By Scott King
I have morals. Five of them. I forget what the other four are, but numero morales uno is (drumroll please): NO MARRIED MEN, of any gender or orientation. None of y’all are allowed to get up in this piece.
It’s bad karma. It’s also wrong.
I was walking in the park with a friend. I know I make reference to my “friends” in this column a lot, but it really was a friend. It’s not a euphemism or a placeholder term for an alluring stranger, in this case.
Anyway, this friend, he invited me for an afternoon walk on my writing day. I figured what better source of inspiration am I going to find on this lovely sunny spring day. It’s snowing in Vermont right now. Let’s do this.
We walked and talked a little bit; then we sat down on a bench. It was very Annie Hall meets Barefoot in the Park. I was wearing cute sneakers.
He was talking about his life. He said something along the lines of, “Blah blah blah blah blah MY HUSBAND blah blah blah. Blah.”
“You’re married?”
“Yes,” he said. “He lives in Chicago.”
“What are you doing here with me in the park, then?” I was miffed.
“I get lonely,” he said.
What kind of Janet Jackson Velvet Rope solipsistic bullshit is this??? I thought.
I took a breath. “Let’s walk,” I said. I thought it might help distract us from a life of crime.
“Oh look, skirrels!” he said.
What?
“Skirrels! Look at all the skirrels!”
It took me a minute. There was a language barrier between me and my married friend. Tres endearing.
After a couple of repetitions and rounds of sounding it out, I realized he was talking about the furry, horny, nervous crackheads otherwise known as squirrels. They don’t run the world, but they definitely fill up a lot of space running across the park, frantically and without purpose.
Kind of like men. Kind of like married men walking skipping and jumping through life in search of recreational cock. It’s like the bonus room in a bougie suburban house that is already stuffed with a plethora of unnecessary rooms.
No, I will not be your man-cave, bruh.
I was kind of pissed. He’s a really sweet guy, but how dare he just assume that I would be his side piece?
Just then, a duck walked up to us. Quack quack quack. All that quacking. It reminded me of a more subtle episode of The View. One of the early ones where Barbara was out with a concussion and Meredith Vieira took us all to a higher plane.
Then the duck turned around. Since we weren’t giving it any bread or attention, it just stuck its ass in our face and said fuck you, bitches, I’m in charge here. Don’t you wish your girlfriend was Scott like me?
You might. But you can’t. Because you’re married. Like a duck to water. Or a squirrel to nuts.
Nuts make squirrels crazy. So does coitus. That’s why they’re always running around frantically. They are either looking for nuts or something to hump on the side of a tree. In plain view of all the nervous pedestrians.
I ran over a squirrel on the way to work once. I was like; I guess that squirrel’s not getting any nuts today. RIP, squirrel.
Squirrels really are the perfect metaphor for men. Married men, especially. Not all of them of course. Just the ones who are always thirsty, no matter how many nuts they have in storage.
Please don’t get in my way, squirrels. I’m already late for work.