The Squirrel Whisperer

 Justin Mulneix was a pretty normal kid growing up.

He did the usual kids’ stuff. He liked playing and he liked animals and when he got old enough he liked lying in bed staring at the posters of various female singers and movie stars on his wall. Enough said about that.

But one thing that made him different from the other kids on Patterson Avenue was his fascination with squirrels. It’s not clear how and when Justin became so interested in these little creatures.

Ask his childhood friends and they’ll say that at first he would talk about squirrels once in a while, and as time went on he would talk about them more and more, until it reached the point that it was almost impossible to have a conversation with Justin about any subject without him injecting something about squirrels at some point.

Sort of like the person who watches a lot of TV and if you talk to him long enough, like maybe a minute, he’ll start telling you all the details of some program he saw that you couldn’t care less about.

In his mid-teens Justin started thinking about what he wanted to do with his life. He wasn’t sure, like a lot of kids his age, but he knew it would be something to do with squirrels.

Unfortunately, his research failed to produce many promising opportunities for someone who was at the ready to dedicate his life to squirrels.

Then one day during his senior year in high school he was driving along when a squirrel, seemingly coming from nowhere, darted in front of his car. This wasn’t the first time something like this happened, and it wasn’t the first time he swerved his car and hit a tree. (His friends dubbed him “The Wood Magnet” for all the times that happened).

“Why do they do that?” he wondered as he sat waiting for the tow truck. “Why do they have a death wish?”

Of course, he wasn’t taking into account that running in front of a car might not be a death wish when you have no idea what a car is or that it hitting you can kill you.

So then and there Justin decided he would dedicate his life to helping squirrels who seemed so hell-bent on ending their otherwise promising – if you considering promising running around eating and storing nuts while stopping occasionally to agitate a dog from a safe distance – future.

He read everything he could find about squirrels and their behavior. He developed his own philosophy about them. He put this all together into a mission he named “Squirrels, you have so much to live for.”

In order to have credibility on this issue he dubbed himself a world-renowned squirrel psychologist. True, there really is no such thing and no one goes to school to be a squirrel psychologist, world-renowned or otherwise, but that didn’t seem to affect his reasoning on this matter.

Once he got going there was no stopping him.

He started the National Squirrel Institute, also known as the Institute. He started public accounts on Facebook and Twitter. He developed a weekly podcast he called “Squirrel Talk.” He wrote a blog called “Getting Squirrelly With It.”

He self-published a series of books, including “The Squirrel Whisperer,” “Squirrels in the Mist: What I Learned From a Year of Living With Squirrels in the Wild,” “Squirrels That I’ve Known: Personal Recollections of Some of My Favorite Squirrels of all Time,” “50 Squirrels Who Changed the Course of History,” “50 Squirrels Who Didn’t Change the Course of History,” “Is That a Squirrel in Your Pocket or Are You Just Happy to See Me?,” “50 Shades of Gray Squirrel,” and “No Ifs, Ands or Nuts About It: My Life as a World-Renowned Squirrel Psychologist”

Finally his big break came. He was asked to appear on an interview show on the local public access television station. Well, maybe he wasn’t actually asked. In reality he asked them – over and over and over – until they finally cracked and let him appear at 8 a.m. on a Sunday morning.

It went like this:

Interviewer: Did you have many pet squirrels as a child?

Justin: While it’s true my early efforts to domesticate the squirrels in my neighborhood proved unsuccessful, I still considered all of them my own personal squirrel friends. To help cope with the disappointment of not having my own pet squirrel, I would from time to time invent imaginary squirrels for myself. This skill came in handy after puberty, as it was a natural segway to go from imaginary squirrels to imaginary girls. Would you like me to tell you more about them? They were quite magnificent too.

Interviewer: No, please don’t.  Is being a squirrel psychologist a difficult job?

Justin: Very difficult. Do you know how hard it is to get a squirrel to lie on one of those little couches so you can analyze him or her? Then just try to get them to take their medicine. You can talk until you’re blue in the face about the value of anti-depressants and they just stare at you with that blank look on their face. And you can forget about the Rorschach Inkblot Test. Every card looks like a pile of nuts to them, except once in a while a male squirrel will claim one or two look like a female squirrel in heat.

Interviewer: How do you handle the fame of being a world-renowned squirrel psychologist?

Justin: It’s not always easy. Fortunately, some of the problems I anticipated when I decided on this line of work haven’t materialized just yet. I suspect they will very soon, though.

Interviewer: What kind of problems?

Justin: Well, the groupies for one. I see the day clearly in my mind where I won’t be able to eat a quiet meal in a restaurant or go to a movie because of the crush of people wanting my autograph, a selfie, asking questions about their own squirrels or maybe just stopping by to say hi.

Interviewer: That’s interesting. I didn’t know there were world-renown squirrel psychologist groupies. How do you deal with that?

Justin: Well, I really haven’t encountered them yet. But I know they’re out there so it’s a natural extrapolation to think they’ll be coming after me someday.

Interviewer: What other problems can you site?

Justin: The talk shows and the news shows. There’s so much competition between the late night talk shows to get the prime guests to speak on the hot topics of the day. And the cable news shows. They’re always interviewing experts whenever something occurs. I imagine they have a go-to list for almost every possible occurrence, including getting a hold of a world-renowned squirrel psychologist whenever some big squirrel-related incident occurs.

Interviewer: So you have been contacted by the various talk shows and news shows?

Justin: No, not me personally, but common sense tells you it’s a real possibility that will happen sometime in the not-too-distant future.

Interviewer: I have to be honest and say I’ve never heard of any big squirrel-related incidents. Can you name any?

Justin: Yes. When “The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle” movie came out in 2000 there was a lot of buzz at the time.

Interviewer: Anything else?

Justin: Hmmm. Nothing comes to mind immediately, but I’m sure if I think about it long enough I’ll come up with one.

And with that the interviewer bid Justin good-bye, confident in the fact that there’s one thing about him that certainly relates to squirrels.

He’s nuts.