Adaptive Curmudgeon

Dr. Simone Moonglow Lenin Rothschild’s plans were working! She had the five nitwits lined up in uncomfortable wooden chairs facing a screen in a darkened room.

“Is this part of the ‘Disco-cracy, Abba, And Transspecies Raptors’ seminar?” Asked one.

“Will this be on the test?” Asked another.

Those two hadn’t yet been reached, but she saw the progression happening and it was only a matter of time. One of them, the last one in the line, was already singing quietly to himself; “There’s no regret, If I had to do the same again, I would, my friend, Fernando…”

YES!

The nitwit immediately to his left (Dr. Rothschild never bothered to learn the name of male students) was staring at the screen; enraptured. The screen, the product of a rather large grant, was 30 feet tall and it was displaying images from Facebook;  specifically Mary And Terry Hate Men.

Facebook, what an excellent scientific resource! Not only was it chock full of instructions (she’d been meaning to read those last few posts) but it had visual aids as well. The nitwits were being exposed to a continuing slideshow. Most of it was Abba, which made sense. Occasionally however, there would be a slide of a squirrel or a hawk. Dr. Rothschild was unclear of the symbolic import of the animals but it was apparently part of the program.

“Is that bird a hawk, or an eagle?” Asked the nitwit in the middle.

“Don’t you get it?” Enthused the one who was the most completely taken in, “it’s both an eagle and a hawk!”

The nitwit in the middle wasn’t buying it, he scratched his nose and looked confused. As if to say “how can a bird be both an eagle and a hawk?” But he remained silent.

Dr. Rothschild poured herself a cup of tea and checked her watch. It was said to be a slow gradual process. According to the instructions she had another 32 hours to go. Fortunately, the nitwits weren’t offering any resistance.

Dr. Rothschild glanced at the other, more appropriate, students who had chosen to attend the “optional” seminar. (Everyone who didn’t show up would get a D, because that’s how Dr. Rothschild rolled.)

They were arranged in the more comfortable stadium seating; well behind the nitwits. Some were enjoying the music but most were idly checking their smart phones. That was okay with Dr. Rothschild, they were already converted and thus she didn’t care what they did. They would all get an A+ merely for being here. The students seemed happy to trade a weekend for an A+.

…

Then it happened. The first thing Dr. Rothschild heard was a collective shudder. Then she felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly separated from Facebook.

She stood up and walked towards the women and other non-binary gendered creatures in the stadium seating. The nearest one looked up at her, pale and shaky. She held up her smart phone. It was blank. “I fear something terrible has happened.” The student whimpered.

In front of them, the nitwits shook their head. The streaming audio had stopped. The screen in front of them had gone blank.

They stood up and stretched. They hadn’t moved for seven hours.

Dr. Rothschild held her breath. Had the spell been broken?

One of the nitwits looked at the screen, now blank, and scratched his chin. “You know what this screen needs? It needs to be hooked up to an Xbox One.”

The others agreed. “Halo would be bitchin’!” One smiled.

Oh my God! What had she done?

The nitwits were milling about. Each, in turn, had removed his tie and tossed it on the floor. She had never heard any of them use the word “bitchin’”. As far she knew none of them knew how to swear! At least they didn’t…

“Dude, let’s go get a beer!”

NO!

“Great idea Bro!” another one agreed.  “We can take my car.” He paused, momentarily puzzled. “You know, I never thought about it before but I wonder if it’s due for an oil change?”

NO!

One of them began to dimly recognize the students still in the stadium seating. They were shaking their cell phones and looking disturbed. A world without Facebook was unthinkable! He nudged the fellow to his left and they both nodded.

“Like, we’re going to go get some pizza and beer. Would any of you ladies care to join us?” He spoke loudly to no one in particular.

LADIES!?!

Five students stood up. They stashed their phones in purses and made their way to the front. The rest stayed behind, oblivious and glaring at their phones.

“I can’t thank you enough Dr. Rothschild,” one of the nitwits was addressing her. Speaking to her as if she were just some… Some dude! Why the nerve of that deplorable little…

“… The videos were awesome!” He grinned. He was standing too close to her and he’d put his hand on her shoulder. Gross! “It totally blows that Facebook crapped out on your show. Sorry about that. Maybe some other time.”

And with that, the five nitwits, trailed by five of her students, sauntered out of the room.

Dr. Rothschild, hung her head in shame. She had meddled with things beyond her control and it had gone all wrong. In her hubris she’d created the world’s most horrible abomination:

She had created the DudeBro.

[On that tragic note we close this chapter in the story of the Lesbian Squirrels. Thank you for your support and tips. I hope you enjoyed a break from the rest of the world. You may now return to regular media and their current show “Felon Versus Hairball; America Takes It In The Shorts” which is already in progress. Also, for those of you who, like me, aren’t hip to the slang of the times I refer you to this documentary which explains the DudeBro.]

On August 21, 1957 Russia completed its first successful test of the R-7 launch vehicle new. The ICBM was born. On July 9, 1959 the United States declared that it’s version of the ICBM, an armed Atlas A rocket, was fully operational. Some things are almost unspeakably terrifying but have not been used.

On August 29, 1997 Skynet did not become self-aware. Not all fictional horrors become true.

However, roughly one hour before sunset and 10 minutes after the arrival of Rosso Maglietta, an unmanned combat aerial vehicle, the MQ-9 Reaper, cleared the horizon and approached at 300 mph. Edward, impressed by the unique vehicle’s speed and agility watched its approach. His admiration turned to horror when it fired two hellfire air to ground missiles which utterly vaporized the squirrel’s oak tree.

The explosion royally pissed off Mr. Curmudgeon’s dog.

Edward had literally filled the tree with female squirrels and showed no sign of slowing down. Mary wondered what would happen when he ran out of squirrels. Even as this thought crossed her mind there was a swoosh as Edward dropped off the next squirrel. This was a red squirrel! Gray squirrels are larger and, as the name would indicate, have different coloring. Terry and Mary didn’t have anything against red squirrels but their plans didn’t include them either.

Terry started to get nervous, when would this end? Would Edward continue forever? Would the oak tree be buried under red squirrels? And then what? Mice? Rabbits? What had they done?

The little red squirrel, who was female and very happy to of been spared Edwards predations, looked around to find itself surrounded by a sea of gray squirrels. However, squirrels (of any sort) are quick to adapt and the little squirrel introduced itself.

“Hi, I’m Rosso. Full name’s Rosso Maglietta. The strangest thing just happened…”

Terry grinned. “A hawk just scooped you up, flipped you over, and delivered you here.”

Rosso’s eyes widened, “That’s exactly what happened! How did you…”

“I need to know what you were doing before the hawk grabbed you,” Terry interrupted, “so I can figure out why the hawk is grabbing red squirrels now.”

“I wasn’t doing anything special at all; eating a pinecone I guess.”

“You guess?”

“Yeah, seems like I was just doing regular squirrel stuff. Nothing extraordinary at all.”

“Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?”

“Nothing special at all. I just a squirrel. Pretty average squirrel really; no particular personality traits. I don’t have any interesting hobbies. Never do anything really notable…”

Mary began to shake.

Rosso was still babbling. They let her go for a while and indeed she described absolutely nothing remarkable about herself, her history, or anything she’d ever done. Finally, she ended with “… I’m just a generic average squirrel I guess.”

Squirrels are clever creatures. They know when to hold ‘em, and they know when to fold them.

“Why don’t you stay here for a little bit, okay Russo?” Mary’s voice was shaky. Russo agreed readily.

“We’re just going to go for a little walk.” Mary announced to no one in particular. She jabbed Terry’s shoulder to get her attention and motioned for her to follow.

The two sauntered down the tree trunk but once they got to the ground Mary whispered into Terry’s ear “meet me at the stinking petrified bear and don’t dawdle.” Then she was gone in a flash. Terry, not knowing what was going on, made haste to follow.

Meanwhile, Rosso Maglietta sat happily in the top of the tree making no effort to distinguish herself from any other squirrel. It sure seemed like she had fallen into an interesting story. She couldn’t wait to see how it ended.

Dr. Simone Moonglow Lenin Rothschild frowned at her computer screen. As a teacher of Advanced Grievance Indoctrination she was required to give these idiots a grade. Yet here it was in black and white, all five of them had aced the test! Who aces a 200 question test? They were inhuman!

Dr. Rothschild’s classes were open to all students; which meant of course that white males need not apply. These five jackasses were pasty and not even metrosexual. They were ruining everything!

The other students were normal. They were a self-selected group that was correctly vaginocentric or at least gynocurious and they drifted in five minutes late while staring at their smartphones. They were college students after all. Also they were using college for its true purpose; to explore new (pre-approved) personalities. All 58 students (aside from the five) were experimenting, en masse, with new behaviors. This was good. Nothing made Dr. Rothschild happier than seeing 58 students expressing their individuality by behaving identically.

Except those five idiots. Did they even have cell phones? Worst of all, they wore ties. Why didn’t they heed the implications of the first assignment? “Ties and Nooses, Hats and Vices, Thoughts on Why Men Are Stupid And Violent Due To Their Torturous Mode of Dress With Examples from Glen or Glenda by Ed Wood.” It was Dr. Rothschild’s best work. She had assigned it specifically because of those five nincompoops. The whole point of the scientific paper was that one should be free to wear whatever they wished, so long as it wasn’t a tie or hat. As she’d explained at length, ties were symbolic nooses and thus a dog whistle employed by phallocentric oppressors and the last vestigial remnant of slavery in the United States. For some inexplicable reason they continued wearing ties despite her explanations. Who were they to make choices which made the rest of the class uncomfortable?

Not only that but those five idiots read the whole paper! They had practically memorized all 18 pages and could quote from it, verbatim, at any moment. They noticed and pointed out(!) a couple of spelling errors; talk about mansplaining! Of course nobody else read it. Who would? Any student with half a brain knew you were supposed to scan the abstract and scatter its vocabulary into rambling answers later on. She didn’t expect students to read her work any more than the students expected her to read their assignments.

Everything they did was infuriating. They dressed neatly. They arrived early for class. They paid attention to everything. They took notes. They finished every assignment early. They carpooled. They recycled. They were polite, attentive, and intelligent. They didn’t drink. They didn’t smoke. They didn’t swear. It was disconcerting at best and downright terrifying when she thought about it in depth!

When the semester had started they’d had a tendency to open doors for fellow students and say horrific things like “ma’am”. She’d publicly berated them for hours. This usually chased Y-chromosomally challenged bible thumpers away; but they merely smiled and complied. They dutifully barged through the door like a herd of buffalo as all the other students did and they’d replaced “ma’am” with a more appropriate non-committal, gender specific but carefully non-binary, grunt.

But it was just an act! She’d seen them at a grocery store and they were unfailingly polite to everyone there (it was off campus or she’d have called them on it!). She knew that when they carried an elderly lady’s groceries to her car it was their way of taking control of a powerful matriarch and forcing her into a position of weakness and subordination. Bastards!

No male students had held up to her onslaught before. She’d cratered six engineering students and a math wizard who fretted over GPAs. She’d baffled a stoner until he swapped into chemistry class and a computer science student until he became a stoner. Two Russian exchange students moved to Bosnia. A veterinary science student who needed an elective had become a monk. She’d convinced three hulking flannel clad forestry students they were gay. (They were helping her write her next paper “I’m A Lumberjack And I’m OK”.) Even male ROTC cadets and returning war veterans gave her a wide berth.

But these five unapologetically conservative males had blown the curve! She’d made a grave error by using an electronically graded test. Normally she’d assign an essay and distribute grades as she saw fit. But, in a moment of weakness, she’d thought about all the time she’d save. After all, she was leaving to visit her androgynous same-sex soul mate in Amsterdam next month.

The mechanical test had been risky and those five jerks had used it to drop a bomb on her. What the hell was she going to do now? You can’t give an A in Grievance Studies to a white male!

It was time to bring out the big guns; she fired up Facebook and clicked to her favorite site, “Mary And Terry Hate Men”. They had some interesting theories. She read the first six of eleven posts and nodded. She clicked to bring up linked audio files and listened:

“My resistance is running low
And every day the hold is getting tighter and it troubles me so.”

She tapped her designer label pencil on her exquisite silver toned keyboard. Yes, this might be the answer:

“Under attack, I’m being taken
About to crack, defenses breaking.”

This could do the trick. With a silent nod of thanks to the Goddess, she began composing the agenda for an “optional” weekend seminar. It would be called “Disco-cracy, Abba, And Transspecies Raptors, An Examination of Societal Norms”. According to Mary and Terry it only took 56 hours to turn a male into putty so they’d make it a three day “experience” that subsituted for Monday’s lecture.

She frowned; it was a little odd that the authors used squirrels and birds in their lectures. She would have preferred more logical non-binary constructs like zieself and emself. Duh! Even so, nothing is perfect and everyone loves disco! She was so excited she didn’t bother to read the remaining five posts. She’d do that later. All hail Facebook!