💾 Archived View for midnight.pub › posts › 1942 captured on 2024-06-19 at 22:51:55. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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I step outside, a neighbor in their SUV smoking out (weed), so I decide to give them their privacy, not stand in my doorway like a *square* and puff a cigarette. Hell, then *I* may be the butt of a few jokes! (pun and pun!)
So I step to the end of the building; a building neighboring a 1 square mile field, beyond that, an abandoned hospital and then tons of farmland. Cattle to boot.
I see two glowing-in-the-dark eyes, larger than a cats, and an odd hiss as they turn and run from the picnic bench I go to smoke at. I wedge the partially smoked Edgefield into my new (and very nice) cigarette holder, much better than the holder I had previous, and strike a light.
I look to the side. Glowing eyes appearing so often from the large shrub 12 feet away. It moves slowly. Then quickly back into the shrub. I puff, and stare, and look around. Stamp the first cig and light another. Rustlings in the weeds the whole time. Weed smoke still eminating from the SUV six parking spots down.
A racoon, I thought. Or even a skunk (it was in the air). A one-off unidentifiable muskrat? A small fox?
I finish the smoke and head back. Past the cloud of weed smoke billowing from the neighbor's car. Back inside, nicotine fix met, I sit and jot things of the small event on this calm Wednesday night.
~bartender, a small coffee, for I may encounter the critter again when I smoke again. Soon.
Funny you should mention critters, as last night I snuck up on both a ground-hog-ish critter, and later a rabbit in the backyard. My wife's frustration with their nipping away at her gardening had me in slow/sneaky pursuit with a broom in hand(s).
I definitely could have "cessated" the former, I think mostly due to its eyes being more in the front of its head than on the sides. I definitely got closer to it than the length of the broom before it noticed me and froze.
But I just didn't have the heart to go through with it in that moment, opting for an "instilling of the fear of God" substitute instead.
The rabbit, well, those eyes on the sides of its head meant having to slowly move and pick up feet, generally trying to conceal the lifting of a foot behind the calf of the other leg. It caught on pretty quickly, but seemed to have quite a bit of patience in its seeming "maybe it doesn't see me" tactic.
I followed its trotting away several times until it finally did so an order or two of magnitude more quickly, finding an opening under the fence before I could see it disappear through it.