The anxiety was unbearable, like when hundreds of bees had burrowed into her fur and were all screaming at her at once because she ate their queen. (She didn’t mean to eat their ruler; it was just that all bees looked alike.) Every moment felt like hours, and the cacophony of who said what felt like it was at full volume. The rabbits in the meadow kept chanting, “they’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats” like it was a hilarious joke, not realizing that they could be next in the food chain. It felt like everyone had lost their damn minds.
Her cousin Shirley dropped by unexpectedly to recruit her to be a poll watcher. The woodchuck assumed that meant the polecats were going to be putting on another show, but watching those skinny little freaks dance made her feel bad about her thighs and she had enough things to worry about.
When was this madness going to be over? The animals in the forest were constantly going on about who they thought should run the woods, and every species seem to have a different idea of who was the scariest. Anxious chatter filled the skies from the bluebirds and the redbirds seemed to be completely divorced from reality, and now the muskrat was offering to pay people to vote for the weasel. The woodchuck felt that was extremely unfair, because no one on her side of the meadow was doing anything like that and she could use some extra cash. She didn’t really know what she would do with money, but she did love to win things. Also, how was that not illegal? She hoped the meerkat named Garland was looking into this.
She needed to distract herself, because if she saw one more clip of that weasel dancing to YMCA, she was going to gnaw off the paw holding her phone.
She tried watching Netflix, but the thing kept buffering and freezing. Reception in her burrow was never great, and it could always be counted on to go out just when you finally managed to lose yourself in the latest episode of Love is Blind, where the people were all terrible and no one talked about Arnold Palmer’s dick. She lay on her back in the dark, watching that little circle go endlessly around and around but never quite completing itself, not unlike this election cycle. She tried not to think about the reports that the polls were tightening, because she knew that had nothing to do with the stripping ferrets, or the fact that Pennsylvania —home of Punxsutawney, where she had faithfully predicted the weather for all those Groundhog Days!—might let her down.
Her head was going to explode if she kept thinking about this. How was she going to get through the next fourteen days? What she needed was a sure-fire distraction, a completely reliable streaming service that worked in a dark burrow and would provide enough mind numbing content to refocus her brain and force her amygdala to process only big-lipped housewives, badly-behaved yacht crews, and whatever Alan Cummings was wearing.
The woodchuck sat up, suddenly clearheaded. This was a great idea! Finally, a project that would focus her mind and keep her from endless checking her phone for updates on whether the former leader Bushy the Squirrel had endorsed someone. The woodchuck started sketching a logo for this new app and realized she should immediately apply for a patent before someone else could grab her concept. She would call it — TunnelVision!
Unfortunately, when the woodchuck applied for the trademark, she discovered that someone else had already patented the idea. It was called Bravo TV.
It was going to be a long two weeks.
Fourteen days to go. If anxiety and nerves could power vehicles, we would never again need to drill, baby, drill.
theblindwoodchuck.com 