art by ivy babson
Imagine: it’s 9:41 am on a hazy, hot Sunday in the college hill section of Burlington. You wake up hungover and dehydrated in search of a cold beverage and some advil to start the day. You look around the room for your hydroflask and realize your drunk ass left it on the porch the night before. You stumble out of bed, open your blackout curtains, and stick your head out the window to find that outside on your porch the resident squirrel has wreaked havoc on your porch. beer cans were eaten for breakfast, the string lights from the christmas tree shop were for lunch, and the potting soil with moss was this ravenous vermin’s dinner . This squirrel is named Get and it ruins everything it touches.
Get received his name on the first day I moved into my apartment. It was a mere three months ago when I thought he was a cute squirrel that had a good squirrel life and would not be a bother. Well, you see, I was very wrong. On the morning of our first fight, my roommate and I were eating Honey Nut Cheerios for our breakfast and he kept trying to come at the both of us because we had bomb ass cereal, so we started yelling “Get!!!!” at the squirrel. For the rest of the summer I developed a tumultuous relationship with this large street rat. Get has eaten my solar powered lights, knocked over multiple of my citronella candles, leading them to break and has probably peed on all my North Beach towels. I know I am not the only one dealing with what I would call a crack squirrel and I would like to find about more about why they pull this shit.
You see, every college student in Burlington has dealt with some type of vermin-esq animal on a night out on the town. Example: last year my friends and I were stumbling home from a basement show in the old north end looking to get some KKDs to fulfill our drunken fantasies . We come upon a raccoon in a tree struggling to get down, hanging limb by limb. Would have expected him to be in a dumpster behind a local asian cuisine restaurant, but instead he was in a fucking tree. Why was he in a tree, he is supposed to be eating trash. Not normal behavior.
Another example of a squirrel on crack: A couple of weeks ago my friend woke up in her apartment to what appeared to be the scene of a robbery. All of her plants and food were knocked over and eaten by what seemed to be a human. She examined her kitchen and living area and saw that nothing was stolen, only a small scratch on the screen of her small window where a squirrel had broken into her home was found. How it got out was a complete mystery.
My theory to why they behave this way is not very conventional. So, at night the roaches, mice, squirrels and other vermin of burlington go out around 10:30 pm in a big gang and go and find some crack in the bottom of a dumpster. They disperse and over the course of the rest of the night and so on, they wreak havoc on burlington. This is why they do things like break into my friends apartment and make a mess on my porch.
The crack squirrels of burlington terrorize their citizens and need to stop their behavior. I have had enough of the vermin in this town and they need to stop doing so much crack. The real question is, what can Burlington do to stop this epidemic? Burlington can offer Vermin Rehab for our crack addict squirrels, mice, and racoon. The people of Burlington should also stop leaving their goddamn crack in the dumpsters and crevasses of the city, this way the vermin will not get it confused with some other tasty treat that is there. So residents of Burlington, I urge you to be wary of our pesky pests and voracious vermin, they do not come off as cute and fuzzy as they seem.
Categories: around town, art, ivy babson, mikaela oberlander