Delivering a Pigeon Egg

I am currently on vacation in the maritimes and have been visiting with my parents for a few days in Halifax. Their apartment is on the 12th floor of a tall downtown building, right across from the Public Gardens. Yesterday I woke up to find my mother rummaging around for something with which to assault some pigeons that had taken up residence on the balcony.

"But why?" I cried. Well, she didn't want them shitting everywhere. So I went out to see what was going on. Sure enough, there was a lady pigeon, and she flew away as soon as I walked up. I didn't even need to wave my arms or hit her with a stick. Mother appeared through the screen door, brandishing a broom. "Oh, it's gone," she said.

The pigeon had flown across to nearby building, leaving behind one single egg. It was very white, a tub of vanilla ice cream blended with four coffee beans. The balcony is made of concrete, carpeted with mini-putt turf. In the corner, utterly forlorn, was the nest and the egg she left behind. It was a tatters, just a few strands of straw and grass spread loosely around the egg, like a disappointing foreign dish. "What should we do with the egg?" I asked. "Throw it over," she said.

(Side note: pigeons weren't just scrabbled together out of old newspaper and paint chips. They're real birds called Rock Doves, and they like to live on cliffs. Whereas humans represent the element of wanton destruction for every other living species except raccoons, for rock doves we've been very generous, because we're rabid cliff builders. It's like if deer suddenly started filling the forest with cozy bungalows. And then covered them with nails.)

"We can't do that!" I balked. Without missing beat, she said, "Well then, take it to the lady downstairs." She was referring, of course, to the Russian lady who sells purses on the sidewalk across the street. Now that we weren't pitching it twelve stories to the road below, Mother started huffing about, wrapping the egg in paper towels. "What will she do with it?" I asked. "I don't know, make it into art or something," Mother said.

At this point I'd only been out of bed for about ten minutes. I slipped on my sandals and, holding the egg gingerly in a thick wad of paper towels, I descended the elevator to the street below. The purses were all strung up on the fence of the Public Gardens, a crazy-colored patchwork. The lady was crocheting a new purse. "I've brought you a pigeon egg," I told her. "How wonderful!" she exclaimed.

She thanked me profusely for bringing her the egg, and told me to thank my mother. I asked her what she would do with the egg, and she said that she would put it in a warm place and try to hatch it. Then she told me a story:

The park is full of ducks and geese and pigeons, and she had gotten into the habit of collecting their abandoned eggs. She liked to leave them in a dish on her table, just to show people who pass by. One day a very old man who had dementia stopped to look at her eggs. All of a sudden, he reached down and popped one in his mouth. She was horrified.

He looked at her with wide eyes, smiling strangely, chewed the egg and swallowed. Then, without saying a word, he walked away. She thought for certain he would die from it, and he did go missing from his daily walk for two or three days. But he survived, and continues to walk by her purse stand to this day.

I returned to the apartment to share a near-death experience with my parents not five minutes later, when a fighter jet flew right outside the window. Imagine hearing the loudest sound you've ever heard in your life, and then imagine thinking that you are about to die in a fiery explosion, and you have the feeling. You may think I'm exaggerating, but I'm not. Even my dad thought we were going to die. Very odd. And then I made coffee.

My Beef With Birds

Everyone loves birds, or thinks they do. They just haven't looked closely enough. The reality of birds is that they fly around above our heads making high-pitched noises and defecating. In fact, birds do a lot of horrible things. For one, they eat insects. Insects are both disgusting and terrifying. They look like creatures from the nightmares of the damned. Now, think of the bird's terrible sharpened bone face. Then think of them thrusting their beaks into the moist earth to slurp up some pulpy white larva or crunch some spindle-limbed pygmy alien. Awful.

Another appalling thing about birds is the way they move their heads around their bodies. Imagine if you tapped someone on the shoulder and instead of turning around they squirted their head forward and looked at you upside down from underneath their armpit. Why is it better if it's a bird? Or imagine if you were at the park and you noticed a young mother sitting on a bench, holding her baby in her arms. Then she vomits on her baby's face. Would it be alright if she had wings? What if she had claws for feet?

A lot of people seem to think that birds are pretty great because they can fly. But what's so amazing about that? They have wings! Obviously they can fly. Flying squirrels are cool. Flying fish are cool. Flying birds are normal. Sure, sometimes they have bright colors, but that's just for sex. It's like, "Look at that bird, it's all tricked out." Finally, let's not forget their dead eyes. Birds have the souls of lobsters. No, there's really not much that's good about birds. Except their nests. Nests are neat.

Treeline

My New Red Hat

I recently was given a new red hat. I have been literally yearning for a good hat for at least five or six years, maybe all my life. When I was a child I loved to wear hats but for a long time now all hats have looked vaguely uncertain on my head. They seem to be asking, "This isn't going to last long, is it?" But I always felt called to hats, and so it has been particularly painful that I haven't been able to wear one.

Between the ages of eight and eleven, I went to Bible camps by myself in the summer, my first experience of extended separation from my family. I had two things to make myself stand out as an individual in that world: one was that I was a good swimmer. The other was that I wore incredible hats.

The hat that stands out most clearly in my memory was a big straw cowboy hat. That was the summer I first fell in love, with a girl whose name started with 'Jo'. I used to walk by the volleyball courts and not look at her. Then, on the last day, though we had never talked, she lifted the hat from my head and put it on her own, just for a second, and then put it back. Her father was standing there, and he took her away.

I went to two camps that summer, and at the second one a weaselly girl on the four-square courts made a sarcastic comment about my cowboy hat. I have never worn a hat confidently again until now, with the advent of my new red hat. Miraculously, it fits me. It's a cap, it has a picture of the Virgin Mary on it, whom I love, and some words in Portuguese.

I suppose it's really a hipster hat, but then, I suppose I'm pretty much a hipster. So I don't mind. The thing I like about it is that if you don't look too closely, it just looks like a red ball-cap that any normal 17-yr-old might wear. I first became aware of the hat's new valence for my life in the Toronto Greyhound bus terminal, when I was actually approached in a conversational way by a normal, criminal-minded 17-yr-old.

He asked me what cities are more than 200 kilometers away. He was running away from the cops because he had tattooed a girl who wasn't yet eighteen years old. He said she was acting like a bitch. He showed me the tags on his hoodie, he had stolen it from his work. He wished he was wearing something nicer.

We sat there and he talked for about five minutes, explaining his situation. He needed to tell someone who would understand. Someone who was wearing a cap. I had been reading 'A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court', and I sat there with the book open in one hand, looking at him and nodding. I did not understand.

Moth on a Screen

A Pleasant Thought

When we hear the instruction to 'be yourself', we don't scoff. We don't dismiss it laughingly or become impatient as though it were nonsense. We don't demand of the speaker, "How could I be anyone else?" We don't question the statement because intuitively we recognize its validity: we all have a hard time being ourselves. Often we take our games too seriously and end up believing our delusions. We allow for some dishonesty in order to obtain better standing, but our lies shut us in from behind like a locked door. We are sealed into our minds along with our terrible secret: we feel like we are being fake. At some point we wanted to be someone else, but now we really just want to be ourselves.

But if we're not being ourselves, than who are we? Well, somebody else. It doesn't matter who, it's just not us. If we've become someone we're embarrassed about, someone who does things we regret, we don't have to get angry at ourselves. Because it isn't us; it's somebody else. That person may be an idiot, and we may be idiots for letting them do what they want, but there's no need to take it personally. It's not that we're innocent, it's just that we have no reason to identify with our bad selves. Or our good selves, for that matter. So we can all relax.

The Good News

Unless you become a bourgeois, retrogressive do-gooder who goes to summer camp for adults every weekend and condemns everyone who disagrees with you to eternal torment, you're fucked.

Phoku #1

Yes,
there's this and this and this and this,
and a little bit of that.

Politician