Feeling squirrelly.

We city slickers tend to think of spring as mating season, but of course that's silly; the reason we see baby critters in the spring is because the mating went on when the weather was getting cold.

I'm told the deer are getting frisky, and they certainly are acting weird. One buck started stalking my dog, until my dog noticed and chased him away. Despite the largeness of my pup, this was no weight class mismatch like a heavyweight vs. a welterweight; this was like a heavyweight vs. the baby child of a flyweight. But the huge deer was quickly vanquished nonetheless.

According to one fellow who sounds like he should know, squirrel mating season does not begin again until December. But when I spotted this ex-squirrel in the street, gone to join the Choir Invisible, my first thought was: He had to be chasing a dame.

We know what it's like, right boys? You're humming along on the telephone wire, doing fine; next thing you know there's some dame, and you rush out into danger like a moron, and---

Maybe I'm projecting.

What made it so on-target, though, was that I found this poor critter on the street outside a funeral home. I would have liked to have gotten a picture of the squirrel in the foreground and the funeral home in the background, offering undergraduate-level picture art expressing Irony and Juxtaposition and Deep Thoughts. But I didn't because:

A) I would have had to stand in traffic;

B) To get the squirrel and the funeral home in the same shot would have rendered the squirrel an unrecognizable speck at the bottom of the shot;

C) In these litigious times, the funeral home might have sued me for making them look sloppy about their space. (If you see a lovely, well-kept home in any American town it is probably the funeral home.)

I'll leave you with the classic song "Three Squirrels" by Joe Williams (not this one) (no, not this one either) (or him) (don't even think about him) (this is the one), courtesy of YouTube, in memory of all our nutty little gray friends. Stay safe out there, boys!