A Little Squirrely

I just remembered that at the beginning of my run yesterday, I was heading down the sidewalk when I saw a squirrel noshing on some grub at the edge of the sidewalk. As with most squirrels that have been semi-domesticated by living in housing developments, this little fella didn't seem to care that I was barreling down the sidewalk at him, but I figured that he would bolt long before it got awkward or uncomfortable. Animals generally get the hell out of the way at a pretty consistent distance. For instance, a deer will leap into the woods anywhere between one hundred yards and twenty yards. The smaller the mammal, the closer you can get, while blackbird or a robin will fly away at around ten to fifteen yards; a dumb-ass turtle dove, however, will let you get within twenty feet, and an asshole pigeon stays just long enough until you think it's not going to fly away. Squirrels are usually somewhere between a bird and a pigeon...usually. As I approached the squirrel, it didn't seem to pay much mind, and as I got even closer, I started to worry that it was going to do that frantic, unpredictable squirrel-spasm dance where it darts in front of the car changing direction sporadically until it ends up passing underneath your car unscathed or sometimes not. It's a little scarier when you're not surrounded by tons of steel, especially when you get so close to the squirrel that you can see its cataracts, and at the last second it looks up with smokey gray, glazed-over eyes and resorts to the aforementioned, panic dance. Am I afraid of a squirrel? On the record, no! Off the record, I started juking and high stepping into the grass for what would have been a spectacular five-yard touchdown run but was actually an embarrassing, shameful tantrum that required me to quickly regain my composure and run the remaining 3.9 miles like a normal human being that wasn't scared by a cute little rodent with a fluffy tail...and demonic eyes.