bad metaphor

It occurs to me that I have never had a positive encounter with birds. Live birds, that is, unfried and still with beaks. Certain experiences in my life have instilled and reinforced my fear and loathing of the avian species.

Exhibit A: Webby. When I was a kid, I loved to watch ‘Duck Tales’ and ‘Darkwing Duck’ and whatever other duck-themed show peddled to kids on Saturday mornings (seriously, it seems like there were eighty of them). So when my parents brought in a little white duck to the bakery shop my mom owned, I was ecstatic. My sister and I tossed around names for it. She came up with the sensible name ‘Pat,’ as we didn’t know its gender; I wanted to call it ‘Webby’ after the girl duck on one of those shows. Like I said, I was really happy, though I was a little afraid to pet it for fear it would bite.

The next day, we went back to the bakery and Webby was gone. “Where’s Webby?” I asked, and my dad said that they had sold it to some neighbors, who were going to eat it. I cried.

Fast forward to when I was fourteen or so, visiting my sister. We went to a nice Thai place in D.C., and I debated about getting the duck curry, which sounded tempting. “Thing is, I haven’t eaten duck since Webby,” I said. “Remember the pet duck that our loving parents sold to our neighbors?”

“You think they sold it to our neighbors?” she said, laughing. “Do you remember what we had for dinner that night?”

That put me off of poultry for awhile.

Exhibit B: The Geese of Gehenna. When I was in middle school, my best friend and I would walk by this little pond in the neighborhood, where all sorts of birds stopped to rest on their migratory paths. We decided to go feed the duckies one day, bringing a loaf of sandwich bread with us. At first, the outing was rather pleasant, and we even had a troop of little ducklings waddle up to us and nip demurely at our offerings.

Once the birds had figured it out, more and more ducks came to investigate, and nibble at the bread. Then, from nearby, came this raucous squawking and a furious flap of white feathers. Three hideous geese, with cancerous knobs on their bills, honked and chased the other birds away from the bread bits. More of their monstrous brethren came and joined them, and circled in on us. Valiant me, I ran up a tree, while my poor friend stood surrounded by squawking, biting geese, throwing bread at them to get them to leave her alone. It only made them hungrier for more.

Exhibit C: Sarah’s bird. My old roommate brought her cockatiel to live with us for a few months, despite my fears that one of the corpulent cats would eat it for dinner. She insisted that it would be fine, that the bird would be kept in its cage in her room. The cats generally left it alone.

“It’s really friendly,” she said. “Come pet it!”

“Okay,” said I, and I reached out a finger for it. Immediately the bird swooped towards my finger with its beak, as if to peck. After removing my finger from its view, and trying again, I observed that the bird didn’t seem to care for me.

“Oh, it won’t really bite you, it just does that. Just get your finger under its feet -”

“Ow! It bit me!”

“Well, that’s strange.”

Exhibit D: Birds against bike safety. Today I mustered the courage to bike to campus, and succeeded at not getting hit by a car or a stray leaflet blowing in the wind. There are lots of hills between my home and the campus, as it turns out! By the time I puffed and huffed up to the building, I just locked it up, helmet and all, at the bike rack, as opposed to hefting the thing up a flight of stairs to store in my office.

When I left work, I checked the bike rack and, relieved that no one had stolen my helmet, went to unfasten it and put it on. As I fiddled with the strap, I noticed some brown specks of what appeared to be dirt in the helmet.

“That’s strange,” I thought. “How did my helmet get so dirty? I hope I didn’t wear it like this earlier.” As I was about to unfasten it and shake it off, I noticed some whitish dried goo, that I had failed to notice in my hurry to get going, on the fastener. And on the bike lock. And all over my bike. And, of course, in my helmet. In total, the volume of the shit happened to exceed the capacity of most birds that would be hanging about campus, except for maybe a hawk or something. Or maybe a couple of birds cackling and using my shiny new bicycle as an awkwardly shaped loo, or maybe the same bird having digestive problems.

The boy and I hauled my bike and accoutrements into the building and into the washroom, and of course there were no paper towels in the women’s room. So I borrowed a few towels and half-heartedly dabbed at the helmet, which by the way, is maybe 20% spandex mesh and 80% styrofoam, so I couldn’t tell whether the stink was from the wetted bird poo or the soaked styrofoam, and so I finally gave up and threw it in the trash.

When we got home, after biking wearing the boy’s helmet (he went without, as he is a more experienced biker and not as likely to run into cars or mailboxes), I declared an all-out war on birds. Birds are NOT animals who are cuddly and deserve our sympathy, they are pure EVIL, maybe not quite Kim Jong Il evil, but certainly approaching the level of Karl Lagerfeld. This applies to all birds, which seem to be universally horrible, excepting little ducklings (to which amnesty is extended until the day one pecks my eyes out, in which case all bets are off). We decided to get revenge against the birds this very evening by eating chicken wings at Vermont St. BBQ. Vengeance drenched in hickory BBQ sauce. Take that, little henfuckers.

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