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Wednesday, April 18, 2012

The True Story of the Dream Bird

I know, I have no knack for storytelling. I do in my head, but when it comes time to put it in writing, all creativity and excitement I had for the telling just disappears. So, work with me here and embellish at your will, because, trust me, you will never be able to do the true story justice, no matter how freaky you imagine this scenario. And, yes, this story is true.

When I awoke today and had the bird dream in my head, I remembered the day I was a real hero to another bird. A living bird. With wings. Flapping wings. A caught food, flapping wings, it's body beating around as it tried to free itself. I was fucking horrified. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

I've had more spelling in my life where I've found myself unemployed than I care to admit. Oh, that's a lie. Some of my jobs have absolutely sucked. I've walked out, I've been fired, I've been through it all. During this particular bump in the road, I was fortunate to be living with my boyfriend in his quaint house in the middle of nowhere, yet right next to Highway 76. The same damned highway I grew up next to. I don't think I've ever lived more than 10 miles from I-76 in my entire life. How strange is that?

So, I'm unemployed, sitting at my makeshift outdoor paradise (a table made out of a copper wire spool and a fake tiki umbrella from Big Lots) and I hear the squawking and banging, just like in the dream. But it's closer. And I'm afraid of birds. This ain't no damned dream and I'm not a damned rock climbing super goddess.

My mom taught me at an early age about her fear of birds. They flwp flwp flwp sound they make when they are coming toward you and how you have no control over where they go. To duck when they come. For me, this fear has passed to all flying things. Moths, bees, flies, birds. They scare the bejesus out of me. Mind you, if I find a broken or hurt flying thing, I will do anything in my power to save it. But when it's flying, I'm scared to death.

So, there I was in my paradise (it happened to be about 100 degrees that day) and I heard the bird. The distressed bird. I tracked it down to one of the jury-rigged columns on our quaint porch. My boyfriend's ex-wife's husband took the cheap way around everything and the columns on our porch were empty fiberboard. The boyfriend, god bless him, tried to keep birds from nesting in them by stuffing the top with plastic bags.

The bird thought either a) Yay! Those bags keep the wind out of our nests, or b) Yay! More shit to make nests with! So, birds still made nests in every single column we had. In this particular column, there was a bird banging around.

Heart pounding, I ran to the garage and got a screwdriver and disassembled the cheap ass column. Inside was a crow (blackbird? what's the difference?) with a plastic bag wrapped around it's leg. In essence, this bird was now a lethal weapon out of a horror movie.

I made a half-assed attempt to move close to the bird, thinking I could calm it down (so wrong) and grab the bird, and rip the bag and set it free. Ha hahahahhahhaaaaaa. I was squealing like a fucking pig at the top of my lungs as I tried to get close to this flying, banging burst of unhappy feathers. If we had close neighbors, I have no doubt they would have called the police.

I also had no doubt that I had to save this bird. When I next stepped outside, I had on my boyfriend's motorcycle helmet (100 degrees), his motorcycle gloves, a step stool and a pair of kitchen shears in my hands. With sweat dripping down my face, deafening screams inside the helmet and 15 minutes of arduous labor while I tried deftly to slice the bag (with my eyes closed) and not stab the bird, I fought valiantly to rescue him. All of a sudden - HE WAS GONE! I have no idea what I did, or how it happened, but I saved it!

And, somehow, that tweeting bird from last night brought all of this back to my head.

Arizona Passes Abortion Law That Says Pregnancy Begins Before A Child Has Been Conceived

Arizona Passes Abortion Law That Says Pregnancy Begins Before A Child Has Been Conceived:

So, does this mean it's illegal to have your period in Arizona? What if you accidentally flush out something by accident that you didn't know what there because you were having your period. It has to be as realistic and medically possible as aborting a child before it was conceived, right?

Arizona has to be one of the most confusing states in the union. That's what sucks about being an independent. Some things I can cheer for, some things are so laughable that you want them to secede and join some other country.

My only hope is they are the first state to ban men from masturbating. After all, there are millions of lives lost every time a man ejaculates. Women like Octomom would gladly use those eggs at the cost of taxpayers. Fair is fair. And....no more viagra. Black market baby. BLACK MARKET.

'via Blog this'

Livin' the Dream....Casserole Shoes

Is it just me, or is it supposed to be a well known supposition that birds chirp in the morning and not all night? Because there was a bird chirping outside my window all night long. I kept waking up and hearing the bird. It's song? Never changed. It has to be past mating season by now, right? I had to eventually come to the conclusion that it was out there just to enter my dream, because that is exactly what it did.

In my dream I was working at a posh upscale resort. God forbid I actually be vacationing at a resort. No, I was working at one. As some sort of cruise director, but not on a cruise. On this particular day, I took people rock climbing. Because I do that almost every day in normal life and I would know exactly what to do. Assuming that rock was about 2x3 inches, we'd be good.

These rocks, not so small. At least that's what I took away from it from the state of my feet when I returned from a damned successful rock climbing adventure. They were torn apart. I obviously didn't have the right shoes for the event, nor did I have the right ones to soothe my aching and bloody feet.

Like most normal people, it was at that point that I took to the kitchen, to MacGyver my way through the need for foot repair. I picked out two mismatched Pyrex casserole dishes (with arch support!), filled them with water and duct taped them to my feet.

As soon as I was sitting snugly in my modern take on the glass slipper, all hell broke loose and a horse came into the courtyard without a rider. Dammit. A tour had gone sour in my incredible resort. Even with arch support, I didn't think the sloshing water and duct tape would make my casserole shoes the most ideal footwear in which to round up a horse (now running through the lobby) or to go trekking through the brush in search of a horseless rider.

That's when I heard the bird. A loud, squawking sound, coming from a clearly frightened bird. It drew my attention to the large silo to the left, just to the side of the lobby of my posh resort. As most resorts do, this one had a massive, old fashioned farm silo with a ladder and a switch that would open and close the roof.

A bird was inside the silo, it's foot caught (what's with the feet?), keeping it from flying properly and it was banging on the sides of the silo. Given my shoes, I wasn't able to climb the ladder, but I flipped the switch to open the silo, hoping that the open space might give the bird strength to break free of its tether and fly away.

But what I saw wasn't blue sky and a clear path to green pastures, but rather a crowded highway, the bottoms of cars and semi-trucks speeding by. I frantically worked to close the hatch to keep the bird pounding against the silo rather than get killed in traffic.

At least I had my casserole shoes.