Wrath might be the wrong word, but it’s the one under which murder falls, and this is a story about a horrible, nightmarish slaying. Since this incident there has grown within me a monstrous infection of despair, and perhaps the act of writing about it will lance it, drain it, and rinse away the clear white fluid of guilt.
It started off as a fairly typical day in sunny L.A. County. The streets were not yet stained with the crimson life-fluid of the innocent, but they failed to sparkle anyway because they are made of dried tar.
As usual, at 6:30 in the morning, my alarm woke me, and as usual I started my morning with a sincere, somewhat pathetic, attempt to figure out what possible difference there could be between lying in bed living a literal dream-life and getting up and doing something with myself. Even now, in total consciousness, I’m not sure I’ve worked out that little conundrum.
I went through my morning stuff, and took a shower. Pedro stalked a potato bug through the kitchen as I savored my Special K, one of the first enjoyable experiences of any morning. He ate the thing, so it shouldn’t have surprised me that this was to be a day in which tiny creatures died at the hands of merciless killers.
I got into my car. I turned the ignition. I backed out of the driveway. I headed to work. I like to wake myself up with a little diva action, while I drive to my job in the morning. I was probably grooving along to some Beyonce when this ran across the road.
Now, I’m a decently intelligent individual. I can work out simple word problems, I can analyze literature, I can write a serviceable sonnet in 10-15 minutes. But I do not know how my gene pool has survived long enough to produce me, because my fight-or-flight instinct is approximately ten blue whales (about 1/5 mile) below the curve. Just today, I almost rode my bike into my friend at the beach, and rather than utilize the “use the brakes” technique, I subscribed more to the “jump off the bike” school of thought. My toe is now bleeding and a striking fuchsia-violet.
My reactions in dire situations are poor, if not destitute.
So it should come as no surprise that when that little squirrel jumped in front of my car, my idea was “If I don’t swerve at all, chances are the chassis of my car will just pass right over him and he’ll be fine.”
Basically, I decided to careen full-speed at the squirrel, in my Toyota Matrix, expecting this to be the life-saving strategy that he needed. I kind of timed it so that I drove over the squirrel immediately after he had passed the line of my right-hand set of tires, so hopefully as the screaming-monster-Toyota-dragon rolled over him, he would be somewhere in the safe middle, away from the deadly tires. This did not work. I am a murderer.
As I said, however, wrath is quite obviously the wrong word, here. First, I’m not sure if squirrels are important enough to God to merit Sin status. Second, the slaughter of that squirrel was done with all good intentions, if that makes sense. But it raises an interesting question: to what extent does it matter what our intentions are, when an entire LIFE has been removed from this planet? If you think about all of us living in our own worlds, with our own perceptions, feelings, and experiences, when any of us dies, that’s like an entire world disappearing like the flame on a candle.
Here, I make my pithy little tribute to the squirrel that I killed. Perhaps, in properly acknowledging him, and acknowledging my own responsibility for his death, both he and I will be set free. I like to imagine this is so.
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