On January 3, 2021 I was going for a quarantine walk. We were still enough in lockdown where people wore masks outside and crossed streets to avoid bursting the 6-foot bubble. It was a sunny day in Brentwood and I was most likely listening to Andrew Huberman (YEAH OK I was on that train) or something similar. Lost in the day dream of how skinny I’d be once I finally #LockedIn which accompanied these walks, I almost didn’t notice the woman calling me over from across the street. She had one of those little, white, crusty-eyed, yappy dogs on a leash.

At first, I feared she was one of the psycho neighbors who hated my high school and would accost students. I approached with caution. The woman seemed quite distraught and asked for my help. She then explained to me that as she was walking, a dead squirrel had fallen out of a tree. And in fact, a dead squirrel was laying there between us. And it. was. massive.

She said she that she had called animal patrol. That seemed highly unnecessary; this seemed like the kind of thing that nature would take care of, but I nodded in agreement. She felt weird leaving it dead and exposed, and so was going to put it in a dog poop bag. She asked if I’d hold her yappy dog while she did so, making sure he didn’t, I don’t know, try and eat the squirrel or something. With the leash now in my hand, I was trapped, and I stood there as the woman grabbed the backside of this obese squirrel, the size of an overstuffed chipotle burrito, with a neon orange bag meant for dog shit. She squealed and flinched as she made contact with it, and it became immediately clear to me that this squirrel was not going to fit into the bag. What ensued felt like a Family Guy cut away scene, lasting far too long, and causing way more discomfort than necessary.

Now nudging the squirrel with her other bagged hand, she proceeded to stuff the creature into its casing. The woman kept repeating “this is the right thing to do right?” Fuck no it isn’t. “Yes,” I comforted her.

I envy this woman a bit. I’m not sure if confidence is the right word, but it certainly takes a lot of something to enlist help from a stranger, during a pandemic, in a feat you’re not even sure is right or makes any sense. And I wonder, what about me suggests I am the person to do the job? There are several other times I’ve been socially held hostage, and I’m not sure if it has anything to do with me, or solely the person holding me captive. I’ve been told I have a resting bitch face, or more endearingly, a face “so miserable it makes others uncomfortable.” So, I am thinking the latter.

I used to be called an ostrich by my family members because I would “stick my head in the sand” when things got tough. Now, if they’d watched Stanley (PBS gang rise), they’d know that Ostriches don’t stick their heads in the sand, but merely put their heads very close to the sand, but I digress. In crisis moments, I would freeze, panic, and if possible, avoid.

In 2019, I was pulling into the parking structure for my gym after work. The parking was shared with an apartment building, so some entrances were resident only. I pulled into one of these by mistake and by the time I realized this, someone had pulled in behind me. If I had harnessed my inner squirrel lady, or even been remotely rational, I would have gotten out of the car, explained my situation to the person behind me, and have them either swipe me into the resident entrance or reverse to allow me to back out. But I did not do that. Behind me was a car, in front of me a closed gate, to my left some median poles and to my right a wall. There was not enough space to turn around, but turn around I did. Making a hard left, I felt the back of my (my mom’s) car tap the right wall and the left of my car hit the pole. Now sobbing, my brain just wanted to get the fuck out of there so the poor lady could pull into her apartment building. After adjusting as much as I could, I gassed it, tearing up the side, front, and back of the vehicle. Honestly, offensive to ostriches to compare.

While I found squirrel lady’s thinking to be nonsensical and ridiculous, at least the source of her behavior was a place of wanting to do right by this obese, dead, creature of God. I have made far more erratic and irresponsible choices, doubling down on certainly the wrong thing to do, in an attempt to avoid making direct contact with the problem at hand. In trying to evade acknowledging my missteps, I create an entirely separate, often worse problem for myself. I caused thousands of dollars of damage to a car just because I did not want to deal with what? asking for help? It wasn’t so deliberate as it was innate. In the moment, it genuinely seemed like the only thing I could do was scream and cry as I defy the laws of physics and turn a 15-foot SUV around in a 10 foot wide ramp.

In September 2023, I was visiting my sister in Denver – partly to celebrate her birthday and partly as an emergency effort to get her life together. She had moved into her apartment the month prior and was struggling to unpack, get organized, get established. This is putting the status of things lightly, but she is dead now, and so it seems wrong to drag her. She was doing her best. Anyways, on my first night there I offered to pick up a pizza for dinner. I drove her car to a nearby mall. With my pizza in hand, I boarded the elevator back to the parking garage with a family. They commented on how good the pizza smelled and I told them that I was very excited because I hadn’t had Mellow Mushroom since I lived in Atlanta as a child. “We’re from Atlanta!” they exclaimed. The elevator doors opened and we went our separate ways. At the parking exit, I realized I did not have my wallet. Fuck. I sat at the barrier, thinking about what I could possibly do, when to my left, I see the Atlanta family pull up. I park my car, get out, and ask if they would help me out. They paid my parking ticket, refusing my offer to venmo them for their kindness, and I thought of The Gym Parking Incident 5 years prior. What would 2019 Sage have done? I probably would have cursed the world and gunned it through the parking gate, accepting a busted front bumper and future court date to escape the calamity.