Welcome back to the weekly edition of Uncle Uglond’s Urban Critter Survival Guide, aka What’s In My Trashcan And How Do I Stop It? This week we’re going to be tackling one of the most-demanded subjects since this blog’s launch: Bigfeet. More like big pain in the ass!
Get Out Of My Business
At a layman’s guess, you’d figure bigfeet’re a security nightmare, right? I mean, they have opposable thumbs, and look at how much a raccoon can get done without those (covered previously HERE); plus they’re the size of a grizzly bear (covered previously HERE). You’d figure you might as well lie down in the street and give yourself up for the coyotes (covered previously HERE) after handing the ape your keys, your phone password, and your credit card, as long as your evil ex didn’t steal it from you (covered previously HERE, amended HERE, and legally certified HERE, comments are blocked until you sign the acknowledgement of my innocence HERE). Not so! Dealing with bigfeet trespassing on your belongings is actually the easiest part of this whole post! Their sense of smell is much worse than a bear’s is (barely better than a human’s, in fact) so even the most basic of precautions taken against attracting bear attention – storing food and garbage behind secure locks and containers, cleaning outdoor garbage residue, installing an electric fence, installing a motion detector attached to an air raid siren, and the ‘street powerwasher’ homemade flamethrower, all detailed HERE and which I legally must explain I do not officially endorse – is already more than sufficient for preventing not just bigfoot ingress to your home, but the most likely bigfoot motive for ingress to your home, which is also not all that likely in the first place. They’re big neurotic babies that hid in the woods for a few zillion years hoping nobody saw them and now they’re big neurotic babies that hide in the ravine out back of your neighborhood hoping nobody sees them, nothing’s changed! You still shouldn’t corner them in your garage with a shovel and try to take a swing (see testimony of Jimmy ‘One-Armed-Bandit’ Frunklit, HERE), but they’re definitely more scared of you than you are of them, and keeping them physically out of your stuff is easier than a bear, or a human, or my evil shitty ex.
No, your problem with bigfeet won’t be keeping them out of your stuff. It’ll be forcing them to be half-decent neighbours.
Quit That Hollering
So the most well-known propensity of the bigfeet – besides their big feet (we’ll get to that) – is their yelling. Bigfeet are like wolves in that they like to keep in touch over long distances through sound; they’re unlike wolves in that although they’re shy, they’re not so shy they won’t enter cities (exhibit: you are reading a bigfeet column, I haven’t had to write a wolf column). So you won’t get woken up at 2 AM on a weekday by a moonlit awoo, but if you’re living in bigfeet country you WILL have experienced a two-hour sleep cycle induced by yapping, hooting, yowling, screeching, and sometimes whistling of all godamned things (and they couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket). As if that isn’t enough, when they decide the spoken word simply can’t convey their emotions, they’ll pick up sticks and start whacking trees with them – what the old timers used to call ‘wood knocking.’ Except now the stupid hairballs are living next door to you, so maybe they don’t have a tree or a stick, they have an old crowbar and a stoplight. They sure appreciate the upgrade in volume per meter travelled, but I don’t think you will, and it won’t be helping your morning commute, that’s for sure.
The bad news is that this is among the greatest challenges facing someone living near urban bigfeet, the good news is that this is something I’ve put a corresponding amount of effort into solving, because ‘I can’t sleep because there’s a 1,000+ lb ultrabass freestyling a house call to his cousin across the river’ is not a situation that lends itself to problem-solving. Triage, right, like putting on your own airmask before putting one on someone else.
So, here’s what doesn’t work:
–Removing all ‘knockable’ tools and surfaces in the city. This just isn’t realistically practical. Not sure what I was thinking here, might have been underslept.
–Leaving out baited ‘knockable’ tools that discharge a household battery’s-worth of electric current into the palm of anyone that picks them up, creating an aversion response. This one got me in a LOT of trouble with the cops, although I think they only found me because of my evil shitty snitch ex.
–Yelling at them and clanging pan lids together. Does less than nothing, they start making more noise. I think they figure you’re trying to talk to them and they start going slower and louder so you can understand them. If I don’t want to learn how to speak French, Spanish, or Chinese, why would I want to learn bigfootish? Dumbasses.
–Putting a running fan in front of your motion detector air raid siren. This one actually works until your other, human neighbours start shit, but it doesn’t let you sleep so it’s more of a moral victory.
Now here’s what does work:
Ultrasound.
That’s it. Get yourself some good, specialized speakers, rig them up around your block (or anywhere else you want to silence bigfeet concerts) where the cops won’t see them and get snooty, and pump out enough high-pitched frequencies to make a mosquito fall dead out of the air from a brain bleed. They can sing over it, but their pitch goes all wobbly and they give up; it’s like trying to sing happy birthday while someone yells yellow submarine in your face. As a bonus it also prevents dogs from crapping within a two-mile radius, so if you’re sick of having to clean your front lawn off it’ll fix that too.
Get Off The Road
You’re driving home and it’s getting dark and all of a sudden something big and poorly-lit and hairy and FAST scuttles across the road. You honk and brake and great, now the guy tailgating you just gave you a back massage with his front bumper.
Bigfeet cross the road as sanely as squirrels, but without giving you the grace of an out where you grit your teeth and make a rodent pancake: you just get to choose whether you want a nine-foot ape to come through your windshield or to get rear-ended in the middle of rush hour while the hairy asshole runs off laughing down sidewalk. This was a lot cuter behaviour when it happened on lonely country roads with one car per league of highway, you little shithead.
The good news: this is the rarest form of urban problem created by bigfeet. The bad news: I am currently unable to provide a confirmed solution, since the guy I paid to rig a spiked electrified cowcatcher on my car is holding it as collateral until my bank account gets unfrozen because my evil shitty snitch control freak ex took ‘her’ account with her when she left. Pretty sure it’ll work though; just make sure you accelerate on impact or you might lose momentum and get tangled in the aftermath of the collision.
That’ll Leave A Mark
Okay, this is probably what all of us have dealt with the most, although some of us won’t have realized it. Bad roads are everywhere, right? And roads in the city get a lot of traffic, right? Nothing weird there at all, right?
Except where there’s bigfeet in town, because then the number of potholes skyrockets. The same big, fat, heavy, hairy feet that used to leave perfectly-legible impressions in riverbanks, sandy paths, and dirt trails wreck merry goddamned havoc on fresh asphalt and overloaded concrete. Look closely the next time your car’s wheel does a fishing-bob bounce or you nearly trip and break your neck and you’ll find that half the time the pit you just fell afoul of has five big toes and one big heel because one big asshole stomped a little too hard while wandering around last night. That’s your time, your health, AND your tax dollars being put at risk by these jackassquatches, and I think that merits restitution.
There are basically two parts to this solution. First, restorative: renegade roadwork. Get a big bucket of ‘baker’s asphalt’ (recipe found HERE, copyright me) and get to filling: a kid’s bucket and spade should pass off any looky-loos, and if an officer gets up in your grill hey, is it illegal to carry around flour, water, and gravel? You’re doing them a favour by putting a patch job on the local pothole count; think of all the road rage you’re saving them, so there’s no need for them to be ungrateful, like my evil shitty snitch control freak backstabbing ex who didn’t even say ‘thank you’ in the note she didn’t leave you.
Second, preventative: get a big wheel of haywire and rig it on pedestrian pathways everywhere you can around knee-height. Humans shouldn’t stumble too badly over it most of the time probably, but it’ll take bigfeet for a tumble. Besides, the humans are going to be tripping in bigfeet potholes anyways, so at worst you’re not doing new harm, just switching the old one around.
Now, there’s still other woes of bigfeet presence near your home, but I’d say these more or less cover ‘the big three’ of this particularly urban critter. Shut them up, shove them away, shoo them out.
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1 Comment
@itsspeltfoot
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Thank you
-the root and vbrancgh peoppple
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