to go to the vet to make sure it didn’t have rabies or anything. It didn’t. But I think the cat always missed his friend after that. If it happened today, it probably would have gone viral on YouTube. But it was the 80s, and YouTube was only a sparkle in its mother’s memory chip.
this is a game of psychology, it made for an incredibly satisfying game.
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