His eyes, vast black ovals of liquid glass, tremble violently in his head. The squirrel stands erect, taut, unmoving, a taxidermic statue on the campus green, perfectly still, waiting, listening, until a bolt of nervous energy shatters his composure like a gummy bear dipped in liquid nitrogen. Twitches shiver up and down his wiry muscles as he scrambles forward half a foot and freezes again. His tiny hands flutter rapidly around the hard surface of a found acorn. He nibbles anxiously. Stop. Listen. Run. Eat. Stop. Listen. Run. Eat. He is constantly in motion. Like aggressive multi-taskers, cocaine addicts and children with ADHD the squirrel does so much without every getting anything done. A cycle of furious spasms propels him towards the base of an oak where he stops, straightens, tightens, quivering, obviously wired, strung out, on the verge of some great mental edge. This schizoid dance of his prevents from ever having to stop and think. It’s as if his mental filter, that great biological spam filter, has broken, burned out and all the vast minutiae of life come crashing into his overloaded cerebellum. He is constantly assaulted by raw stimuli. The scrape of a shoe on stone. The sickly sweet smell of grass. A distant voice. The lingering breeze. They pour directly into his cracked-open mind. Like a shark he must keep swimming, moving, going, or he’ll drown.
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