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unlucky woodchuck
Wednesday, May 16 2018
A fat unfortunate woodchuck wandered through the yard this afternoon and Ramona caught it unawares. I heard her making the kind of noise she only makes around wild animals and saw the woodchuck stuck in the yard, rearing up on his hind legs trying to defend himself, but Ramona grabbed him anyway and started shaking him. I shouted "No!" but there was no stopping her. By the time I got down to the yard, she was choking the last of the woodchuck's life away, so I gave up and let her finish the job. She lay next to his corpse in the yard for the next serveral hours and only later began eating him. She seemed depressed and emotionally detached after that, as though she was alarmed at her own vicious behavior.
When I went to check the mail, I saw that the house across the street was for sale. There isn't much turnover of housing stock on the south end of Dug Hill Road, with the exception of that one house. In the 16 years we've lived here, no other nearby house has changed ownership except that one, and this would be the third time in that span of years that it would be on the market. The guy living there now owns the hip but vegan-unfriendly restaurant Cucina in Woodstock, and recently he broke up with his long-time girlfriend, a young hair dresser who has a tween girl and two tiny yappy dogs (one of whom was named Charlotte). The girl and dogs have been gone for weeks, and the place is mostly quiet now, save for the endless contractors and lawncare professionals that that property attracts, no matter the owners. Whoever buys it next will probably continue this tradition. Such a person automatically has to be wealthy, as the house never sells for cheap. When I checked Zillow, I saw its listing price was $599,000.
I posted the listing in the opt_random channel of the workplace chat, joking that someone in the Optimization department should come be my neighbor. This led to some good-natured joking about things that are known about my neighborhood by members of my team, particularly the bus-turnaround that the local redneck population uses as a gun range. Inevitably I posted an image of the Arabic-festooned flyer I'd made that I'd intended to post down at the bus turnaround (but never had). The flyer claims that the bus turnaround is now the "Fathiyah al-Karim Gun Range" administered by an organization calling itself the "Ulster County Jihad Society." It then posts rules such as "Alcohol is forbidden," "Fire only on targets," "Never fire towards Mecca," Maintain Western (infidel) appearance," "Speak only English in local dialect (if mastered)," "No excess of facial hair or exotic cologne," "Place NRA and 'patriotic' stickers on vehicles," "All forms of pork are forbidden," "Sodom is forbidden," and "No practice during Ramadan." There is also a schedule, with "small arms" on Sunday, Thursdays, and Saturdays, full automatic rifles on Mondays, mortars on Tuesdays, improvised explosives on Wednesdays, and prayer on Fridays. The idea was that locals wouldn't want to be mistaken for jihadis trying to blend in, and so would find some other place to shoot. The flyer is always a hit in my remote workplace, so we all had a good chuckle about that. But I noticed that Geetika (my boss) wasn't joining in on the love.
Later, after I'd taken a bath, she politely asked that I remove the image of my flyer from the channel. She said she understood that it was satire (technically, it was more complicated than satire), but that, after the fallout from my "Don't be a Moron" document, she didn't want to take any chances. So I removed it, though I also told Geetika that she was overreacting (she didn't respond to that comment). I also complained about having to do that in wad_random (which includes all of the people who used to be in IT and does not include Geetika), saying opt_random is a "no fun zone." That's sad, because there's this advertising specialist named Dani who is in opt_random but not wad_random, and she totally gets my humor (and also likes the music I like and other things), and I wanted her to be able to see wacky things I've made like that flyer without worrying about Geetika's overly-cautious instincts. Perhaps we can get the others in wad_random to agree to admit Dani. She'd totally fit in there, though the only other person besides Geetika who is in Optimization but not wad_random is Steven, and I think he would be a bad fit for the wacky darkness we cultivate there.
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