Animals Inside Me

Couples wearing matching clothes creep me out.

Couples wearing matching neon yellow jackets creep me out more.

Clueless couples wearing matching neon yellow jackets flat out piss me off.

They wandered around like they were lost before asking for help, and when I walked Mrs. Yellowjacket to the reservation station so she could use a computer, she paid no attention to a word I said and started moving the signs we had posted on the reservation podium. I tried to kindly explain that the signs were arranged where they are for a reason, since she moved one in front of the receipt printer and another in front of the barcode scanner. She sighed and rolled her eyes, like I had just fucked up her feng shui.

When I gave her the reservation receipt, after moving the sign back where it was, she snagged it out of my hand and refused to let me explain how it’s used.

Lovely couple. Maybe the neon yellow jackets were some kind of warning about their toxic personalities, like a human version of poison dart frogs who can avoid being eaten by showing flashy colors. Not that I would’ve eaten this couple, but I wouldn’t have minded lunging for their necks and shaking their empty heads until they died of shaken adult syndrome.

Grrrrrrr.

I think reading Peter Allison’s new book Don’t Look Behind You is having an interesting effect on me. Today I wore a leopard print blouse, and this is the first garment (other than undergarments) I’ve ever owned in animal print, which mixed well with stories I read between patrons tonight, stories of Mr. Allison’s adventures as a safari guide.

I could be a leopard. I have the long body, big head and short legs, and I’m nocturnal. I could be a leopard on the Okavango Delta. My Okavango Delta looks strangely carpeted and smells of musty books and stale air, with the mesmerizing sounds of keyboards clicking and wild children running amok, punctuated by the obnoxious ringing of cell phones. I perch on my branch and watch, devouring a previous catch, planning the next one. My Delta, too, floods annually, bringing with it hoards of potential meals during social studies fair or other local school projects. My predatory skills improve daily. Sometimes I toy with lesser creatures and scare the crap out of them. Sometimes I run into a lion, which is not a courageous predator unless it has two friends, and I know this, so it becomes a game of chicken. But I’m a leopard and I have the coolest spots of all. No one wears lion print clothes. I don’t need to be king of the jungle. I rule my kingdom.

Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

Today I found a child prostrate, sprawled out beneath a chair, between the legs. He was about 12 years old. Easy pickings.

I said, “That’s not the way the chair was intended to be used, you know,” which is the leopard equivalent of, I could so easily grab you by the throat and drag your dead weight up to my reference desk to nibble on for the remainder of the evening.

His younger sibling, who was sitting on the chair, said, “Yeah, you idiot. You’re supposed to sit on the cushion, not lay underneath it. He’s a moron. Sorry.”

I found this amusing and let him live, trotting off to await the arrival of my next game.

She walked right up to my desk, too. I don’t like her. She asks for obscure books, largely teen in maturity level, despite the fact that her teen daughter doesn’t even read this crap. There have been a number of incidents with her and Circ, namely one where she claimed to have returned something and someone found her out in the stacks putting the “missing” item on the shelf, to make it look like a Circ error so she wouldn’t have to pay fines. She’s a weasel. I don’t like her.

Tonight, after the closing announcement was made and I was shutting down my computer, she approached and said she was looking for a book on how to take your bunk beds, cut the legs shorter, and put wheels on them so that one would wheel under the other, like trundle beds.

Yep. There’s a book on that.

IN YOUR DREAMS!

Of course, we were closed as she asked this, and to pounce upon her and tear her throat out with my fangs were well within my means, but she wasn’t a worthy adversary. Nor did she look tasty. I suggested she come back when we were open and do some Internet searching, or see one of us and we would help her. I flashed my incisors. My nose even twitched. She backed away and thanked me for my help.

It’s good to be a leopard.

Maybe tomorrow I’ll browse through the Timothy Treadwell book Among Grizzlies. I wonder if I have any clothes that look like a grizzly bear for my next pursuit.

Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.