Jolly Green Tyrant

Sparrows, Chickadees and a Wren

2009-07-05T15:30:00.003-05:00

Did you know there are birds awake at 4:30 in the morning? Well, there are. Cheerful birds. At 4 freakin 30. They sit in the tree outside my window chirping, chirping, chirping. Meanwhile I lie in bed wishing they’d shut the hell up and I could go back to sleep. But, of course, they don’t and I don’t. I just lie there looking at the shadow the leaves make on the muslin curtain as it gently bellows up and back; a breathing canvass. I lie there wondering if the birds are really as happy as they sound. After all, what does a melancholy sparrow sound like?

At 5 o’clock I harrumph my way out of bed and down to the kitchen. By now the chickadees are going at it – chick-a-dee-dee-dee-dee and I like them better because it seems to me they have something to say, unlike the frivolous sparrows who are probably just gossiping. I make myself a cup of dark, thick coffee and enjoy a rare moment with the sliding glass door wide open, Sweet William still perched in his bed, safe from escaping, safe from himself. And he’s quiet – another rarity.

There’s a small dog curled up like a furry little comma at my feet -- a tiny, spotty, smelly, skinny dog. She rolls over, begging for love. On her belly there’s a fresh Frankenstein slash of a scar and it reminds me that she’s been through hell. She’s been over bred, neglected, starved and who knows what else. It reminds me that people are capable of incredible cruelty and I wonder what I’d do if I ever met the woman who abused and neglected her. But that’s probably never going to happen and for all my imagined bravado I’d more than likely just turn away, disgusted.

They named her Ya Ya (she’s a Chihuahua mix) at the shelter where she just came from, the good place with the good people who rescued her from her very bad situation. We named her Wren, so she’s now Wrennie Ya Ya. It seems to fit her. Serious, but she wants to be fun. And she will be fun, once she heals up. I won’t go through the list of her maladies but let’s just say that she takes more pills than Elvis. For a while we had medicine bottles and ointments all over the kitchen but then Sara arranged them in a bowl, the bottles and tubes sticking out at angles, arranged like a Harry and David gift basket.

She’s now sleeping at my feet, sprawled trustingly on a floofy bed, snoring. I can’t help but marvel at her resilience – abused for years but still ready to accept love. And a comfortable bed. A belly scratch also goes a long way. So I’d better get busy, there’s lots of belly scratchin’ to make up for.

In Lieu of Jonesy

2009-06-09T17:26:00.004-05:00

I know it's just not the same, and I am not really very funny like she is, but here I am. The parrot loves her best, and I write more on the blog.

I am currently boiling down rhubarb with sugar into a sauce to make, in the future, an Edwardian Pink Shocker. I am not joking: http://www.pbs.org/manorhouse/treats/prog04.html On this site, you can take the Snob Quiz as well. Who said PBS has no sense of humor?

The bird is pacing on his perch, wings out and in and out, trying a series of different calls to get my attention. Now he is pretending to chew. The cat is pawing at the glass door, the dogs are watching the yard for intruders. The ancient cat just limped into the kitchen for a snack.

I am thinking about how if I knew what was good for me I would give up sugar, booze, whining, driving, butter, starch, swearing, and fried foods. Alas, I am flawed.

Just like my pets are flawed--just now the dog nipped the cat and the other dog nipped the nipper. This resulted in scolding. The old cat is oblivious, moving soft food around in her dish from side to side.

My parrots nails are too long, I bite mine, I cannot clip my dogs' nails due to their utter refusals. We all keep making more.

I should go for a walk, read some poems, eat an apple.

The old cat wandered off and now is yowling from the basement, which sounds mournful, like she is lost. I will go retrieve her bony self and squeeze her a little, so that she will start to purr and we will look out onto the yard and whistle back at the birds.

Post Earache

2009-06-04T21:35:00.005-05:00

I have resurfaced. For a few weeks, the mere heft of dragging my muscles and bones from one room to the other had me flummoxed and exhausted. Velocity stalled, stuttered.

Today I got my appetite back, and coincidentally, said goodbye to the last of my antibiotics. God bless drugs to squelch ear and throat infections.

The dark chocolate with espresso beans is kaput. I gobbled almost an entire small pizza. The bird gnawed at the crust, always using his left food as the grabber, the right foot as the stander. His eating foot always looks like he's making a fist. I love this. Then he bit Jonesy quite hard for having a water bottle too close to his body as he clung to her collar as she drank.

He bites when he's tired, and he was up way past his bedtime, which is 7 or 8, so he can get 12 hours of sleep, like any good tropical bird should. Up an hour or two past his tucked into his box time. I wonder if we left him up as late as he wanted if he would go to bed ever, or crash out in corner like a kid at a slumber party?

This leads to this question: Can the bird make the best choices for himself? Like flying outside, so No. For wanting to eat more nuts than he should eat in a week: No. Biting the hand that feeds you: No.

But he's a Smoocher, a Snuggler, a Dancer, and Singer, and a Scamp. He nods in affirmation of the list. He says, Djesssss.

A mercurial, contradictory creature. Indeed.

Movie, Cake, and Birds

2009-05-20T22:25:00.008-05:00

I just started to get a sore throat. I noticed it while I was trying to savor a slice of flourless chocolate cake my friend John made, while simultaneously watching the movie Old Joy. The movie is a lot like Rivers and Tides, but with two humans and a dog in it and a little bit of dialogue. So of course, I adored it. The dog, Lucy, carries different sticks in her mouth throughout most of it.

Earlier, I had been thinking about someone who offered me her sun conure this week with no hesitation after she heard I had a dusky-headed. She wasn't kidding, and I totally know why. I told Sue about her and she said, too, Yeah, I know what she means.

Volume.
Mess.
Demands.

I guess you can hear a sun conure for blocks away, the loudest and most colorfully plummaged of the wee parrots. My hearing at breakfast is already challenged as I try to enjoy a cup of tea and toast. It seems we have trained the bird to scream while we eat so that we will give him a bit of our food. It's delightful. I am not one who can even make sentences for a half hour or so after waking, so the shrieking takes a lot to just be.

Charm.
Silliness.
Vivacity.

He shuffles around on the floor like a small man looking for a ride or for directions to the bus stop. Are you going that way, he asks? And when it gets dark, he ambles into his cage and into his shoebox, where he peeps and tweedles and shushshh's til my heart is aflame with love. How small a creature, how large his insistence and how great the affection.

Why Bother?

2009-05-07T18:01:00.004-05:00

Slow pitch softball is a sport like none other. By that I mean it’s not really a sport. Not the way I play it, anyway. I stand out in right field, glove at the ready, with the mantra in my head: I will field the ball. I will not shame myself. A typical play goes like this: At the crack of the bat I crouch forward, poised for action. I am relieved when the ball tings off the aluminum bat and rockets straight for the 3rd baseman, who scoops it into her mitt easily, then in one fluid motion raises her arm up, hand behind her head and sling shots the ball across the infield hitting the bull’s eye of the 1st baseman’s glove with a confident thwack, long before the doomed runner even gets close. I am relieved because this is something I cannot do, the scooping, the slinging and definitely not the confident thwack. When I throw the ball it either bounces off the ground hard before making it to the target or lofts up gently creating hardly any sound at all as my teammate easily catches it. That is, she catches it if she doesn’t get bored waiting for the throw to reach her and lose focus.

When at bat I modify my mantra only slightly: I will hit the ball. I will not shame myself. The good thing is that most of the time it works. I’m a solid base hitter, if only because the pitch is often not the only thing that is slow in slow pitch softball. More often than not I hit the ball into the zone between the infield and outfield and then just run like hell. If I’m lucky the outfield is populated by those too slow and unskilled to play the infield and even though I feel like one of those cartoon characters with legs spinning round, trying but failing to gain traction (I can almost hear the sound effects), I make it to 1st base. It used to bother me that no one shouts ‘Heavy hitter!’ or ‘Look alive outfield!’ when I step up to the plate, but I’ve lowered my standards. Now I’m just pleased if I don’t have to pretend that I meant to bunt.

So, the logical question is, why bother? I mean, it certainly isn’t for exercise since most of the running I do is between the bench and right field. I’d like to say it’s to have fun, and I do have fun shouting for my teammates, but that’s not it. I suppose I do it do it because at any moment in the game I could completely screw up, but in general I don’t. The potential for error in front of a crowd makes my heart beat a little faster, makes me focus on that moment and no other. In my daily life I’m too comfortable and life, the way I see it, is all about taking risks. It might seem small, the playing of a game, but nothing makes me feel alive like the possibility of shame.

Startled Awake

2009-04-29T21:45:00.009-05:00

A few times I have been waiting at a light, completely immersed in the minutiae of my thoughts, in the rabbit warren of mental static, churning, falling into that place of, what is it?--that cognitive grind? A few times I have waited at a light and a flying creature is what startled me out of my head. A highway hawk on a sign, a kestrel twitching its tail from a telephone line, a turkey vulture riding an air current, an eagle's white head bright against the green of a tree.

Or maybe I wasn't stopped but driving the time a hawk nearly flew into the windshield of the car in front of me. The driver's body suddenly erect, alert, awake from whatever waking slumber he was in.

And then there are the crows that fly along with you, at the same speed as your car, coasting along as if it were easy, just hardly something worth noticing really, but they want you to see them, to witness the grace and humor and wonder of going forward like you, but above you. Air an afterthought. What could be simpler but feather + wing + flight?

Dickinson wrote: "I hope you love birds, too. It is economical. It saves going to heaven." That spark in the heart seeing a creature so different from yourself--unbound, spontaneous but programmed to sing or croak or shree--that it transmogrifies you each time you realize this, a shift in your whole thought pattern, if only for a minute, an entrance to the other, the whiff of the present tense, again and again and again. Even the house sparrows give reason for joy--how could they not, even in their common plumage? For it is not a small thing to gather air, and rise.

Dear Fine Blog Reader

2009-04-25T21:30:00.007-05:00

We, the management, would like to apologize for the delay. We appreciate your business.

In these few past minutes, it's raining, thundering actually. My little terrier is panicked, even on her Prozac. She prefers the Xanax, the zapper of anxiety. Well, who wouldn't? I mean, the small white pill evaporates the chatter in her nerves. Poor boo.

We are listening to Sigur Ros as it thunders. The bird is in bed. Maybe he wakes when the rumbling starts, but he doesn't peep from his room. Maybe his pupils dilate. When he gets scared during the day, he sits up straight, his feathers flat to his body, his torso and head still, as if he's listening for the turn of the planet. Then, at a cue known just to him, he relaxes, slouches a little, hunches his shoulders like he's ready to slack off. Or maybe fly over to his box in a bag and shred some magazines.

All in all, he's really just a small alien to me. A little green man. Jonesy's figured out the code, the mishmash of language he speaks. Me? I'm the mama who's a tad bit distracted, trying to type as the bird regurgitates on my pinkie. He scuttles across my keyboard, silencing the speakers or closing files or diminishing frames with his quick pace. His warm, scaled eight toes, briefly on my hand--a hey, a message from the avian to the human to say hello back. He means it, or he'll go on next to eat the computer cord or the mail. Then who's in charge, eh?

Love Triangle

2009-03-31T09:44:00.007-05:00

I don’t know if all birds are perverts, but Sweet William sure is. I discovered this disconcerting fact soon after he came to live with us, not by catching him in the act, but by being the object of his attention. Well, not exactly me, but my knuckle. He sat on my finger, which is innocent enough, but then maneuvered himself around, straddled the knuckle of my thumb, made a happy, chortling sound and just went to town. I wasn’t sure exactly what was going on at first, (oh how naïve I was), but he sure did. Yep, he’s a bird who knows his way around a knuckle.

Initially I just let him do it – he is, after all, an incarcerated bird, a being who knows the magic of flight, yet is forbidden to soar. How would you feel in the same situation? Angry? Frustrated? Like you might just get your jollies wherever possible? So how could I take away any simple joy?

Foolishly I told a friend about this less than endearing habit. She raised her fist in the black power pose and shouted, “Power to the parrot!” That would have been fine once, but a week or so later I ran into her at the market and she did it again, this time adding a knowing smirk. The chortling, the smirking -- it all made me feel dirty, so I had to break up with Sweet William.

But that wasn’t easy to do, after all, we couldn’t sit down and have a heart to heart discussion, me telling him that it’s not him, it’s me, all the while both of us knowing it’s him. I had to be even more manipulative. The next time he decided to get intimate I rotated my hand so he had a less advantageous position which caused him to scream and bite me, angry for the interruptus. He didn’t give up easily. He made his move again and again, each time suffering the same dissatisfaction. So, thankfully, he finally went off in search of a more willing partner. Which he found in a tube of chapstick.

The courtship.

One morning Sweet William was busy shredding an oven mitt and since destruction is his favorite activity (or perhaps second favorite) he was content, leaving me to drink my coffee in peace. It was a morning like most others until I heard his happy chortling ‘I love your knuckle’ sound. I turned around quickly, catching him in the act with a tube of Burt’s Bee Balm chapstick. He was straddling it, scooting it across the counter, pushing it forward, rolling from side to side, oblivious of all else around him. He eventually pushed the object of his desire over the edge of the counter, hanging on for just a second the way Slim Pickens rode the nuclear bomb in Dr. Strangelove. Then he took flight, landing on the floor near his amour.

He caught up with the chapstick, straddled it (her?) and carried on as before, perhaps a little more aggressively, pissed off about the chase. Now he had much more room to roll around and he skittered around the floor, chortling and occasionally shrieking, oblivious to the ancient cat who could probably still have him for a snack.

But this isn’t the end of the story. Later in the day I caught him cheating on the chapstick with an empty Advil bottle. Now he goes back and forth between the two with no clear favorite, his attentions doled out liberally to each. They all seem ok with it; the advil bottle, the chapstick and Sweet William. As long as he leaves my knuckle out of it, I'm happy for him and his love triangle.

2009-03-15T18:19:00.008-05:00

Occasionally you wake and crave something or somewhere you haven't thought about in a long time. Maybe your subconscious has been rolling it around for awhile, who knows, but then one day, the nostalgia or wishfulness or flat out craving arises. A few weeks ago, I dreamt about the verdant, quiet saltwater estuaries along the Southern coast, with their meandering creeks, the long-legged wading birds, the sound of air popping from the muddy banks, and the occasional surfacing dolphin.

On another plane of wanting, this past week I saw a sad, scared conure at the shelter, not yet up for adoption, shaking in its cage, unhappy at my cooing near it. It had a splotchy yellow head, so maybe it was a sun conure x'ed with something else, like a Jenday. I heard on internet that they are called Sun-days. How cute. How perfect. How too much.

I have written before at length why I won't get another bird. I know the logical and logistical reasons for my No. These factors don't factor in emotion, especially ones inflated by walking around a shelter, where we got Bug in the first place.

And the logical and logistical have no say in wanting to kayak in the marsh, to drag your fingers in the warm water, either.

The murky weather of the brain vs. the tick-tock, stay on task mantra of living as a day-to-day human often don't mix very well.

Day After Day

2009-03-11T13:50:00.002-05:00

I was offered a job yesterday. One would think that being offered a job after two months of unemployment would make me happy. One would think. But instead, I was more depressed than before.

Picture a low-end used car dealership. Now take that image and grunge it up a little more. Focus your attention on the perma-grime around the light switch, the chipped plastic table and clunky metal chairs, the jagged rip of the veneer on the inside of the bathroom door in the shape of Africa, or a profile of Martha Washington. So hard to tell which.

Used car dealerships all have a certain smell, something like WD-40 mixed with bubble gum. When I left the interview I couldn’t get that smell off me all day. It was in my clothes, my hair, the folds of my brain. It's never really bothered me before, but yesterday I felt a little sick every time I caught a whiff of it.

Before my dad moved up to the bigger league of the new car business he owned a used car dealership. He actually had a couple of different car lots, but the one I remember most was called Bear Motor Company. I remember it as a low-end, grungy place too, but not depressing. It was where my dad poured his energy and made his money. He always seemed happy at the car lot.

I worked for him one summer, checking fluids, detailing cars, running errands and other odd jobs. Many of my tasks required me to get inside the vehicles, some of which smelled like vomit, others like sweat, air “fresheners” or fast food. I began every morning by starting each vehicle. I’d open the door, wait for the heat to escape and then take the biggest breath I could muster, hop in, turn the key with a silent prayer and try to start it without breathing. The stench was too powerful to even mouth breath so if the engine wouldn't fire quickly enough I'd have to get out, gasp and jump back in for another try.

One of my other jobs at the lot was to clean out the cars Dad bought or took in on trade. I found a $20 bill once. I also found a used tampon, half a burrito, a dirty diaper and a comb that looked like a switchblade. Hardly a winning hand. Ok, so maybe it was a little depressing.

I turned down yesterday's job offer which means I won’t be keeping the books at the sad little used car dealership, but I also won’t be working at all. Any idea what it’s like to be out of a job for two months? It’s like when you have a cold, stay home from work and wear your pajamas for the entire day. That evening your hair’s still messed up and you don’t know exactly what to do with yourself. You feel like eating dinner is kind of weird – after all, you didn’t do anything all day. It’s like the dull thud of the melancholy of a Sunday evening. It’s like you’ve lost a good friend. It’s like going to the funeral of someone you don’t know. Day after day.

When A Quiet Saturday Night is Enough

2009-03-07T19:57:00.003-06:00

The bird has been put the bed, the dogs are asleep on the couch and floor, Jonesy is out on the town. It's just me, the heater kicking on, and mint ice cream calling from the freezer.

During the week, I don't get much silence, much empty time to be alone. My head is full of static, I forget to breathe fully (by the end of the day, a series of huge exhales ushers forth), and I watch a lot of rented movies to unwind.

When I get home from work, the bird is screaming, the terrier is leaping and yelping, and sometimes the old cat is crying in the basement. After watching a few episodes about the heavily boozed characters on Mad Men, I see the attraction to vodka. But then their excess tips into obliterative, and well, I just can't compete. I'd rather have a good nap. Liquor up, Ad Men.

The absence of household chaos, the lack of cacophonic competition--this is a humble goal. The night is quiet, especially the later it gets. I turn off lights to not bother the napping hounds, and my brain rests a minute, sighs.

I am to blame, I have created this slow crescendo with each new pet: quiet cats for years, then a dog who rarely barked, then another, louder, but not too loud dog, then a terrier mix thrown in who paces and whines and frets and barks, and then, then, then--then the minute we decide, Yes, we will take that small green bird home from the humane society, and how he screamed and screamed and screamed when we got him home--how his wings were clipped and we were in other rooms sometimes than he was (it could not be helped as one has to move and eat and clean), and I thought my head would fissure, and I had the flash, We can just take him back, yes we can.

Jonsey said, calmly: We made a promise to him to feed and protect him for his whole life.

It was the sudden turned up volume in the house that caught me off guard. This level of calling and insisting? Really?

Really.

You adjust your ears' expectations. It becomes What You Know.

But a quiet night at home, delicious. Magnificent.

The Wrath of Grape

2009-02-28T08:54:00.003-06:00

Sweet William stole a grape this morning. He grabbed it off the counter and tore into it right away, his little pupils dilating and contracting so rapidly that it looked quite comical – in, out, in, out, whoooo! Attempts to take the grape away ended in threats of violence so I gave up and watched him devour what looked like a reddish-purple bowling ball in his tiny talons.

I wonder if he’ll regret it when the excitement wears off and he’s left with an aching gut. Or will he feel fine, smug even? One thing is for sure he’ll be doing you-know-what like Niagara Falls soon enough. Imagine eating a 5 pound watermelon for breakfast. My guess is, you wouldn’t want to stray too far from the small room. And I wouldn’t want you sitting on my shoulder.

Conures With Socks

2009-02-24T11:39:00.008-06:00

It's not surprising that parrots, or birds in general, don't wear socks. How would they perch, and wouldn't their nails get caught in the fabric?

If socks weren't so ergonomically challenging, Bug could use some in the winter--sometimes when he steps up, his feet are cold. And then I feel bad that his whole, small torso's shivering. Occasionally he steps in his poop, so the socks scenario gets further complicated. Toed socks with grippy bottoms like those slippers one can buy?

His species is from South America, where birds don't need footwear if you live in the jungle. Sometimes he stands on one foot, the other tucked into the electric green of his vent feathers. Whether he lives in the land of snow or tropics, I am pretty sure that behavior wouldn't change. Up here, however, it probably serves to warm his little phalanges.

My own socks, my favorite Smart Wools, have taken a turn for entropy this winter. I've lost about half my pairs to the Rift Phenomenon: the heels wear out where the thicker heel stitching transforms to the thinner vertical material at the back of the heel. Which then equals: a hole.

I can't seem to throw these broken socks away. They cost a lot but I don't darn, like my grandmother did. Wouldn't the repair create a line/scar that would rub the skin like a too tight pair of shoes on the heel, where you'd have to wear a bandaid?

And sometimes Bug bites my socks and creates his own new holes.

I guess we are between a sock and hard place.

Lunch

2009-02-20T16:56:00.002-06:00

When I was about 12 years old my mother gave me a diary and told me to keep my secrets in it. It was tiny -- no bigger than a birthday card, no thicker than my two fingers. Two fingers of secrets. It had a cloth cover with brightly colored flowers all over it, altogether too jolly for the darkness I wanted to unload. But it did have a lock, which gave its contents, no matter how frivolous, an elevated importance and made writing in it a clandestine act. I wrote in it furtively, hiding under my bed, and never committed anything I didn’t mind my brother reading. It was a flimsy lock.

Sister Annette made us keep a journal in our senior writing class. When I asked her what the difference between a diary and a journal was, she told me that we would get class credit for writing in a journal and she didn’t care if we kept a diary or not. And a journal doesn’t have a lock.

She told us we could write anything at all in our journal as long as we “wrote with new eyes.” We were forbidden to write about anything ordinary or to echo the thoughts of anyone else. By way of example, she told us we could write about the curve of a tree or the veins on our grandmothers’ hands, except we couldn’t now because she’d just mentioned those two things. But the biggest rule was that we could not write about ordinary things, that we could not -- repeat, could not, write about what we had for lunch. Just knowing that made me hyper aware of food. I became obsessed with the grainy texture of applesauce, the burnt sienna halo of the grease surrounding the sloppy joe meat, the salty, crunchy hammocks of fritos in the frito pie. I kept all of these observations locked away from Sister Annette. Being so contrary, it’s little wonder I didn’t become a food writer.

If Sister Annette were around now I’d love to ask her what the difference between a blog and journal is. I have to imagine she’d tell me that you don’t get class credit for a blog and the ban on writing about lunch is lifted.

And a blog doesn’t have a lock.

There's Nothing More Pathetic Than a Remorseful Glutton

2009-02-16T17:22:00.004-06:00

If psychiatrists don’t have a caloric scale to gauge their patients’ level of depression, they should. For those who want to quantify emotion, it makes perfect sense. Think of how much easier it would be for doctors to keep records.

“How are you feeling today?”

“Lousy, Doc. Half a strawberry cheesecake and a plate of nachos.”

“Real cheese or velveeta?”

“Real.”

“Ok, that puts you at 2800 today. That Ben & Jerry's and brownies binge had you at 3300 last week. I'd say we're making progress."

Even worse than stuffing your face to feel better is eating instead of exercising. To refine the system, let’s say that eating in the place of exercising throws on a multiplier. For example: scarfing eight chocolate chunk cookies instead of running = (8 cookies x 200 calories each) x 2 = 3200. That all adds up to a pretty crappy day.

Of course we all know that eating a half dozen doughnuts and a chili dog will only makes us feel worse in the end, but that doesn’t stop us. Doesn’t stop me, anyway. I’m not the sort to puke, so all I can do is try to suck in my gut and curse myself with every lard laden burp.

For the record, I did not eat a chili dog today. But that’s all I’m going to say. That, and, considering the way I feel right now, Elvis must have really felt like shit.

Master of Monotony

2009-02-11T17:14:00.010-06:00

Call it the winter blues, call it ennui, call it the dull bewilderment that sets in when suddenly your time is your own, call it what you will, but I’m bored. I know, I know, only boring people are bored. So I admit it: I’m boring.

Case in point -- I went to a baby shower the other day and ended up talking with a group of people I’d just met about internet providers. Seriously. We might have had plenty in common but not one of us could break the ground, so we sat around and shared anecdotes of poor service and high costs. It was about as fascinating as cleaning the lint out of the crevices of a computer keyboard (which I just finished doing). How did I become so dull?

The past few years have been sucked out of my life by the study of a tedious topic the way an unfortunate astronaut is shot into space from a faulty airlock; neither time nor astronaut ever to be recovered. But that’s no excuse. I now have leisure, so I should be laughing all the way to somewhere, yet here I am, down in the doldrums. Action is what I need – something to jar myself out of the morass of my existence, so with failing imagination, I decide to take a class.

Idly I peruse the non-degree class catalogue from the local tech school. There’s an amazing array of classes on offer, but none, not surprisingly, that really grab me.

Classes I will not be taking:

Harmonica 1 and 2 (Blow in! Suck out! Make noise that only pleases you!)

Kentucky Rifle Building (With a follow up class in whiskey chuggin’.)

Making Lefse 1 and 2 (Why?)

Legal Expense Insurance (I just fell asleep reading the course title.)

Negotiating Across Cultures (Don’t be a jackass!)

So maybe I won’t take a class. Maybe I’ll just take a nap.

Like a Brooch, Only Bigger and Biting

2009-02-08T10:12:00.002-06:00

His feet like the pin of the clasp.

Or like an electric green prom corsage. Me, the Never Attender of the Prom, now has a living bouquet of brilliant feather.

You may lose hearing in the ear nearest if he screams while adhered. He has yet to bite a cheek, an ear. But one flinches a little each time, deep down. Parrots can be irrational, emotional. They would love the opera if they could go.

He likes my left clavicle/shoulder for attachment. Swinging by one or two feet as I lean over the sink while brushing my teeth. He makes whooshwhooshy noises in mimic, and bobs his head in delight. We can't seem to capture it on camera--he will not perform on command.

Yeah, he's the boss of me. And I let him.

But the 18 year old cat is downstairs crying (in fear? pain? confusion?) with more regularity--sometimes 3-4 times an hour. I have the two dogs to walk, one who likes to bite the other in the face when she's excited, which is most of the walk--trying to take down the world in her sphere. And then there's the 15 year old, overweight, arthritic cat, too.

So I let myself be bossed by all of them. I know, I know.

But each has a spark you cannot turn away from--

To Friend Or Not To Friend

2009-02-02T16:22:00.014-06:00

At first I thought I was too old for this FaceBook thing. Well, that’s not altogether true. At first I didn’t understand what the hell it was. Second, because of the first, I thought I was too old. When I was eventually able to wrap my 45 year-old brain around the concept, I figured it was simply a ridiculous waste of time. But I kept hearing my friends tell stories of finding people from their past-- roommates from college, buddies from high school and distant cousins. I was intrigued, and besides I’m not that damn old. Proving that I’m a savvy citizen of the modern world I moved past my confusion and scorn.

I got on-line and filled out the form, indicating that I wanted to link to a few of my closest friends. That’s what I thought, anyway. I have no idea exactly where I screwed up, but somehow I clicked something that told FaceBook to send an email invitation ‘to be my friend’ to EVERYONE IN MY EMAIL ADDRESS BOOK. That’s right, everyone who exists in my email landscape was sent a message from FaceBook inviting them to check out my web page and be my friend. Bankers, business contacts, distant acquaintances, people I don’t particularly like, and people I never want to speak to again all received this amiable overture. It’s like sending a wedding invitation to everyone you’ve bumped into in the last few years, and the last few years have been a bit rough.

Naturally I was so embarrassed I considered changing my name and moving to a remote jungle village where the electronic world couldn’t follow me, although that’s probably not possible -- I wouldn’t be surprised if you could pick up a wireless signal from a treehouse in Papua New Guinea. There was nowhere to run. This was worse than my white pants incident of the 9th grade, and it’s hard to get worse than that. Picture me, a chubby, self-conscious kid, hiding in the girls’ bathroom during biology class with a miniscule offensive dot on the very center of the crotch of my pants. You probably couldn’t see the damn thing with a microscope, but who could take the chance? I had to do something, so I took off my pants and washed them out in the sink. Miraculously it worked, but then of course I ended up with wet pants. Spot free, but wet, which was not as bad as before, but still a serious problem. And of course, I was also standing in the bathroom in my underwear. Utterly desperate to avoid embarrassment, I did what any resourceful high school girl would do; I grabbed my pants by the ankles and started swinging them over my head to dry them in the breeze. After a short while I became confident that I’d be back in the hallway, free of stains and dampness by the end of the hour. I got comfortable, forgetting that what I was doing was totally weird and sat down on the edge of the sink, whistled a jolly tune, and continued to swing my pants around and around like a lasso. That’s when Sister Sandra walked in.

Not so savvy then, not so savvy now.

The FaceBook debacle is the electronic equivalent of being caught in my underwear, only this time in front of upwards of a hundred people – friends, acquaintances and enemies alike. But life goes on and so do millions of signals zinging through cyber space so although I don’t think I ever looked Sister Sandra in the eye again, I hoped that this time the constant bombardment of messages would distract my ersatz friends and they’d forget about me and that stupid invitation. After a few weeks I recovered enough from the extreme embarrassment of the techno- faux pas to open my FaceBook web page.

Now that I actually look at FaceBook, I’ve got a few problems with it. Most notably, I was right: It is just plain silly. For one thing, it encourages the use of ‘to friend’ as a verb. Not to befriend, but ‘to friend,’ as in, “Hey, I friended you and you didn’t friend me back,” meaning I sent you an invitation to join my network of friends and you have not accepted my offer. Ok, so I friended you is a little more efficient use of words, but it's still a horrible bastardization of a lovely language right on par with spelling light with an ite. (Lite beer makes me want to puke in more ways than one.)

Next, people I don’t know or barely know have ‘friended’ me. Initially I felt guilty, like a horrible FaceBook snob if I didn’t accept. Then I noticed that a lot of these people have more than 1000 friends. They don’t really want to be my friend they’re just using me to jack up their numbers. These FaceBook whores will friend anyone.

My last major issue is with the people who over FaceBook (I call them OFB’s). OFB’s feel the need to cast their frivolous thoughts out indiscriminately, like the way a drag queen tosses colored beads at a Mardi Gras parade. For those of you who are unfamiliar with FaceBook, each person’s website has a box at the top of the screen with a sentence for the participant to fill in and then post for all their friends to see, so that everyone knows what they are doing or feeling or about to do or just did. For example, when I open my webpage I am encouraged to complete the sentence, Jonesy is______. I fill it in occasionally, but am utterly incapable of being earnest. I say things like, “Jonesy is counting to ten.” Or “Jonesy is contemplating all the trouble in River City.” But some of my friends (and I use the term loosely) complete this sentence every freaking 15 minutes. They post compulsively, as if they just can’t help themselves, like the way some people play slot machines. “So-and-so is laughing.” “So-and-so wants to have another cup of coffee.” Wow. Riveting stuff. Don’t these people have jobs? Lives? Real friends? I barely even know these OFB’s and I’m not sure why but they annoy the hell out of me. Sara says I should unfriend them. Sara’s always right.

On the positive side I’ve connected with several people I’d considered a part of my distant past. I’m prompted to call or email my actual friends so we don’t lose touch. I get the occasional chuckle from some silly comment. And, I am reminded that silly can be good.

Jonesy is finished writing on her blog.

Forget the Caribbean

2009-01-24T09:07:00.016-06:00

It would be easy to see oneself living on a small island in the Caribbean--snorkeling, drinking fruity rum drinks from cheap plastic cups at 2 pm, wearing a sunhat to keep the burn at bay. Working? Well, that's a different story. How to pay for the $5/jar peanut butter and $10 frozen pizza, because let's face it, when you work, sometimes you come home and eat peanut butter from the jar. While standing, and waiting for the oven to preheat.

My thoughts are once again on the tropics because it's -4F out, the windchill's probably -15F or -20F. Yet the house sparrows, the chickadees, the cardinals, the house finches, and the morning doves insist on persisting. I am worrying that the feeder is almost empty and that could lead to some wee ones' demises. I need to get to the store to buy more fatty sunflower seeds in the shell.

A month ago while in Chicago and the windchill was over -25F, the difference between my hotel room temperature and the outside was over 100 degrees. I am going to say this outloud: That's just plain ridiculous.

Today, at home the sky is stark blue, the steam from the neighbor's chimney casting a shadow on the snow in the early morning yard. Bug is shredding a magazine in his box, and I am wishing for a warm beach.

It's ridiculous, I thought also, when I got to St. John last May--the turquoise water, the white sand beach, the loggerhead turtles 10 feet from the shoreline. I mean, this is the same planet as below zero temps and endless prairies of the Midwest? Eagle ray vs. glare ice on the windshield, tamarind trees vs. the brittle leaflesss arms of a willow?

I see the beauty in starkness. I do. The simplicity of form, the silhouette against white.

But I can't seem to get in the car to go to the store to buy more seed, so my petite friends can keep on going. They don't know their tiny bodies have a large surface area to volume ratio, so that's why heat keeps pouring off them and they have to eat eat eat eat.

I eat in the winter for other reasons, as so do you probably, too. Fried food seems especially magnificent and alluring when you have to wear a hat and mittens, boots and a down coat out of the house. If you are going to go to all the trouble to leave the warm, heated abode, then why not eat the greased and crispy? That's what the birds do, but they have no cozy slippers or space heaters to leave at home when they venture out.

Bug just flew into the office to sit on the desk in a patch of sun. Then he began to sneeze and pick at his nostril with a toenail. His nose is dry--I've got to go set up his humidifier, and then maybe later, get him to take a bath, dip his head in a bowl.

I am sure he'd prefer the steamier Caribbean, but how would he pay the bills, eh?

Appearances Can Be Accurate

2009-01-19T10:08:00.006-06:00

While house hunting on the internet Sara and I came across the following description written by a realtor:

"Living room appears bigger than it looks! Charming fixer-uper, move in ready!"

I wouldn't buy an egg from that genius, but he does get points for enthusiasm.
No wonder the house market tanked.

If SSW Could Join Facebook

2009-01-17T17:11:00.004-06:00

He would join this group: "I Dont [sic] care How Comfortable Crocs Are, You Look Like A Dumbass."

I am not a member of that group. In fact, I am trying to break up with the black-hole of time consumption that is Facebook.

Regardless, the parrot cannot type except when he runs across the keyboard from one side to the other.

But he hates Crocs. Just mine, not Jonesy's. Mine are navy and have holes on the sides, not the tops, the "professional" style, so liquid (ie chefs, drs) rivulets off the top, the holes for aeration. These are not good shoes to run to the car to warm it up when it is snowing, snow creeping in through the little vents.

Bug will chase after me and seize upon the side holes with his beak and not let go. Not even if I lift him off the ground. One time, I put him, attached to my foot, into his cage that way, my leg through the cage door, clogged foot resting on the grate. Then he got off.

He likes to adhere to the footwear and inflict small puncture wounds with repetitive, forceful motions with his beak. And whatever you do, do not put your hand near him to try to release him. Crocs must die.

I like them as winter slippers with thick wool socks: lightweight, good indoor traction, neutral colored. And they wipe off, or you can completely submerge them to clean them.

So Crocs haters out there, it's too exhausting to be so angry all the time, isn't it? I know the bird has steam pouring out of his ear holes when he chases me. I don't know what the shoes ever did to him.

@$%#!!

2009-01-15T13:35:00.004-06:00

Not cussing is really effing hard.

The View from Here

2009-01-13T13:49:00.007-06:00

For three days I have had a sore throat, and today, now a runny nose. So: I have taken some cold medicine and here lies the weird landscape of the fuzzy-headed, but with lessened cough. Behind me out the sliding glass door, the yard's brilliant with snow and a full-blue sky. We are headed to a week of below zero temperatures. Can't wait.

I am watching Jonesy about to make oatmeal cookies. Bug is on her shoulder and goes from one to the other, depending upon the best balance and viewpoint. She is also concurrently crafting chicken noodle soup, and when SSW won't get off her shoulder, she says looking in the pot, See what happens to birds sometimes?

It is preferable to not have a bird on your shoulder while cooking for numerous reasons. I am sure you can make your own short list right now. An apron is good for protecting the front of you from flour and butter and milk, but your shoulders--they are open territory for the you know what, from the you know who's little rear.

Well, thankfully, he decided to hop off and go to his perch to rub his beak on his rope perch and then proceed to chitter.

He loves the sound of the mixer, by the way. No surprise there: he screams at each plate and cup being put away from the dishwasher. Looking at him now, though, he's sitting still and erect, feathers poofed a little, and his calls are quiet, like little oh dears and that scares me a tad. Occasionally he emits a taut, high-pitched squeak, like an exclamation point.

Ah, there's a sneeze from me, and it hurt my throat for a second. Bug likes to mimic my coughing first thing in the morning when I am extra intolerant to noise. Ok, it's endearing, but give me tea first.

I just got to lick the mixer beaters. Very cinnamonny.

Well, I suppose that's all from here, for right now. My head's ablur and I seem to be staring off into space--

Pardon My French

2009-01-10T12:02:00.005-06:00

With gentle encouragement from Sara I agreed to quit cussing. Anyone who knows me, or has had the misfortune of being in line with me at an airline service counter after my flight has been canceled, understands the enormity of this challenge.

I’ve had a potty mouth for years, going all the way back to the first grade when Miss Shaklett washed out my mouth with Bab-o, the cheaper equivalent of Comet, for saying ‘damn hell’ on the playground of Norman Binkley Elementary School in Nashville, Tennessee.

After almost 40 years the memory of the incident still makes me queasy. You’d think I would have learned my lesson back in 1970, but all I really got from the abuse was that ‘damn hell’ is a poor combination and Miss Shaklett was a royal bitch.

My proficiency with the coarser side of the English language has improved a shit ton since then, especially my verbal adroitness with the word fuck. I frequently drop the ‘F’ word, often multiple times in the same phrase, as in “…fuck that fucking little fuckwit.” Concurrently, primarily due to my fascination with Dead English Writers, I’ve amassed a fairly respectable arsenal of what I like to call ‘$2 words.’ Often these two sets of vocabulary merge and produce a single oxymoronic sentence like: ‘That Troy Aikman is a loquacious mother fucker and I wish he’d shut the fuck up.’

Sara claims that my excessive use of obscenities leads people to believe that I’m either stupid, inarticulate, angry, or all of the above. She’s probably right since she almost always is, but I’ve long held the belief that a single epithet provides more punch than pounds of so called ‘clean’ language. I’ve now come to realize that isn’t always true. Overuse weakens just about everything -- consider the brakes on a ’91 Saab. Trust me, they wear out, many times over. So it is with words. Through intemperate use I’ve robbed profanity of its power. What should have a sharp, glinting edge is now blunt and lackluster. Well shit.

To be completely honest, it’s not possible for me to eliminate expletives from my speech altogether, but I can control them. My hope is that through judicious use, scurrility will become the habanera rather than the salt and pepper of my speech.

Fuck. (I had to swear gratuitously, just one more damn time.)

My Kind of Kids

2009-01-09T11:05:00.005-06:00

I know it’s cliché to say that I think of my pets as children, but I do. Kind of. To clarify, I think of them as the sort of children you can lock up in a cage or just leave running loose in the house for hours on end while you go out and work or run errands or play the slots at the Ho-Chunk Casino or hang around a coffee shop pretending to write on a fancy-assed laptop computer sitting across the table from another pet owner whose cats or dogs or guinea pigs or other creatures are also in cages or running loose at their house, while they tap on their fancy-assed laptop computer that’s open just opposite yours making it look, for all the world, like you two are playing battleship. They’re the kind of kids that you actually encourage to eat whatever it is you dropped on the floor, let them drink from ponds, restrain them with nylon collars and leashes and shove off the bed when they start to puke in the middle of the night. You never put a dime away in a college fund for them.

Like the children I imagine I would have had if life had been very different, my pets come when I call (most of them, anyway), are jealous of one another, and make the house a mess. They want you to get their dinner, take them for a walk, get them a new toy, play with them, etc. making you just a worker on the line of a fulfillment factory where the conveyor belt keeps coming at you while you try to deal with one need after another, sometimes just giving up and allowing the pleas to tumble to the floor. That’s when it comes in handy that you can lock them up and leave the house without fearing repercussions from social services.

That’s where I’m at right now. Time for Sweet William to go into lockdown, for Taiko and Gracie to have a quick constitutional moment outside and for me to pack up my fancy-assed laptop.

Roasted Not Toasted

2009-01-05T12:58:00.009-06:00

I used to be a barfly but now I hang out in cafés. I had to leave the bar thing behind for lots of reasons, not the least of which was my liver. That and time, which I have come to value and beer is, among other things, a time accelerant. Sit down on a bar stool, drink steadily for seven hours straight and the time just washes by. And with so few memories to show for it. Some unexplained bruises, yes, a pounding headache to be sure and an empty wallet no doubt, but not so much recollection.

I’m not a teetotaler and I don’t avoid bars, I just don’t make them my living room. I still enjoy a good drink, and, in fact, since leaving the bar scene I’ve come to appreciate a wider variety of booze for the taste, not the buzz. Sara’s chef friend, Robin, told me the other day that “there isn’t a meal not enhanced by an alcoholic beverage.” Being the devil’s advocate type I immediately thought of a Happy Meal. Then again, a frothy, peachy Saracco Moscato D’Asti would complement (and cut the grease) nicely. PB and J -- a bright, jammy California Zinfandel. Mac and cheese – a cholesterol taming, zesty pinot grigio. Yes, Robin was right.

Now rather than squandering brain cells in a bar, I spend a few hours a week in cafés. I go to several, but my favorite is EVP, a local outfit. I walk in the door and savor every aspect of fine roasted bean. I mentally roll in the smell of it, add a little cream and admire its dark caramel hue, sip through the rich folds of it, and appreciate the warm ceramic mug on my hands.

The relationship between customer and barista is much simpler than that of drinker and bartender. With a bartender it’s important to cultivate the relationship so as not to be left standing at the end of the bar with an empty glass and a $20 bill in your hand while more popular patrons are served. For the most part, the best way to avoid such a travesty is through exorbitant gratuities and glib remarks – costly and subjective. On the other hand, EVP baristas seem quite pleased with the type of appreciation that ends up in their tip jar but don’t snub you when your offering rattles the glass. Conversation is more natural as less depends on it – they’ll never leave you high and dry when you present them with an empty cup, even if your jokes do suck. Of course, there is no presumption of psycho-therapy for tips, but that's probably for the best since the answer to pretty much every problem confessed in a bar is another vodka gimlet.

The café has become my social arena, much like the pub used to be, except that I remember the conversations and they don’t increase in volume in relation to consumption. And, hopefully I don’t sound quite so dumb all the while thinking that I’m very clever, buy rounds of espresso shots for all of my new friends and wind up stumbling on my way to the bathroom and pretending that I didn’t. The most deleterious effect of my time in the coffee shop is that I talk a little faster.

I don’t have a job at the moment so I have the luxury of spending an afternoon or two a week at EVP. I have time to write (case in point), read and chat. When I, once again, have to bend to the yoke, I’ll miss this. But for now, the afternoon is bright, I have a table next to an electrical outlet and a friend just walked in the door. So cheers to coffee, to the bottomless cup, to the dilettantes at the tables and getting all jacked up.

When You're Old, Maybe You'll Eat Cat Litter Too

2009-01-03T15:57:00.013-06:00

Sasha, my ancient feline (18 in April), Holstein-colored, muscle-wasting, tottering, senile dear has taken to eating clumping cat litter. I first witnessed this a few months ago, so who knows how long this has been going on since she has moved to the basement 23 hours a day.

Just yesterday, as I leaned over and scooped her litter, she came up to the edge of one her boxes and put her nose down inside it and began to nibble as if she were at a trough made for cats. I tried to gently dissuade her by tapping the box and talking to her, but my hands were full, and she didn't lift her head. After a few seconds she wandered off to the stairs and put her snoz in a bowl of expensive, stinky, fishy, dried cat food and ate it as if it were litter.

To be clear, we feed her whatever she wants, which is made for cats' consumption. Her pica shouldn't be due to a nutritional deficiency. She is, however, slowly losing her mind.

I like the new Sasha. For 17 years she was mostly unapproachable, untouchable, except for the rare occasions where she'd jump on the bed, and if you didn't move, she might knead and suck on the fabric in the crook of your arm. Now, things are very different. I can pick her up, hold her, for god's sake. I walk her up the stairs in my arms and pet her on the couch for hours. She purrs and purrs. She even saunters up to the bird when he's stupidly on the floor. I am not sure if it's in malice; more likely, she's wondering what the hell the little blurry thing on the linoleum is.

We first noticed The Great Mindshift during a party in May. She came up the basement stairs, sat in the kitchen filled with people, and proceeded to stare at the guests. Huh.

She had vacant but sweet expression on her face. A few friends picked her up; the dwindling cat mewled. Jonesy, protective like a mama bear to her cubs, burst forward with a "I don't care if you are vets. Put my cat down!"

Down the cat came.

It's painful to watch her walk, wrists askew in arthritis. Her hips jut out, her once fatter belly sags and swings like an empty udder. When she sees me at the top of the stairs I wince, knowing she's headed up to see me. I put her on pain meds, but I am not sure it helps much.

Further proof her mind has wandered to the place of permanent absenteeism--we feed her little bowls of wet food when she comes upstairs. If you move when she eats, or if another pet walks by, distracting her (you need to sit by her and fluff her food with a fork), she turns around, looks up as if to say, What was I doing here? You get her attention back to the bowls (multiple flavors to encourage her to nosh), and she dives in as if she's never seen them before. She may eat for a minute or a few seconds, and the whole cycle of attention starts again.

The newest dilemma is she appears to be voraciously eating but when she totters off, the food merely looks moved around, some now on the floor for the dog-vultures to swoop in. We add water to the wet food to create more of a stew--she tends to lap up the liquid and then stumble away, as if drunk. Then a minute passes and she looks at you as if she hasn't eaten yet.

Occasionally the bird walks over--he prefers to be center stage with all activities. I shoe him away; the dogs are circling, knowing there will be great payoffs if I step away from guarding the bowls. A little bird in the way of that could lead to a pile of feathers and a small avian leaving this mortal plain.

Every day I look down the basement stairwell to do what we call the Dead Check. This was first instituted when my lovely O, my aging lab cross, started to not come down from the upstairs bedroom (do we detect a pattern here, retreat to floors above or below the mainstay commotion?) when we got home. He had gone a wee deaf and was not easily wakened, even by the piercing barks of the terrier-mutt Lulu. Each day, you never knew if today was the day.

So now we wonder, Is today Sasha's day? So far so good.

She seems transilluminated with happiness, suffused with even more present-tense-ism than even before. I love watching her look around the room, then amble over to rub on Jonesy's legs. She's unsteady but she doesn't care. She just wants a little pet, preferrably on her tummy, and then feed her already--It's been days, she says, since she last ate.

The Crows are Up to Something

2008-12-30T15:49:00.015-06:00

They are hanging around on corners, on the tops of snow banks, in parking lots, puffed up, leaning over and cawing, in groups, looking around, looking at each other, looking at you.

The winter weather is defining itself in a standard definition--grey, sidewalks slicked with ice, forty inches of snow--a record--already this year. Walking the dogs is like being enlisted in a physical comedy training school. Might as well as walk on the frozen lakes with plastic blade covers on your ice skates. I stay inside instead eating the sugar that's accumulated in different forms from the holidays: truffles, fudge, cookies, caramels, chocolate bon bons and bars.

It's not even the dregs of winter yet, when one would expect the crows to gang up due to boredom or sheer crankiness from a season gone on too long. It's barely winter, the solstice just last week.

Ah, it's snowing again. A fine, sideways recipe. The feral, tough band of house sparrows is fighting over the pile of sunflower seed husks under the feeder. A female cardinal holds pole position above them at the main seed dispenser.

As I type, Bug is regurgitating while gently grabbing the pinky of my right hand in his beak. He loves me, thinks I need wooing and/or dinner. He lost a feather on my keyboard, a greyish-green chest feather. Then he presses his forehead into the desk once. He clicks his beak along with the sound of the typing keys. He's a mystery.

Mostly, he's looking for something to do, like those crows. Eat a spine of a poetry collection? Why not. Fly to his paper bag full of magazines? Sure. He's quietly crrrr-ing in response to something Jonesy is fixing in the bathroom--it sounds awful, like sawing metal. My teeth hurt.

I bet the Bug would like a neck cuddle but I got a new hoodie sweatshirt for x-mas. He ate holes in the last one, ate the hood ties, and he has a tendency to poop on your shoulder. I am going to try to keep this new one pristine as long as possible, which means, of course, it's doomed.

He and I have not had such a good week together. I was sick on the weekend, unable to monitor his goings-on, so he had to be in his cage, so that I could sleep unmolested, not fretting the damage he was inflicting upon the house while unsupervised. He screams, of course, if he in his cage if he hears you home. Upstairs in bed, I slept, the dogs slept, so he was quiet. Maybe he was napping, too. When Jonesy got home, the yelling started, and she let him out, so he was quiet again.

I had been keeping him off me since he bit me on the chin the week before. I felt like it was unprovoked, but I probably just missed the cues. With Jonesy, they're pals, they're goofy, full of colorful stories and braggery.

A bite, then the crrkk crrkk with the cute head bob. All I am going to say is we have conditioned each other's behaviors. If a bite gets you an operatic response and you love drama, then you know what, a bite's what you get. Maybe if I had a crow, I wouldn't get nailed as often.

I would need to clarify this with my phylogeny expert, John, but I am guessing that crows and parrots aren't that close in relation, despite their tendency for intelligence, and therefore, easily roused boredom. (I am such a dork and went upstairs just now to see if I could find one of those family trees of birds--who's branching off whom & when sort of thing. In my five ornithology books, nothing, though I found in the aptly titled Ornithology mesmerizing drawings, like the flight pattern of a hovering hummingbird, or the muscles of the syrinx, the vocal instrument of Aves).

Bug is preening himself next to my laptop. I do not want him on the desk but he keeps insisting, scuttling behind the screen, checking out pieces of paper, the drapes, pens with his beak until I make him stop with an ahem! He looks tired, scritching his neck with one of his feet, his head turned in pleasure, his eyes shutting. He's fluffed up like a baby, and we love the smallness, defenseless postures of the young. When I ask him to step up, however, he leans in to bite me, and then bobs his head. So cute, so true, our pattern of to and fro. He wants something to do. He might as well as be a crow.

What To Do?

2008-12-27T08:13:00.003-06:00

I am a list maker, and I mean a real list maker. Real list makers almost always have a ‘to do’ list going, if not on paper, certainly in their heads. Those who occasionally jot things down are not list makers; they are forgetful and need reminding.

People have been making ‘to do’ lists for thousands of years. Crude representations on cave walls of bison hunts and camp fires are not attempts to tell stories, but a way of reminding early humans that first you hunt, then you kill, then you build a fire and cook. Likewise I’m sure there have been many other misinterpretations – hieroglyphics on a papyrus thought to mean “…in the summer of the third year of the reign of the boy pharaoh the gods blessed us with rain and we enjoyed a great harvest. We defeated our enemy, enslaved the strong ones and sacrificed the young and weak ones” could have actually said “…buy a slave (strong one from the last successful battle), sacrifice a 3-year old to the Pharaoh, water the plants and go to the market.” I have no scientific basis for this conjecture, but it seems plausible to me, even without bullet points.

As a list maker I delight in the completion of a task primarily because I get to strike it off my list. It is an earned moment, a joyful stroke of the pen. I love it so much that I sometimes add things that I’ve already done to my list and then immediately strike them off. I know that’s stupid, but I crave that sense of accomplishment so much that, like any other addict, I just can’t help myself.

For a person who makes a lot of lists, I’m not very organized. I usually have several lists going, none of them comprehensive and all in different places. At any given time I probably have a scrap of paper in my back pocket, a small yellow pad at home, a wedge of 2”x4” in the basement and a chunk of cardboard in the car, all covered in my block letter handwriting outlining the things I need to do in either agonizing minutiae or Herculean weight. Even worse, I often forget to look at them after they are made. List making for me is more of a pathological habit than a useful organizational tool.

My list might look something like this:
1. Shower
2. Coffee
3. Paint house
4. Decide on a career
5. Be a better person
a. Lose weight
b. Stop telling linear stories with too much detail – it bores people
c. Find a therapist
6. Stop making lists

Clearly, this is a form of mental illness. But does the Betty Ford clinic have a rehab plan for this addiction? How about a 12 step program, or does the enumerated format preclude the possibility? Is there an anti-list making drug available? If there is, I haven’t seen the commercial, but I can imagine there would be many potential side effects. They would probably include: twitching, constipation, headaches, weight loss, confusion and memory loss.

And of course, listlessness.

The Tai Chi of Carpentry

2008-12-17T09:50:00.002-06:00

Today is December 1st. I can’t take a shower today. I couldn’t take one yesterday either. Or the day before or the entire week before that. Tomorrow’s prospects don’t look so hot either.
I guess, technically, I could take a shower. The plumbing works. Trouble is, there’s no wall around the bathtub, so the water would become rain in our basement. We don’t like rain in the basement.

The day we moved into our house I vowed to rip the nasty pink bathroom tile out and replace it. “Fixing up that butt ugly bathroom is my top priority,” I confidently told Sara and a bevy of our best friends as we sat on the hardwood floor of our new living room and drank bubbly out of plastic champagne flutes, boxes piled all around us.

Six years later the crappy pink tile was still on the bathroom walls, although some of it was barely clinging -- the result of a little moisture problem. Over the years the grout had become even skankier, pulling away in some places and holding fast in others due to the adhesive properties of a robust black mold. The middle of the wall bowed out as if it had a potbelly. The mold and mildew had genetically evolved so as to be immune to cleaning products. I envisioned colonies of icky organisms breeding behind the tiles.

I haven’t had a bath in six years.

Finally I admitted that I was never going to retile the bathroom. I didn’t have the time, and, the truth is, I was afraid I’d fuck it up and spend the next six years looking at wiggly rows of tile and cursing myself instead of placidly reading an LL Bean catalogue. I knew the only answer was to hire someone to do the job, but it’s hard for me to admit that I can’t do something, especially when there are people who say things like “I’d never even screwed in a light bulb before, but tiling the shower was so easy. It only took me half a day.” Or, “Retiling our bathroom was an easy weekend project.” Even though I know they’re lying I still feel judged for not doing it myself. To make me feel even more inadequate, I know several people actually capable of doing a project like this on their own, making it up along the way.

But not everyone has the patience and dexterity to pull it off. Patience, to put it mildly, is not one of my virtues. When faced with something fiddly I get easily frustrated and swear like a sailor in labor. My home remodeling efforts generally send the household into an emotional tailspin; Lulu hides and acts like she’s beaten daily and Sweet William gets excited and screams. Sara puts on headphones and, I suspect, tries to will herself to her happy place.

So, for all our sakes, my path was clear: suck it up and hire a professional tiler.

Newsflash: Professional tilers are really fucking expensive.

That’s how I came to hire my friend Tim to do the job. He’s a carpenter/handyman who I believe can handle most anything he tries. He told me that he works slowly and that he’s never done a job like this before so it would take a little time. He wasn’t sure how long. Big deal, I thought. It’s a tiny bathroom. How long can it take? Three days? Five?

After the deal was struck, but before he got started Tim let me know that, upon reflection, he didn’t have a problem tearing out the wall and putting up cement board, but he didn’t feel comfortable tiling, since he’d never done it. Before I could start rocking in a corner, Tim let me know that Jim, a guy he occasionally works with, could do the job. At first I was a little pissed off – here was a guy who I believed could do most anything and he was telling me there was something he didn’t want to try because he didn’t feel confident he could wing it. Wait a minute. I’ve heard this story somewhere before. Have I mentioned how much I like this guy?

I did the tear off. I started at 2 pm on a Sunday afternoon and was finished and cleaned up an hour later. It was gratifying to pop those hideous squares off the wall, as I’d wanted to do for the last six years. And, thanks to years of neglect, they were hardly attached at all, making it an easy job. It was a great feeling: phase one, complete.

According to plan, Tim showed up on Monday morning and got to work. By the end of the day the plaster was off, exposing the studs. By Tuesday night there was some mighty fine looking blocking installed (small pieces of 2”X4” stuck between the studs). Tim worked another full day on Wednesday, took Thursday off for Thanksgiving, and was back at it on Friday and Saturday. The bathroom didn’t look that much different.

My friend Tim is not a loafer. I have yet to see him take a break. However, it was almost a week into the project and I was still looking at a skeletal bathroom. On Saturday I stood in the doorway, made small talk and watched him work. His movements were deliberate and steady. He would occasionally stop what he was doing, sit back, look at his work carefully, then lean forward and continue the task. The unhurried motion was quite beautiful, almost meditative. He didn’t seem bothered that he’d been working in my tiny bathroom for days. He apologized for taking so long, but I don’t think there was a thought in his head that he should feel bad for taking his time. At least I hope not.

I’m the opposite -- I work as if I’m under siege, battling my way through every day. Always rushing, always apologizing for taking too long, always behind, always pissed off. There’s never enough time, never enough hot oil to pour over the wall. Work isn’t even about winning; it’s about holding ground. Maybe this is why I’m looking for another job.

Today is day 10 without a shower. Jim, the tiler is here. He’s not quite done, but we should be enjoying all the advantages of indoor plumbing by the weekend. After that, Tim will go on to his next job and leave my house much better for having spent time here. As much as I want a shower, I’ll miss having Tim around.

Tim’s Tai Chi-style of carpentry makes me realize that I want to be more deliberate. I want to enjoy my work. I want to be honest and unapologetic. The question, as always, is how do I make these fundamental changes?

Tim’s not exactly pulling in the big bucks but he enjoys what he does and maybe that’s the key. It’s a philosophy that easily fits on a bumper sticker: Follow Your Bliss. (After all the wonderful things Joseph Campbell wrote, that’s his legacy – a quip slapped on every ’89 Volvo wagon in America. At least the adhesive helps keep the rust bucket from falling apart.)

A friend once told me a parable about the two Hindu goddesses; Saraswati, goddess of knowledge, music and art and Lakshmi, goddess of wealth and prosperity. The upshot of the story is that if you follow the goddess of knowledge, the goddess of prosperity will become jealous and follow you. This tale is unconfirmed by Wikipedia, or any other internet source I could find, so either it’s not well known or my friend made it up. Either way, I like it. And, I’ll bet if I could figure out a way to condense the story I could make some solid cash by putting it on a t-shirt.

Windchill of 15 Below

2008-12-15T07:56:00.005-06:00

I had forgotten about Bug's leg band he had when we first got him, a few numbers, a few letters and FLA. We had it taken off when he started to chew on his leg and wipe the blood on his face. It turned out he had mild bumblefoot right after his adoption, small sores on the bottom of his toes. He healed well once the band came off and had a short course of fruit-flavored liquid antibiotics.

Floreeeeda. Imagine. An outdoor aviary, perhaps a few avian psittacine friends to hang out with there, sounds of other birds, direct sunlight. This is why escaped parrots do so well there, too. Conures spotted at the Home Depot? A few African greys in the neighborhood? Well, they are certainly not saying they are moving to the Midwest, where today the windchill is -15F, the temperature -1F.

So Bug was born to a breeder in Florida and then ended up loose, flying around a construction site in WI in the middle of the summer. Between A&B, who knows? I tried finding the breeder he came with by looking up his tag number. This was not as easy as reported. We also placed a parrot found ad on the internet. (The lost bird ads will break your heart.) No response. I know a vet who got an African grey because it just happened to pick the tree in her yard. I know another who got an Eclectus because it chose a vet school where she worked to roost near. Apparently, these bird are no dummies.

I am afraid to go outside today. I am not ready for new weather pattern that arrived last night after a day of 40F and rain.

Right now the juncos and house sparrows are picking through the dregs of the sunflower seeds under the feeder and there is quite a bit of wind. It makes no sense how they withstand the cold, being minute, heat pouring off their bodies.

There is a colony of monk parrots that lives near the brisk lake in Chicago. They make these elaborate and large nests in trees (above photo by blogger, below). Maybe they line them with polarfleece and down. But what does a tropical bird eat amid the snow and ice and bluster?

You can read about them here: http://www.brooklynparrots.com/2006/05/photo-essay-fabulous-wild-parrots-of.html

That said, stay warm, stay inside, drink hot chocolate.

More Votes for Florida

2008-12-12T10:26:00.007-06:00

It was so cold this morning that I cringed when my pants touched my legs. I don’t usually think of my legs as bare when I have pants on, but below 10° Fahrenheit, skin touching fabric leaves me with the understanding that under my clothes I am, indeed, naked.

I could wear long underpants but most places are so overheated that I fear spontaneous combustion. A piff and all that would be left is a puddle of ashes on a café chair, obliterated like one of Spinal Tap’s drummers. Besides, I’m outside for just beyond a nanosecond as I do my duck speed walk across the icy sidewalk to the car. Oooh aahh, oooh aahh as my skin brushes my suddenly cryogenic khakis. Honestly, if we’re going to have cold, I’d rather have snow. Somehow the white flakes seem jolly whereas the bright bracing empty air feels stark and painful; a cold bath in a steel tub.

In Wisconsin, preferring the white stuff is an unpopular attitude in light of the Sisyphean snowball of last winter. We got – we shoveled – 8 feet of snow last year. That’s 96 inches, some of it wet, sloppy, icy, moved from the sidewalk to the increasingly tall side-of-the-sidewalk snow mound. All in all there were 50 shovelable events, sometimes two or three a day.

Florida.

When I think of Florida I conjure up the image of a Bugs Bunny episode in which Bugs, for a reason I can’t recall, hunkers down on a rudimentary map of the US, cuts Florida off with a handsaw and finishes the task by kicking it free to float into the Gulf, just flicking it away like a giant hanging chad. I have no idea what Bug’s beef was with Florida back in the 50’s, but here at the turn of the century, I think of conniving republicans , the false reality of Disney Land, yahoos in the bayous, and Miami Vice. Just plain Loony Tunes.

But today, as the car thermometer registers 8°, I cast my vote for Florida. Sweet William votes for Florida (but he always does). Gracie, a dog with so little fur she is almost nude and hates her coat, absolutely votes for Florida. Taiko doesn’t care either way, as long as she gets plenty of snacks so Gracie tricks her into going outside and then votes for her by proxy. Even Sara, the Midwestern stoic, says ‘yay’ to the warmth of Florida.

So are we going to pack up and head south? If we did, I’d bet the farm we’d be heading back this way come July. Maybe we’ll just crank up the furnace and watch Miami Vice reruns tonight.

One Vote for Florida

2008-12-09T17:09:00.007-06:00

It snowed today, and most of the southern part of the state stayed home from work and school. Something about ice and snow and sleet. My neighbors were out early competing for who could bust out the most snow on the first real use of the snowblowers for the season. Thank you neighbors, for saving my lower back. I had to dig the car out from where the plow tucked it in so nicely with packed snow. The snow from the morning was the light, easily moved kind, not glumpy or heavy or wet. Whew.

All the while I could hear Bug screaming, through storm windows, nonetheless, old ones. The song goes like this: MEmemememeMEMEMEMEME! Then da capo.

I spent a few minutes on Facebook reading today about my classmate who moved to Hawaii. Smart gal. The weather so far this winter is looking a bit serious.

And why do we have amnesia each December when it all comes tumbling down all white and cold?

I stayed home from work today, too, like many, out of the muck and slippery trouble. Instead, a nap, a dog walk in the snow, a cup of Mexican hot chocolate. And the parrot got a lot of one on one. Though the last few evenings he has been trying to take triangle (beak-shaped) chunks from my wrists. He hates sweaters and typing and generally not being adored every second. He is vocalizing his vote to move to Florida or New Mexico, Somewhere else, he says, so I can live outside and get some real sun. The members in the household may be a little low on the vitamin D.

It's tempting to run--well, to plan to run, to get a new job, sell the house, pack and move--all that exhausting schlepping of stuff from one abode to another, just to move closer to sun. But it just makes me tired. Instead, I try not to obsess about other climates while in the middle of a snow storm. It leads to a less than happy mental attitude.

And now, in a fit of distraction from the weather, I am taunting the parrot with a white rag, so he will chase it like a kitten after a string. I suspect he is really aiming for my wrists.

Holiday Letters, Honestly

2008-12-09T12:08:00.017-06:00

It’s early December. After shoveling snow off our sidewalk for the third time this season I open my mailbox and, with effort, unstuff it.

I lay out the yield on the kitchen table like I’m dealing cards.

Sara’s pile: a Sierra Trading Post catalogue, something about a bird conference, a credit card transfer offer; another credit card offer (ACT NOW! it says. I quickly move it to Sweet William’s pile. Sara hates to be pressured.), a letter from her mom, an early Christmas card, and an insurance bill.

My pile: a postcard from the Subaru dealership making it clear we need to winterize now, a solicitation from the Equality Federation, a solicitation from the Best Friend’s Animal Shelter and a solicitation from The Nature Conservancy.

Sweet William’s pile: the Shopper Stopper, offers for cable tv, satellite tv and AT&T high speed internet.

The last piece to sort is a bright red envelope with a green Christmas tree shaped seal. It has a computer generated label addressed to both of us. I recognize the return address and immediately know what it is, causing me to groan involuntarily, which causes Sweet William to squawk. Although he doesn’t realize it, his reaction is spot on. I am holding a Christmas letter --an impersonal, mass mailed announcement outlining the successes and accomplishments of a given family over the past year. I put it in Sweet William’s pile. Then I take it out and put it in Sara’s pile. Then I move it to a place all on its own: the recycling. I pour myself a glass of wine, a fine Argentinian Malbec, sit down, stand up and take the dreaded thing out of the bin and put it back on the table. These letters are like the presidential debates: even though I know they’ll be painful to see, I just can’t help myself.

When Sara comes home I make her a cocktail of cranberry juice, ginger ale, a twist of lime, and the tiniest splash of vodka. After she’s had a few sips I show her the envelope and encourage her to open it. Like me, she feels bad that she doesn’t want to read it. But still, she uses it as a coaster. I goad some more and she moves her drink, tears open the envelope and reads the letter out loud.

Exactly as we imagined, it’s a boastful account of the achievements of the authors’ talented son, daughters and even pets. The admirable health of an elderly parent is also lauded.

Theoretically these are all good things, so why all the humbug? I’ll tell you why: there’s not anything less than complete success in these letters. They are deceptive. Through embellishment and omission their family is Cleaver perfect.

“Brittany was awarded first prize in the all school spelling bee.” (Not mentioned: she tanked in the first round at regionals.)

“Tyler scored the most goals on her soccer team.” (Not mentioned: The team finished last in the league.)

There’s a holier-than-thou conceit to almost all of these missives. The subtext being: our family is better than yours; our kids smarter; our careers better; our vacations more stunning, etc.

“Craig won salesman of the year for the fourth time in a row -- the prize this year was an all expense paid trip to Bermuda for the whole family. The hotel was fabulous and the water so blue. Little Joshua saw a shark and wasn’t even afraid!”

In case the reader hasn’t spewed by the end of the thing, the standard closing should do the trick. This is where the writer drives it home that their family is so wonderful that they want to share all their God given good fortune by bestowing a blessing on you and yours, because clearly, they have an inside line.

Nobody likes these letters. Anyone who says they do is only being polite. Just once I’d like to receive a Christmas update based on the opposite principle, which I imagine would look something like this ---

Dear Friends, Family and Parole Officers,

This year the Jones family experienced many events. Some were bad because the world just has it out for us. Some were good, which we attribute to just plain dumb luck.

Here are a few of the highlights:

Charlie is still in juvenile detention (he calls it ‘juvie,’ isn’t that cute?). Unless he pulls another stunt like the last one, he should be out next spring.

Celia was blessed with another baby, this time a little boy. Celia says he might look just like his daddy, only time and a DNA test will tell. The principal says she can return to high school once she’s finished breast feeding. She was such a smart little girl, before she got tits.

Danny was rehired at McDonald’s after it was determined that the deep fat fryer fire was not his fault. When he received the news he laughed hysterically. He’s such a good-natured boy.

My divorce was finally final so Mikey and I can get married again. He’ll be my first and third husband. Isn’t that special? His proposal was so romantic – we were screaming at each other about child support outside Warehouse Liquor, when suddenly we both looked down at the very same moment and found a $20 bill. Since we spotted it at the same time we were very adult and decided to buy a case of Schlitz Malt Liquor 40’s and split it. And here’s when it happened – the case of 40’s cost exactly $20. It was a sign. He dropped down on one knee and I said yes before he even asked. I didn’t find out until later that he was tying his shoe. But after we made a serious dent on that case he began to see it my way. By 11am that very day we were once again officially engaged. Even though he’s a d-bag about the child support I know he’ll honor his word and take me to the alter again.

Priscilla, my youngest, was convicted of grand theft auto. Hard to believe there’s a crime named after the video game. The judge accused her of ‘joy riding.’ I stood up and corrected him – nobody fuckin ‘joy rides’ in a Honda Civic. She was just fooling around, as kids do. He told me to hold my tongue and watch my language and of course everybody knows I do exactly the opposite of what ‘the man’ tells me to so he held me in contempt of court and I did a little time. Ain’t so bad, 3 squares a day and I got my teeth fixed.

I’d like to include news of all the rest of the kids, but I have no idea what the ungrateful brats are up to since they haven’t bothered to call all year. The ones in the pen I forgive, but I just don’t understand why the others wouldn’t want to be close to their mama. Kids these days, I swear.

To finish up on a good note, Grandpa Jim does not have the clap. The doctor isn’t sure exactly what it is, but it qualifies him for all kinds of medical experiments so he gets paid for just sitting around on his ass and watching tv.

Well, hell, I guess that’s it. Happy Holidays and all that good shit.

Best wishes,

Debra, Charlie, Celia, Danny, Priscilla, John, John Jr., Trip, Becca, T.K.La and the rest of the Jones/Stewart/Brown family

PS: We’re looking to borrow a little scratch for December rent. Anybody help us out? We’ll pay it back. Honest.

Sweet William is, A Punk Rocker

2008-12-08T10:38:00.004-06:00

If Sweet William were human he’d be a teenage punk rocker. He’s happiest in cacophony and rages against authority -- no request is accepted without question or incentive. If he were forming words (that he understood the meaning of) I’m positive he’d curse like a sailor in labor.

“Turn that music down, son, and clean up your room.” He defiantly bobs his head up and down. No response. “I said,” unsuccessfully yelling over The Dead Kennedys, ‘California uber alles, California uber alles….’ (I would hope he’d have more eclectic taste than the DK’s, but he’s never been an eclectus, and I guess conures follow the flock. Besides, what is punk except conformity to a set of rules that calls itself individualism?) Raising my voice as loud as possible, “I said, clean up your damn room! It’s a pig sty in there, young man.” “It’s my fucking room, why do you care? All you do is try to make me do shit – I’m not your fucking maid.” Then I scream more, and he screams more. We both scream.

I walk over to his boombox and turn it off altogether. He shuts up and glares at me, hair short and spiky, jeans ripped down the thigh and held together with safety pins. I know this is the payback I get for doing pretty much the same thing to my folks, except I didn’t curse around them and we had a housekeeper, so, like so many of my crowd I was just mad they made me clean the pool.

He grabs his skateboard, “Eat asphalt, asshole” scrawled in black sharpie on the bottom, the ‘o’ embellished with the symbol for anarchy, and storms out of the house. I know he’ll skate for hours, taking flight off curbs and buzzing lightening fast through parking ramps. I have to confess it sounds amazing and if I could, I’d probably do it too. But I worry.

I look through his room and find he’s ripped every other page out of J.D. Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye.” I’d given it to him as a present, thinking he’d identify with Holden Caulfield, but I guess he was becoming quite the critic. I know he read at least some of it because, if nothing else, he’d gleaned the new swear word ‘asswipe.’ I have to grin. When I read it, I too, was pleased with the addition to my vocabulary.

When he returns, having gone who knows where and torn up who knows what, he slumps down in front of the tv and turns on an Everybody Loves Raymond rerun, mostly, I suspect, because he knows the inane show makes me want to puke. He glowers, filled with more angst than anger. I poke my head in the living room, “Hey, how’s the mayor of the Island of Dr. Morose?” I get the eye roll.

“I made walnut loaf, topped with sesame seeds. Mangoes and grapes for dessert.”

He can’t help himself. Although he longs to break free, to skim over trees and to bask in the real sunshine and cool wind, he’s lured in by the temptation of his favorite food and the comfort of his home. Once fed and happy he cuddles up, ready to be loved.

Sir Sweet William. My little brat. I’d love it if he’d behave himself, stop screaming so much, stop ripping up everything from Jane Eyre to junk mail, but he has no choice, really. It’s who he is. He’s a wild animal contained by a quirk of fate. I can either love and accept him for that or lock him in a cage and neglect him. (Social services would really frown on that approach if he were human, but as it is he’s a bird and there’s no law against that kind of cruelty, even though there ought to be.)

As well as tearing shit up and shitting wherever he pleases, he wants to play and talk and snuggle. When he sits on my shoulder, bobs his head up and down fast and then laughs when I do, I fall in love every time. I do my best to keep him happy: I play loud music, give him seed balls and make sure he never runs out of things to destroy. And that's the best a parent can do.

Public Service Announcement

2008-12-02T10:28:00.007-06:00

Durian fruit is not cheese but it smells like it. To be specific, it smells like aged bleu cheese thrice vomited – once by a person and twice by a dog. The only thing more disgusting than a dog eating its own puke is durian fruit.

In much the same way that Jerry Lewis is a comic genius in France and Cheap Trick rules the rock stages of Japan, durian fruit is considered a delicacy in parts of Asia. I have no first-hand knowledge of the fresh product, but I’ve been told that it has a custard-like texture and a delectable flavor so unique that comparisons can’t be made. (I asked, and it does not taste like chicken.)

In case you’re planning a trip and are unfamiliar with this Asian delight allow me to be of some assistance: Keep your eyes and nose alert at markets and street carts for an oval shaped fruit -- spiky on the outside, (making it look sort of like a hedgehog) and stinky on the inside (making it smell like the hedgehog has been dead for quite some time.) You might even see signs banning the fruit from certain public places, like hotels and hospitals. It seems unbelievable to me that anyone has to be told not to inflict this malodorous experience on patients in a hospital. People there are already sick; an olfactory assault like a ripe durian could set off a hospital-wide vomi-rama affecting health care professionals as well as patients and taking hours to get under control.

I have read that, in places where the fruit is common, there are two camps: those with durian shame and those with durian pride. Among the first group there is a movement to genetically alter the crop to create a less noisome fruit so it can be exported without embarrassment. And of course, the second group delights in the will power required to run the gauntlet of stench. The reward, they say, is all the more delicious because not everyone has the fortitude. I do suspect that some of the proud are not necessarily disciplined, but the victims of an accident leaving them without a sense of smell. Cheaters.

Even without going abroad, naïve Americans should be warned of this epicurean landmine as some Asian food stores in the states carry not only the fruit, but products made with it. The combination of durian and ignorance create a recipe, if not for disaster certainly for disgust. Here in the Midwest, most people have never even heard of the food, but if asked, would probably agree that Durian would be a great name for a Golden Retriever. In a haphazard way they aren’t wrong, especially if the dog is excessively flatulent.

Here in Madison, the managers of the local Asian grocery store understand the power of the fruit and warn unwitting shoppers with shelf labels that say something like: “If you do not know this flavor do not buy this food.”

I have a very adventurous “foodie” friend, John, who saw the label as a challenge. Despite the advice of those in the know, he nonchalantly tossed a package of durian fruit flavored sugar wafers in his cart. This was not an act of hubris. Hubris would be buying the fruit and slicing it open. This was a packet of cookies, which seemed to contain only trace amounts of the noxious ingredient, making it a good place to start.

When the package was scanned at the register an alarm bell sounded alerting the clerk to the potential shopping error. She picked up the cookies, put them aside and told John that he really didn’t want them. John stubbornly insisted that he did want them. “Do you know this flavor?” she asked, almost belligerently. “Can you eat durian fruit?”

Anytime the question is phrased “Can you eat…” rather than “Do you like….” there’s trouble. In Japan I was asked many times, “Can you eat natto?” Natto is a nauseating fermented soy product covered in soy snot so stringy that it hangs from your chopsticks, stretching from bowl to mouth as you try not to look but can’t help it. Admittedly the odor is not as powerful as durian fruit, but it is far from pleasant. I foolishly ate natto a total of three times; the first because I didn’t want to offend my hosts, the second because I was so plowed I ate it by accident, and the last because I am a patriot -- backed into a corner I had to prove that Americans are not wusses. (Hey, we all make sacrifices.) Rather than knuckling under pressure or admitting that I can’t eat the slime I finally learned to counter the question with a question of my own. The challenge: “Can you eat headcheese?” got me out of a lot of tight spots.

After paying the $1.19 for the cookies John brought them to our house hoping for an interesting culinary group experience. Sitting in our kitchen he told us the story of their procurement, of the warnings and of the clerk’s preemptory look of ‘I told you so.’ Naturally our curiosity was peaked.

John removed the wafers from the plastic shopping bag and we each examined the package from every angle as archaeologists would study a rare artifact. “I’m eating one.” he said. “Yea, me too,” I told him offhandedly with no idea of what could be lurking in the bag. After all, I have eaten natto, so how bad can this be? Sara's response was naturally, “Maybe.”

John cautiously tore open a corner of the package and stuck his nose near it. He pulled his head back, scrunched up his eyebrows and said nothing. I leaned in for a sniff, and swear I damn near puked in my mouth. I was stunned. How could a sugar wafer smell like a fetid carcass? I don’t know how Sara reacted as I left the room in a hurry. From the living room I braced myself as the rank cloud invaded the house like some evil presence from outer space. I looked up and John was in the doorway holding one of the cookies.

“Aren’t you going to eat one? I’m eating it,” he said like a firefighter says “I’m going in” when faced with a burning building. I was horrified. “What? You’re not serious. You’re not going to put that nasty shit in your mouth are you?” John is not a guy who backs down. “Hell yea I’m eating one. Come on, you can do it -- just a taste,” he chided. All I could do was shake my head and clamp my mouth shut in much the same way a toddler refuses to eat brussel sprouts.

He held the nasty little wafer toward me and threw down his final dare: “Are you telling me that you categorically refuse to eat this cookie? Are you totally backing out?”

“That’s right. I refuse. No fucking way am I putting that turd near my mouth.” John shrugged as if to say, ‘your loss.’ Then with the seriousness of a surgeon he took a single bite, made a face and then ate the whole damn cookie, barely chewing. I have to say, I was really impressed. Sara walked by, picked up a cookie, took a nibble, wrinkled her nose, and casually threw the rest of it in the trash.

I have no idea why they were so calm while I was on the edge of hurling just from the smell. Unable to bring myself to approach the bag I begged John to put the damn thing outside on the porch. Even then, the pernicious odor hung around all day and the kitchen still stunk the following morning. (Yes, I did take out the trash.)

Sara and John both agreed that it tasted a bit like bleu cheese and the after taste was not easily neutralized. Neither was damaged by the experience although both said they were not interested in trying the fresh fruit.

As for me, I’ve been abroad and eaten foods I did not find appetizing, but was able to swallow with a smile to please my generous host. I’ve eaten crickets, brittle-like candy with tiny dried fish in it, rattlesnake, parts of goats I’d rather not speak of, and vegetables and meats I couldn’t identify. But I met my match with the mighty durian. Without having even a smidge of durian in my mouth I believe it should all be buried under concrete with other toxic waste.

I understand that such strong feelings are not shared by all and to those of you with durian pride, I apologize for my scathing review. But, come on, how many foods come with a warning label?

Better Than TV

2008-11-29T10:39:00.012-06:00

A couple of years ago just about every guy I saw was wearing a yellow “LiveStrong” bracelet to promote awareness of testicular cancer and, I suppose, to show compassion. Those strips of embossed rubber were worn by waiters, teachers, mid-level state bureaucrats, college kids working at Ben & Jerry’s, insurance agents, under-age skate punks trying to buy beer, retired executives, boys, men, gentlemen and dudes of all description. I remember seeing one poke out from the starched cuff of my banker’s shirt sleeve. It was heartwarming – the man might have seemed automated but here was tangible proof that he either knew how to care, or he wanted everyone to know he knew he ought to care. It’s so hard to tell which when caring is expressed through a fashion trend.

Trends, by definition, have an up and a down side. The once ubiquitous yellow bands are pretty scarce these days. I noticed a website advertising them at 25% off. When fashion fades, does concern wane? Can it be that some people are such bargain hunters that they won’t pay full price for anything, including a donation to cancer research?

One of the guys I used to work with, Peter, never took his band off. I guarantee you it had nothing to do with looking cool; he was the kind of guy who didn’t give a rat’s ass what others thought of him. It’s not that he was a slob, or unkempt in any way, he just needed adult Garanimals to take the pressure off picking out clothes. Charcoal grey and brown do not go together, something even I know but he could never grasp, not at the time he worked in our office, anyway. He left town for the fashionable east coast about a year ago and, I had imagined, upgraded his wardrobe, rising beyond the Lands’ End comfort of the Midwest. I was wrong about that. Wearing a grey v-neck sweater with tan corduroys he unexpectedly stopped by the office late in the afternoon the day before Thanksgiving. Man oh man, was I glad to see him. Being the last one in an otherwise empty office the day before a holiday is more depressing than spending New Year’s Eve in a hotel room for one in Waco. Without cable. Well, that’s taking it a bit far, but you get my point. I was not only glad to see him, but grateful for the excuse to pack up and head to the Tiki Bar.

Yes, I work in a building with a Tiki Bar. We’ve also got a seafood restaurant on the first floor and a coffee shop next door, making our office ripe for a sitcom. All we’d need to do is add a little drama and some witty dialogue. And characters. We’d need more interesting, better-looking characters with perpetual sexual tension to make annoyingly bad decisions and propel the plot round and round, week after week in the same exasperating loop.

But of course, our office is nothing like tv. We don’t live in a land of existential epiphanies, preposterous pranks and perfect skin. We just show up for work day after day in our ordinary clothes and sale rack shoes. It could be argued that we could all use a make-over and a little plastic surgery, hell I know I wouldn’t turn it down (How did those worry lines become carved into my forehead? Who strapped those hams to the undersides of my arms?), but I won’t speak for the rest of the staff, even though I kind of just did. If any of you guys are reading, please know that I’m not talking about you, but the others.

As for drama, there’s not much, not that you can see, anyway; no temper tantrums, no secret trysts (unless they are really secret), no catty remarks, no explosions -- nothing to really draw attention. Ennui is quiet. Like most of white-collar America, we look forward to lunch, get pissed off when the copy machine doesn’t work, suspect our co-workers mock us behind our backs, and hoard office supplies. About the only plotlines we could scrape together would involve a bogarted stapler, a bungled copy machine toner replacement job, a misunderstanding about a happy hour venue and a controversial blog entry. Although most of the programs on tv are so vapid that even plants get bored I still don’t think we’d make the grade, not even for a mid-season pilot. Exploits in excel spreadsheets would not keep America in front of the widescreen. Unless the remote is lost.

In real life, the Tiki Bar has plastic palm trees, fake parrots (the big gaudy ones, nothing as classy as a dusky headed conure), a bamboo bar and a long list of fruity rum drinks with names like The Jimmy Buffet, Tommy’s Tsunami and Penzance Punch. What it doesn’t have is a coat rack. I once suggested to the owner that he get one and was told, “No coat racks in Tahiti. No coat racks in my bar. That’s how I keep it real.” I love that guy – no insincerity and cheap beer for the faithful. Who needs a coat rack?

Peter and I got a beer and a barstool, letting our coats slide to the floor. As he lifted his pint, I noticed he was still wearing the LiveStrong band. “So what’s with the bracelet? You haven’t taken that thing off for two years.” “Hey,” he said, with feigned indifference, “wearing is caring.” After a few seconds he cocked his head to the side and said, “brother.” We drank for a few minutes in silence. “How’s your mom?” he asked me. “She’s a tough old bird – too stubborn to let it get her.” It was a practiced line meant to show that I wasn’t afraid of the shitty cancer that attacked her body. Not surprisingly, he wasn’t fooled.

If this were tv you’d see me and Peter playing shuffle board and high fiving each other for even the smallest accomplishment. You’d hear a voice over, one of us saying something poignant about that moment of connection, about how some of us wear a bracelet, others run races and have a t-shirt to show for it and some of us just push it down deep until it becomes a hard dark kernel inside, shoved so far down it comes out of our feet as toenails. The last lines of the show would explain how joking and laughing and drinking up the night served a purpose -- how it felt good to know we’re not alone; that we’re not bad people even though we both emotionally stutter, never saying what we mean to people we love; and that although we privately rage against the cruelty of cancer we have no idea what to do with that anger.

Oh yea, and of course, Happy Holidays.

2008-11-27T11:49:00.010-06:00

On this late morning, Thanksgiving Day, I went to take a pre-emptive, pre-gluttony walk with the dogs. A few others were out, too: staunch, winter-dressed bikers on the bike path and women walking their dogs. Lulu was wearing her coat, due to the cold, which tempered her tendency to flail and flare at dogs we passed. Despite the cloudless sky and the manageably cold weather, plus sun on the face, it took about a half an hour to dissolve a little of my cruddy mood, too boring, really, to go into. Due to this said mood, I had been mulling for a brief time on my walk the subtleties between anti-anthropomorphism and flat out misanthropy. Not feeling up to fiddly mind benders, I pitched it out of my head. Good riddance. Occasionally in the breeze I smelled a ham cooking. TK continued her unending quest for crumbs in the snowy grass. When we got back home, the Hmong family next door had 14 cars parked in front of their house.

Bug, enthusiastically, as ever, is eating his parrot pellets, dipping them in his water bowl. He is, of course, oblivious to the pending nation-wide engorgement festival. He's doing what he loves to do--go in his paper bag and shred some magazines, shake the spare keys in the box in the bag. Lulu's treed a squirrel and is volleying barks at the tree in her terrrier-intense manner. TK thinks maybe it will come down if she just stares at it long enough. Now Lulu's walking on her hindlegs in front of the tree like a circus dog.

I am going to our friends' for the feast of the day, and I plan, as always to fill up on bread. He texted me this morning, Bring your liver and pancreas. This seems reasonable and wise. Wouldn't leave home without them.

On this holiday of thanks, I am grateful for my liver and pancreas, and I hope you are, too. In drastic measures, one can receive a pancreatic transplant, I recently learned. I had previously thought if one ever even thought of touching the organ during surgery the thing just fell apart, promptly eating everything around it with its pre-packaged super enzymes. Apparently, I am wrong. I don't know how it's done, but maybe it's form of magic.

I love my liver, by the way, tremendously, too. God bless the liver and the hundreds of things it does unselfishly every day.

And I wanted to send out a mushy hello to everyone out there. Miss you, love you. And try to take it a little easy on the organs, ok?

Improving With Age

2008-11-22T23:41:00.005-06:00

Having spent my childhood in Texas I can tell you one thing with absolute certainty: ice cream melts if you don’t eat it right away. To me, the phrase ‘delayed gratification’ is a euphemism for wasted opportunities, dull predictability and soggy sugar cones. I’m in good company here in my house where having to wait for anything results in either full-on hysteria or barely contained panic. Seed balls, salmon tid-bits, the bed by the heat vent, Gail Ambrosius’ chocolate truffles, an overpriced bottle of Willamette Valley Pinot -- all examples of desires requiring immediate dispatch.

Pets and children too young to control their own bowel movements are exempt from even trying to enjoy later what a bit of whining or a temper tantrum could get for them right now. Not so for the rest of us. As adults, we’re expected to be ants, not grasshoppers. Sara, with her Midwestern sensibilities, seems to discipline herself without hesitation. No matter the temptation, her default answer is ‘no,’ at least initially, which could possibly, with encouragement, edge toward, ‘maybe later,’ whereas mine is consistently ‘hell yea,’ making me a lot like the Bug, except he’s much more entertaining when he says ‘yes’ (his only really solid party trick). He draws out the word so far it snaps and separates into two syllables – a break made all the more clear by his slow head bob right in the middle of it. “Yyee-esss.” “Yyee (head bob down)-(head bob up)esss.” “Yyee-esss.” He’ll repeat it as many times as I do. Who wouldn’t like such an agreeable feathered fellow?

About five years ago, long before my little green yes man showed up, I was wasting my days working in a dusty, sunless warehouse moving pallets of wine from one tall shelf to another with a forklift. It was sort of like playing Tetris over and over again with a modified bumper car from a carnival.

I knew I shouldn't have taken the job, but it was a desperate measure designed to get me out of a crappy job, as had been taking the crappy job I was leaving. No doubt about it, every step I took was going down.

The first moment I walked into the airplane hangar sized, climate-controlled building, the voice in my head exploded with an Edvard Munch type psychic scream so loud, so clear, that the echo of it lurked around the boxes of champagne and chardonnay for months. I should have taken my own advice and run fast, screaming like the guy on the bridge, snagging a bottle of Veuve Cliquot on my way out. But four weeks of vacation and a deep discount on really good wine was enough to sell out my own brain. I am so fucking cheap.

At first I contented myself with the notion that it’s not what you do, it’s who you do it with; a mental trick that worked well enough to get me out of bed and into my steel-toed boots every day for about six weeks, which is how long it took me to realize that the guys I worked with were total dickheads and I was pretty sure they had a corresponding term for me.

Bob, the boss, when in a good mood, had a habit of driving the forklift as fast as it would go, weaving through the aisles and at the top of his lungs quacking duck-like: “Fuuuck….fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck, fuck fuck!” and then laughing like he was auditioning for the part of mad scientist. Initially, I thought he was a speed freak, but I later discovered he was just drunk.

When he was in a bad mood he’d mutter to himself while rearranging wine we’d just rearranged and take really long lunches. He was drunk then too. Either way, he ignored me, having decided that I was a stuck up bitch. And maybe I was.

The other guys had their quirks too. Jim, a 35 year old 6’7” redhead spoke with the speed of an amphetamine addict, his verbal firehose on full blast, without pause or breath, revealing a stream of conscious dialogue mundane in meaning and fascinating in delivery. As we’d hoist boxes of cheap plonk up onto a shelf above my head (eye-level for him), he’d launch into one of his monologues, often about food. “I stopped at Pick ‘N’ Save you know Pick ‘N’ Flick yesterday because I wanted peanut butter I really love peanut butter don’t you love peanut butter (not really a question – no pause) but I only had $3 so I couldn’t get any bread only the peanut butter so I got the peanut butter but not the bread.” The words would just tumble out, one on top of another, too rapid to easily understand and too trivial to make the effort. Instead of listening to him I often found myself fixated on counting the seconds between breaths (one Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi…..).

Then there was Ted, a fellow history major who also considered the warehouse job to be only temporary – a minor stop on the way to a bigger and better occupation. He had been there for five years. I thought we’d identify with one another, but instead our common circumstance proved repulsive, like looking in a mirror and seeing ‘loser' written across your forehead. So instead of commraderie we built our own private Maginot Lines; mine of morose silence and snobbery; his of crude male humor and silly flamboyance. He wore Hawaiian shirts and shorts all year long, which is completely nuts because we live in Wisconsin, a place where global warming is welcome. When I asked him about the shorts in February, he grinned and told me, “I like to let the boys air out.”

For some stupid reason I think I have to keep a job for at least a year, no matter how shitty, but before a year was up, doing doughnuts in a forklift on the smooth cement had lost all its appeal and I was taking advantage of my wine discount to an unhealthy extreme.

After scouting around for another job it was clear that my jumbled work history still had me on a speedy escalator to nowhere so I did what every middle-class person crushed of creativity would do: I went back to school to study accounting. It wasn’t entirely unpremeditated. I’d made a deal with myself while in my mid 30’s that if I hit 40 and still had no real career I’d force myself to do the dullest thing I could think of, which was, of course, bean counting. With a threat like that hanging over one’s head, who wouldn’t get their shit together? Answer: me.

I resisted. It meant giving up evenings and weekends for two years and then even more time to complete a series of exams. Could I force myself to do that? A friend pushed me over the edge by summing it up like this: “Yea, work now, get what you want later --think of it like a frequent flyer program. So you have to go to Scranton a bunch of times for business but when you rack up enough points you get to go to Tahiti.” Tahiti, I thought: snorkeling, warm sand and those fruity drinks with umbrellas. I liked the Idea of Tahiti. And, I had made a promise to myself. No matter that the decision was made after a birthday pub crawl. I stand by my word, no matter how slurred.

School sucked. I hated almost every second of class, of homework and especially of fucking group projects. I spent hours and hours dinking around with the debits and credits of theoretical widget factories. Despite my distaste, I kicked ass as a student, unlike my pathetic performance almost 20 years before. Back in 1987 I was a lazy, smart-ass kid who hung on to just enough gpa to graduate. In fact, The University of Texas probably let me slide a little just to get rid of me and my Flock of Seagulls haircut. I felt like I was making up for it this time and most importantly I was determined to see it through to the end even though it was nearly as soul sucking as one of Harry Potter’s dementors. I had made myself a shit sandwich and I was damn well going to eat it. With onions and bleu cheese.

Since the prospect of a job in accounting wasn't exciting to me, yet I'm so amazingly stubborn that I wouldn't change my course, I needed to do something to inject some gratification in my delayed gratification plan. I had to have something, some dangling carrot, so I bought myself a really, really good bottle of wine to stash away. I got it at an auction and gave more for it than I paid for the first car I bought. On-line wine sellers had it valued at double that price which made me giddy with anticipation. That’s how I remember it anyway. Sara has a different version of the story in which I was a little tipsy on free beer (she might actually go further than that), opened the bidding on a bottle I didn’t know much about and although it quickly jumped out of our price range, just kept going, eventually topping the last bid with a ridiculous offer. And here’s her favorite part of the story: she ended up paying for it. Truth is so subjective.

I squirreled my prize away in the cellar (basement, whatever), and for the next four years fantasized about the day I would finally deserve to open it – when I’d finished all my classes and passed all four grueling exams. I pictured me and Sara, (me 20 pounds thinner, Sara in a beautiful velvety dress) the wine surreally red in the decanter, both of us relaxed and jovial, sitting close on the couch, faithful Taiko at my feet, Sweet William chattering away, and finally, finally, raising the glass and reveling in the subtle magnificence of the alchemy of superb wine. Of note, an accounting job does not figure into this daydream.

It took me three tries to pass the last exam. Each time the pain and stress of studying was like giving a kidney, which left me one kidney in the hole. When I finally passed, I wept out of relief, and then went right back to work. I was completely buried in spreadsheets and other accounting goop. The ’97 Cab stayed in the basement. Er, uh, cellar.

On November 4, 2008, the time had come. Oddly enough, I was about 20 pounds lighter. The weight loss (due to stress) came mostly off my ass which didn’t really need to shrink, leaving the life preserver around my middle intact. Also, I’d just had the worst haircut of my life. I had been shorn so brutally that you could see my scalp in places. But Sara looked lovely. We ordered a pizza and camped out in front of the tv, caught in the collective excitement of the election. The decanter glimmered, all promise and possibility. The first taste told me that I’d jumped the gun. A wine of such stature needed more time to breathe. As the evening progressed Barack Obama’s success became more and more certain as he racked up the electoral votes. The wine’s ranking never improved. It just kept sucking.

As President Elect Obama gave his speech in Chicago I sat in my living room and studied the wine through the glass, brick red in the center and almost clear around the edge. I had waited so long for it, and it would never improve. If this had all been about delayed gratification, I would have cried, but all I could do was laugh. I laughed from deep down, kidney deep. I had the extreme privilege of being a part of one of the most significant moments in American history and on top of that I’d done what I said I’d do, requiring every strand of discipline I could scrounge. Not a bad evening at all. Before going to bed I got on-line and after a quick search discovered that the wine’s value had plummeted to $30 a bottle. Had I been reading up on this all along, I would have seen that this particular wine peaked 2 years before, and should have been drunk then. Had I not confused success with sacrifice I would have known that.

As I poured this very expensive bottle of unpalatable wine down the kitchen sink I realized that it was not wasted. I’ve learned a hell of a lot in the past four years, most importantly that everything – and I mean everything – is a metaphor.

Stress Management

2008-11-17T11:29:00.011-06:00

After living in our house for 6 years we’ve finally put up curtains to replace the beige (originally white), mangled, dusty mini-blinds that made our place look like a cheap rental with an unresponsive absentee landlord. We’re on a tight time budget so we bought tension curtain rods – the sort that require no installation save squishing the rod ends toward one another, sticking the apparatus in the window, letting go and allowing the spring to hold it up. But with the weight of the curtains will it stay up? In our house, you bet. The whole damn place is held together by tension.

The humans of the house have both been a little on edge for the past, oh, four years or so. Well, six years, really, to be fair. Or eight, maybe eight years. Anything before that I’ve deliberately blocked out.

I am capable of controlling my anxiety, especially with a glass of cabernet in one hand and a tube of Xanax-laced cookie dough in the other, but besides those moments of calm, let’s just say I wouldn’t be the world’s greatest air traffic controller. Unless that's how air traffic controllers "get in the zone." As a frequent flyer I really hope that's not the case.

At home I have an excuse for my, shall we call it, excitability. Picture this: Gracie the uptight terrier squealing and frantically pawing at the back door like she’s going to dig right through the glass; the phone ringing, its location unknown (between the cushions of the couch? in a coat pocket? who the fuck knows?); the old cat circling my legs figuring if she trips me I’ll feed her breakfast which consists of gourmet kitty pâté that is not good enough on its own, so it has to be diluted with hot water, blended with a second type of chunkier food, served by the heater vent and guarded from the riff-raff; Sweet William sitting in his room acting like he can’t fly, screaming his high pitched panic CAW! CAW! CAW! that gets higher and faster and higher and faster like a warning signal that any second he’s going to blow. Oh, and I’m late for work. Work. I can’t even talk about the j.o.b. I mean it.

Like me, Gracie is uber-tense. After a few shots of espresso each morning she patrols the perimeter. She runs from one window to the next, rises up on her hind legs like a meerkat, places her sharp little front claws on the already scratched window sill, presses her snotty nose to the glass, and barks at anything in her air space, which extends to the outer limits of her sight and hearing range. The only good part of the process is that every time she hops up to look out the window she audibly farts. I don’t know why farts are funny, but they always are.

For the most part Sweet William knows how to deal with stress. Sometimes he screams like a spoiled 2 year old until he gets what he wants – usually a shoulder to sit on and a sweater to surreptitiously eat a hole out of, other times he finds an expensive textbook, rips it to shit and then takes a crap on it. Charming, I know. And, by the way, he also does that when he’s happy too, so his mood is sometimes a little hard to read. Now don’t you want to get a parrot?

The Older You Get

2008-11-15T16:02:00.006-06:00

About two weeks ago, my 17.75 year old cat began to sporadically howl from the basement. It's the kind of drawled meow my Siamese (I got for my 5th birthday) would make at night in the middle of the hallway near the bedrooms for no apparent reason. She, being timid and neurotic, spent most of the daylight hours under my parents' bed.

My current old cat, Sasha, may be yowling when I am not home, but she seems to do it around feeding times, either before or after she's come upstairs to eat her nibble of wet food (the old ones get whatever they want). It's as if she forgets who/where she is. Or maybe it's an acute and piercing loneliness surfacing, unquenchable. The sound stabs you under your sternum.

The other new thing with her is if you go down and get her from the basement, she will sleep next to you on the couch while you watch tv. She won't even flail or cry out as you carry her up the stairs. She, who was found as a dirt-eating, weaned too early, itty street urchin on the stoop of a run-down colonial house. She never, til now, lost the feral streak. Always prickly, an occasional arm kneader/sucker.

Her mindset is so vastly changed from even a year ago. Yesterday, clueless and curious, she walked right up to Bug, and stuck her nose at his head three times, Bug with his beak ready to chomp her tender pink nose. The point is, Sasha now loves everyone.

Bug, on the other hand, is a bit more selective. He prefers his two humans, and the companionship of our birdsitter. Occasionally, he will swoop down on the shoulder of a brown-haired female friend, who tend to shreik a little and shrug him off in a panic. Bug never seems to be offended by it, though.

Besides biting his two humans, SSW has bitten those who stick their hands near his cage or near him while he's perching on one of his humans: my brother, my friend John, the bird sitter (who was nonplussed). He has yet to land on any other person with blond hair besides me. Maybe we just have brown-haired friends?

It's late fall and this means fleece-typed sweaters are out of the cedar chest. Bug's now thinking of destroying the zipper pull as I type this. I am listening to Rose Polenzani's new cd, http://www.rosepolenzani.com/, off her website. The bird likes the harmonica and percussion, quietly matching his chirp to the beat, but randomly.

It's almost dinner time, and after that, movie time, the cat next to me on the couch. She's melting away as she ages, muscles disappearing, arthritis rising. She will purr and purr on the couch, and I look at her, seeing a different cat than the one I have had over these last 17 years. What ever disrepair aging has brought her, she is content to be the new her. Stranger, sweeter, loving--

A Typical Sunday

2008-11-11T08:58:00.000-06:00

Sweet William loves to watch football. Perhaps I anthropomorphize? What’s wrong with that? I’m not totally delusional -deep down I know what attracts him: a stable shoulder, complete attention (during commercials), a beer label to peel , the occasional snib of a potato chip, the frequent burst of expletives and the loud clatter of absurd beer ads. He doesn’t care that Budweiser’s claim of ‘drinkability’ is empty marketing and if all you can say about your brew is that it’s the coldest then you’ve just given away the fact that your beer tastes like spring water mixed with a little piss - almost tasteless with a twinge of nasty. It’s clear that I am a beer snob and my bird is not. He delights in the claim (made loudly enough) that Miller Lite (sic) has great taste and is less filling. (Less filling? That’s great if the goal is to create greater urine output and hence, eventually, more beer at the Miller brewery). T o my dismay, I believe that Sweet William would happily tear the label off of any beer. Now you see what I have to live with.

But this isn’t really about beer, or football (shit! the Packers just lost to the Vikings), or even politics - the other popular American blood sport, although given the events of the last week, it’s tempting to add a word about the election. Ok, I’ve caved – one word -- well, more than a word. See, I’m untrustworthy. Fits the topic, ya know? But, hopefully the B-man is different. Hail to the chief! (elect). And thanks to the millions of Americans who voted, no matter who they cast their ballot for. Although it is a mystery to me how any fuckwit could have voted for John McCain and his intellectually challenged running mate. Think about it, if Hillary Clinton had performed half as poorly in interviews as Palin did, Clinton would have been dipped in shit, rolled in boogers and drug behind a truck. But that’s all over now, until next week when the 2012 candidates are announced.

Again - enough of beer, football and politics. This whole dealybob blog thing is supposed to be about the bird. Or cheese. Sometimes it’s hard to tell which. Today I’m going to pick the bird; the tiny, free-range green monster whose vulnerability trumps everyone else’s need for attention. He sits up here on my shoulder, the only one allowed on the couch, soaks up all the attention in the room and projects an attitude of superiority the way a lord looks down on his serfs. What more is there to say?

TK Wants the Bug Dead

2008-11-09T10:35:00.005-06:00

I have become lax. And with laxity, in this case, comes near death for a fierce, but tiny friend.

Equation: dog on couch + Sara on couch + bird flying over dog (possessive of couch) to Sara = a flash of teeth, an open maw, a blur of green, a snapping sound, the bird somehow on my shoulder, despite.

He sat on my shoulder wide-eyed and silent, breathing hard. He knew what almost happened. My own heart was pounding.

No more dogs on the couch, sorry pups. It just makes you growly and weird anyhow.

This is why birds do not live to be 35, 50, 70 years old.

I am a terrible mama sometimes.

But how can we not love each in their instrinsic natures, their sheer cores of wildness?

Jonesy's Back in Town

2008-11-07T17:31:00.001-06:00

And all the creatures of the household are celebratory. The parrot's screaming and bobbing and shredding, joyous, skull-piercing-loud, but ecstatic.

The flock is back in action.

Falling - Are You a Bird or a Cat?

2008-11-07T11:25:00.002-06:00

Birds, cats and people have something in common: embarrassment. When faced with failure - large or small - birds and cats react differently, but they are definitely embarrassed.

Cats, normally acrobatic, fall and pretend the mishap never occurred. Francis, or F-Cat, provides the perfect example. He’s 15 years old which is approximately 95 in human years. ( 5 people years equals 1 cat year – a number I just made up - selected mostly because it’s close to 7, which, without any scientific proof is a number people readily accept for dogs, and 5 times 15 is easy to multiply in my head). The point here is that he’s not the svelte feline he used to be. Yet, he never gives up trying. He just can’t get it through his head that it’s a real bitch to leap to the top of the fridge. His reluctance to accept the armchair and crossword puzzle of old age is probably due to his rapid physical decline – one day he’s scaling the 6 foot fence and the next he’s shopping for a segway. We attribute this sudden change to the death of our other cat, Zoot. Zoot was a portly and prissy fellow; picture the bastard child of Pee Wee Herman and Dom DeLuise as a cat in a tuxedo and you’ll have a pretty good picture of him. Just following Zootie’s death, F-Cat doubled his weight. The current theory is that he ate Zoot, or at least absorbed his spirit and with it his fat content.

F-Cat is now a rotund 17 pounds, a poster cat for the excesses of our western lifestyle. But, he can still lick himself in all the places necessary for good feline hygiene, which I am enormously thankful for as the last thing I want to do is to clean my cat’s anus with a baby wipe. All this extra pudge has meant that he often uses his claws to haul his ass up, a practice unpopular in our household, especially when the destination is the back rest of our new leather couch or the bed, via a handmade quilt.

He’ll leap, slip, grab, slide and plop on the ground. If you happen to notice his little blunder, F-Cat makes it clear that he meant to do that. He doesn’t have to regain his composure, because he never lost it. Without missing a beat he begins grooming, often by rolling back on his rear, sticking his back leg straight up in the air in a yoga pose and cleaning himself from belly on down to the place mentioned in the previous paragraph. I hope the latter part of the exercise is not a yoga pose, but I’d never know. I tried yoga once and fell asleep while attempting some sort of ‘relaxing’ exercise. I never went back because I was pissed off that I paid $15 for a nap on a crappy mat. And, yes, I was embarrassed.

Sweet William reacts differently to his mistakes. A poor landing or a slip while climbing makes him furious. And when something pisses him off, you know it – he makes sure everybody knows it. He screams, paces, and flaps his wings up in his scariest ‘fuck off, I’ll cut you, man’ routine. I find it tempting to laugh at the 100 grams of feathered fury, but one look at the scar on my finger reminds me of his ability to follow through on his threats. He demands to be taken seriously. Deeper than my fear that he’ll lash out is my empathy. You see, I understand his outrage.

People can go either way. I know it’s more complicated than that, but on a basic level, it isn’t. I can imagine the question on a dating website – “When you make a mistake, are you more like a cat or a bird?” The answer is revealing. Kind of like, “If you could have one super power, what would it be?” (Of course that’s a weed out question - anyone who says anything besides omnipotence is just plain stupid.)

Failure. A bird or a cat. It’s the ninth inning, two outs, score tied, bases loaded, and you’re the last batter. A powerful swoosh at nothing but air - that’s strike three and the season’s over. Do you slam the tip of your bat into home plate and grit your teeth? Do you push your shame down deep, nonchalantly shrug your shoulders and tell your teammates that your plan worked and now you can all go get a beer?

Now for the tough stuff. The real complications come when our mishaps have nothing to do with physical errors, something Francis and Sweet William know nothing of. Neither of them has ever made a mistake on their taxes, failed an important test, made thoughtless career moves or blathered drunkenly to their boss at an office party pretending to enjoy golf. Lucky little bastards.

As we know, or some of us do, there are degrees of error. The mistake on taxes can be corrected with a 1040X – a do-over provided by the IRS since they know that there are plenty of tax paying morons. Some tests can be taken twice, thrice or more if success is all that important, and if one is very lucky, the boss at the office party was so hammered he thinks you really do like golf and the Christmas tie with the twinkling light really is cool. But take it up a notch. Some mistakes are not fixable.

A hard fall. A broken nose. Can one recover? Will the nose always be crooked? Poor judgment can domino, knock over others, even people you care for so deeply you’d take a bullet for them. (Well, you’d jump in the line of fire if you were pretty sure it would hit an extremity, not your torso or head – your ass perhaps - you’re just not that selfless.)

These situations generate big questions. How to cope with the loss of friendships, pride, the respect of your peers? In one part of your brain there is an excuse factory which churns out bullshit to console yourself and perhaps look for anyone or anything to blame. But the factory has to shut down. Excuses muddle responsibility. And as an FYI, so does vodka and red bull, although there is a moment that the muddling of just about everything can be quite therapeutic, when used responsibly.

Responsibility. Francis and Sweet William remain blissfully ignorant of this burden even when leather is ripped and skin is broken. And there’s the big difference. Taking responsibility is the only way to resolve the shame, sadness and fury that wraps around you on your downward spiral, much like the way cotton candy whirls around and sticks to a white cardboard cone. It’s sticky and tough to get off, but in the end you just have to eat it, digest it, and well, deal with it. In the words of a good friend of mine “You’re a total wastrel of a dipshit if you don’t buck the fuck up and deal.”

Falling is not the greatest shame. It’s not getting back up. I’d rather be known as a person who sometimes trips but always gets up from the fall, than a person who always succeeds. There’s a Japanese proverb, ‘fall down seven times, get back up eight.’ Eight just became my lucky number.

Why is It So Hard to Accept What is Readily Offered?

2008-10-31T20:18:00.002-05:00

Since it's chilly, I placed a square of fake fur into a small box that Bug likes to climb in at night sometimes. A swatch of soft yellow yumminess for a certain little bird to snuggle into.

I should've known. He abhors it. If I leave a seedball in the fabric, he'll go get it. Snuggle? Hell no. Eeewww, he snorts, fabbbbricccc. Like his snunky little box is full of poop.

Tonight, a small cadre of trickotreaters came by, so I had to put the Bug away. I put him in his room with his drawbridge down, but the lights off. He could sit on his cage or go inside and sleep. I went in later to tuck him in and he was chortling softly, his bedtime cutie-pie dialogue. Hooray!, I thought. He's in the soft, yellow nest! I couldn't see him but found his little fuzzy box empty. No, instead, he was on top of his cage between the two sheets I used to cover his cage. He was tickled and giddy and silly with the sheer luxurious serendipity. I laughed and left him there. How could I disturb such utter satisfaction?

And how could've I know what would be perfect for him? He chose what suited him. I merely stumbled into his preference. I want him to love what I offered him, but this never works.

I need to go check on him again. He'd probably be fine with his cage door open and the room door shut. The cats are in the basement and the dogs are on the couch with me. What a little dude. Anything to keep him warm in this upcoming season of chilliness.

Why Bug Needs to Get a Damn Job

2008-10-22T19:55:00.005-05:00

So.

So, it's getting colder--frost on the windshield, frost on the grass, the leaves almost fully off the trees. And I've turned on the heat in the house.

Before Bird, or BB, as we shall call it, we used to turn our thermostat at night to 59, close the bedroom door to keep the heat in, and pile a ton of down comforters on. Now we have this tiny creature, used to thick, humid air, and well, warmth.

So now we keep the thermostat at 64 most of the time; higher when we get up in the morning and when we get home. But mostly, it's a full five degrees warmer all the time.

Oil ain't cheap. But you all know this. But Bug doesn't.

So he should get a damn job to pay for the extra heat.

But he would protest, recounting an event last winter. Last winter I came home one day to the house at 47 degrees. I freaked. The little one is dead! He wasn't, but his tiny, scaled legs were cold and he was all fluffed up. (A bird can tolerate cooler temperatures if they don't fluxuate--for goodness sakes, Chicago has it's own population of Quaker parrots!) The pilot light on the furnace had gone out and a friend came over to rescue me in my icy panic. Soon, it was getting warmer upstairs, and everyone thawed out.

The mammals of the house, besides the humans, have fur. Yeah, they were cold, tucking their tails over their noses, but they got by. The bird, he's practically am exothermic/ heat-losing being. The smaller you are, the faster you cool. Smaller body volume to surface area ratio.

And now the air has dried out and he's sneezing--sinusitis? I got him a humidifier last winter to ease his nostrils. But it puts out cold steam--what a drag. He does twiddle and screech from the shower rod when I am in the bath, so he gets some tropical stem.

Sometimes I imagine living somewhere warm, where he could have an outside cage. I think he'd like the warmth but hate the isolation. He says yes (well, djesss) a lot when he's excited, but outside, alone, even where it's balmy, I think he'd scream til he was hoarse.

Gum Chewers Unite

2008-10-12T19:56:00.006-05:00

Yesterday showcased a balmy, beautiful October evening, and I sat outside on the porch eating my dinner, my dogs staring at my plate. I turned to look in through the sliding glass door, to check on SSW's whereabouts. He was right in front of me, leaning toward the glass, staring at me with one beady eye from the ledge of his cage, chewing in the exact rhythm I was chewing. He had nothing in his mouth, however.

The Mirror Chewer, we should call him.

If I have gum, he acts like he has gum.

If I eat at the table, and I get his pestering body away from my plate, he goes to his cage and eats.

He's a communal diner, and I suppose we are his flock, his cohorts to share and steal and hoard food from each other.

Sometimes he's too social, he forgets to eat. Maybe he's a little skinny.

You can always tell if he's had a good eating day, though--when I get home and his water bowl is a soup of disintegrating parrot pellets, like the last bits left in the milk at the bottom of the cereal bowl.

I imagine him throughout the day dipping each cracker with relish. I imagine him shredding some paper in his cage, taking a quick nap, then going back to the cracker ceremony.

Maybe I should read the dregs in the bottom of his dish, like one reads tea leaves. It might only translate to Feed me.

Avian Superhero?

2008-10-06T13:19:00.007-05:00

Maybe his secret identity is Flash or Presto or The Vapor. Perhaps time elongates when I blink, preventing me from witnessing his quick passage from A to B. Blink, and he's adhered to the front of your shirt, your shoulder, around the edge of a closing door. He's almost inside the fridge, he's on his cage you're cleaning, he's attacking the rag you're using to clean the poop off the linoleum. Pfffffshtt!

The lime green into amber of his feathers hint at an otherworldly origin. Nothing around here looks remotely like him. Maybe South America is another planet, I don't know. The map on my wall says it exists.

The only thing this superhero is afraid of is planes flying over the house. Large, loud bird silhouettes.

Right now the Shapeshifter is eating a bit of apple. Quick calories for some imminent mission?

He calls out to the high-pitched screech-pitch in the Beck song "Devil's Haircut." Maybe it's a secret code.

Now's he's chortling out some Morse chirping and pausing. Hmm-- Then tap tap tap-tap with his beak.

Autumnal

2008-10-05T10:28:00.000-05:00

A house finch lands to drink from the dog water bowl on the porch. It looks in the sliding glass door, dips its beak into the bowl, looks back into the house. I catch its eye. It flies off. A flurrying of small brown bodies alights, shifts, moves into the trees.

The leaves are starting to fall. Walking the dogs comes with the sound of brittle leaves beneath your feet.

Angle of sun on your face, the sky cloudless--

The Tiniest of Tremblings

2008-09-28T20:09:00.003-05:00

I was lucky enough to have SSW fall asleep on my shoulder today. I was finishing watching a movie I had started last night, and he perched on my left shoulder as the women on the screen talked about their past relationships. His white eyelids were closed. I leaned my ear to the left to stretch my neck and I heard a very quiet hum, a tiny engine of breath and heart beats. It was as if the small machine of his body was vibrating with electricity. You could almost feel the halo of electrons careening around the sphere of his body.

The Kingdom of the Floor

2008-09-25T12:32:00.009-05:00

SSW is peeking his head out from under the rolly dishwasher. Now he's headed over to try to get behind the gas stove. I gently steer him out of there with my foot.

I swear he has a little limp as he walks, then he doesn't. When he tries to run fast enough to keep pace with me from room to room, sometimes he opens his wings a little, flies a few inches. He seems panicked when he's trying to catch up. Jonesy likes to say, You can fly, man, so fly.

He will pace in front of a closed door, poking his beak under the crack and dragging it along the floor. Open the door, and he'll meander around the corner, looking up at you like a friend across the bar: Over here!

Lulu is protective of her food bowl so I get a tad nervous when the bird is strutting about at meal time. I do appreciate how he likes to dip a drink from the big red dog bowl, though. Give SSW a surface with a rim to perch on, and he will perch. Shitty little toes contaminating your water glass, your tea mug, your pasta bowl. He is not too embarrassed to walk through his own poop as he has proven to me over and over. In the wild, he says, da poop falls to the forest floor.

Sometimes I feel stalked by those little pitter patting feet. Sometimes it makes me laugh. I should feel flattered, utterly adored, worshiped. Small green fellow at my feet, keep on ambulating. And maybe, try out those wings, too, ok?

A Quiet Saturday Dusk

2008-09-20T18:24:00.005-05:00

Five Times

2008-09-11T11:51:00.011-05:00

It's really my fault. It always is. I knew it after I walked out of the room, pissed and hurt, thumb throbbing. SSW bit me five times on my left thumb's knuckle--chomp, chomp, chomp, chomp, chomp. He had been on the floor next to me trying to nail the clean newspapers I was placing around his cage. The big cat walked by and I wanted SSW off the floor; he though, wanted to tell me that this was unacceptable and that yes, he was very riled up and thank you very much for providing your thumb for the proper outlet for his displacement of emotions.

I look at my thumbs and first fingers and they have a small collection of small half-moon wounds in various stages of repair. My coworker asked me yesterday, And why do you have this creature? I smiled and thought of Jonesy.

Jonesy is SSW's right hand parrot-mate. She talks like a pirate to him, which makes him bob his head. They make smoochy noises to each other. He rubs his cheek on her neck. She will type on her laptop with her right hand and let him sit on her left hand, held in the air, like a little prince. They are drinking buddies--he peels the label off her beer bottle and tongues the condensation off the glass. She even has a song for him, which makes him sing along, in his own way, of whistles and shrieks.

But Jonesy works all the time. So SSW is left with she-who-keeps-her-thoughts-to-herself.

So how does the wallflower trait have a corresponding relationship to the frequency of being bitten, you say?

Ach--the math makes perfect sense.

Note to introverts: birds prefer a chatty pal. If you are the silent type, get a cat. This just could be my hurt feelings talking, though. He nuzzles my neck, too, and chortles soft mumbling sometimes. I love to watch him dehusk and eat a snap pea, the large, green pod clasped in his left foot. And you've should've seen him holler in equal volume and excitement at a PJ Harvey cd. As they say, parrots love drama.

He's lucky he's so darn cute.

That Blue in the Periphery

2008-09-06T17:15:00.001-05:00

When you wake, the first thing you hear is the wind in the trees. If the wind is down, then the waves, against the red rocks of the shoreline. It is the utter lack of human racket that strikes you, while you are still sleepy, the absence of traffic, voices, car doors, front doors, or dogs (besides your own). You feel yourself unspooling stress after a few days of listening waking slowly, and your posture straightens, your chest broadens, and you sleep more soundly.

And yet, after a few days, after a week, after a month, you must return home. You go back to the landscape of human clatter and few moments of stillness, the remembered lives and work that you have built for yourself.

The lake, the aspens, the blue tongue of the waves all start to evaporate, and you pick up your cell phone, check your email, and turn on the tv. Maybe even your misanthropy rears its head again—there always someone else in front of you, no matter where you go.

When you are not too entrenched in the A to B trajectory, if you sit in your car for one moment longer, hands to the wheel and you look up at the sky, you may come to the conclusion, This is not working out for me.

Yes, there are Thai and Jamaican restaurants near your house, an intricate byway of bike paths, and prairie gardens of native plants in some of your neighbors’ yards. But you can’t stop feeling like you can’t fully inflate your lungs.

You remember, just last week, I saw 10 pileated woodpeckers in three days.

But it is not, as if, your hours away were devoid of all other human-made noises. A car driving down the gravel road, the sound of a hammer far off, voices off the water from a boat, the phone ringing. And at home, there are answers how to push aside the cemented world—you’ve heard about them, tried running, gardening, yoga, meditation, a hike in the woods. No matter, you can find a legion of excuses to prevent you from attending to your core’s quiet refueling. Guilt takes innumerable shapes.

There is just so much talking, so much static caroming around inside your skull, that everything feels tangled, knotted, taut.

But don’t we take our burdens from place to place, that if you are unhappy in one place, won’t you be in another?

So then, how long can you hang onto that smooth stone of tranquility once you return to where you left off?

Vacation without William

2008-09-04T13:15:00.006-05:00

Day 1. We get a late start, Jonesy cursing all the pet-made messes. SSW continues to shred paper while we tidy, so when the house cleaning is finished, he has made new flotsam. Circular, endless.

The two dogs vie for who gets to be nearest the front of the car, noses or paws on the armrest. Once we get to the lake, Lulu bursts out of the car, an explosion of barking and leaping. TK smiles and smiles.

Day 2. We drive a half-hour to the grocery store (Ach! we have no coffee!) where Jonsey insists on a chocolate box cake with cream cheese factory frosting. When I make it a few days later, she feels caked-out after a couple of pieces, moaning about how there is so much more to eat. She makes me promise not to let her cajole me into buying another cake to make on vacation.

Lulu rolls on a dead fish and is summoned by Jonesy for a hose-bath outside, which she partakes in humbly, gently, tail-tucked.

Day 3. The dogs are starting to slow down. They stand around sleepy-eyed after breakfast, but then startle alert when you mention the word beach or walk. Anytime we leave the house without the dogs, Lulu shrieks and paces—you can hear her barking move from one side of the house to the other as we get into the car. Her utter belief in abandonment is heartbreaking.

We’ve seen a small village of pileated woodpeckers so far—one bird was stumbling around the tall grass, another above it. This year’s inexperienced broods?

A large porcupine crosses the road in front of our car near the house, a creature in no hurry, so we stop, and I roll down my window to send him salutations as he enters the weeds.

Day 4. Jonesy tried to encourage the dogs to “go enjoy their dogness” out in woods. They prefer to stare at us through the screen door, pleading to be let in.

We go driving without the dogs (since they abhor waiting in the car, preferring to freak out as we walk away), out about the lakeshore, visiting little towns. I stumble around a dusty bookstore of 40,000 titles while Jonesy falls asleep on a wicker couch in the sun. We leave with a Sherman Alexie book,
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.

Day 5. Jonesy finds three grey hairs on my head. I think she is a liar.

Each day, we swim in Lake Superior, a brisk, enlivening experience—quite bracing! as Jonesy likes to say, comparing it to water off England. By now the dogs can barely stay awake at anytime of the day. This is first time I realize TK is old; her legs are unsteady on the lake rocks, she drags her left rear foot sometimes, leaving a nail-trace in the sand.

Day 6. The perfect weather ends—as we start to park the car, it pours. The hatchback had been open to air it out, and before it rained, the dogs sat in the back, looking out, ready to go.

When we get home, it is dark, and our bird-sitter has put SSW to bed. We hear him whispering to himself, and he won’t come out of his cage for me, but immediately runs up Jonesy’s arm. Now it’s clear whom he loves best. And his head bobbing begins.

How Does Your Contentment-o-meter Rate?

2008-08-18T20:39:00.006-05:00

My terrier, Lulu, is barking, of course. And it is piercing a hole straight through my skull. Each bark makes my eardrums bow out, pulse and flinch.

I have a parrot on my right shoulder, preening himself. He ruffles his feathers all at once and makes a series of nasally, soft revs and riffs, almost like a very slow and very small dj scratching minute records. Slo-mo dis-co.

When he is really content, he sneezes once and stretches out his leg and his wing on the same side, at the same time. I love that this is called mantling. To spread out, to blush, to cover, to cloak, to conceal. It looks like it feels good. He does this all the time for Jonesy. Tonight, I think was the first time he did it while standing on my shoulder.

The last time I felt as relaxed like he looks was after I took an eight week meditation class where I sat, quiet in one spot, for 45 minutes a day. That was years ago--now my mind is like a tumbling dryer.

He is warm to my cheek, and his feathers tickle where his tail ends and it brushes against my collarbone, a back and forth as he adjusts, wiggles, and keeps an eye on the room. I am not sure if SSW likes one shoulder over the other. He is content to chew the straps of my tank top regardless of the side he is on.

Last summer, when a plane or a crow flew by the sliding glass door where SSW could see them, he would scuttle off the top of his cage, and once inside it, hide, making a series of soft, single-noted, high pitched calls, what I call his eek-scary alarm. Planes no longer bother him, the crows can just shove off for all he cares, and even the terrier's bark is less troubling most of the time. He has gotten so comfortable that even the keeeeeer! of a red-tailed hawk near the house last week did not set off any worries in his tiny skull. What a quick and naive meal he would make; I hate to think about it.

This is not to say he is no longer extremely high strung. No, no. He is a guy who listens for everything, like Lulu. Maybe he doesn't really sleep, but keeps one eye open, like dolphins who swim and sleep simultaneously.

For the rest of us, there is always Ambien or Xanax or beer.

The Messy Truth

2008-08-10T16:04:00.007-05:00

Yeah, so he's cute. He lives his life by his beak, as I suppose many of us do, except that most of us don't tend to try to shred everything within reach, and then throw it on the floor.

So.

My kitchen looks like a ticker tape parade, even though I sweep everyday. That's him above actively tearing at the paper that lines his cage. I place magazines inside a shoebox that has a little door cut out of it, so that he can go in there and root around and shred for hours. You know you need to replenish the magazine when most if it is on the floor and he is avidly searching other surfaces in destructo-mode.

It doesn't help SSW's boredom or my inability to keep up with the mess since Jonesy has been utterly unavailable for fun, as she has been studying for the Very Evil Exam, or the VEE. Soon the VEE will be done, and SSW will have his gab-pal back and they can chitter away like two school girls.

Meanwhile today, I, finally, in a small, manic cleaning episode, vacuumed out a kitchen cupboard, where SSW had taken over the drawer above the sieve, Cuisinart, salad spinner, and waffle iron. This was his first take-over of previous public space. He had moved into the drawer and was seen to poke his head out every so often amid the shredding of paper. The paper fell to the shelves below, and sometimes when I didn't hear him, I would open the door below and find him sitting on the colander, shushing me and making himself small and adorable. I let him do this for awhile, then he got bored with the drawer and I wanted the drawer back, so I closed it, and got him a shoe box. Then I discovered he gnawed his way through the waffle iron cord. Arg. And he's not sorry. He would do it all over again if he had the chance.

It's good we don't have cockroaches or mice (yet) from the far-flung crumbs I find under his large nighttime cage. You need the vacuum hose to reach and this is not going to be done every day, for it is a pain in the ass. (Read Providence of a Sparrow if you want to read about a great mouse and moth takeover of a home filled with free-range sparrows and finches.)

The dogs have learned where to scrounge for parrot biscuit bits and dregs of veggies. They help out in any way that they can.

No one but the humans in this house seems capable of tool use. For all the fur the pets shed and food they dribble, it would be swell if they would try and pitch in a little more. Their utter lack of thumbs makes them exempt from every having to learn how to use a broom or a vacuum.

They are very good at sleeping, though, if they could ever get paid for that.

2008-08-02T15:37:00.006-05:00

Today I found the headless carcass of a teen rabbit in my yard, being carried around and sucked on by TK, my dog. I don’t think she is the murderer, but only an opportunist. F-cat, a hulking 17 pounds, was lurking nearby. In his younger years, he could decimate an entire litter in one day, and he always ate the heads first. He is now 14, and corpulent, so there has been less rabbit carnage, but maybe this mid-sized bun was more than he could resist. He was a stray, and those hunting habits linger feverishly in his blood.

I picked up the poor, dead thing in a newspaper and placed it in the weeds on the other side of the fence.

You see, I worry. I worry about having a killer cat at the same time as SSW. Since it’s summer, I keep F-cat out of the way of the bird since he likes sleeping on the porch. In winter, though, SSW’s floor ambulation is going to have to cease, unless the fat cat is locked up in a room.

SSW did stupidly land on the cat on the couch once, trying to reach me. F-cat is a tremendously relaxed feline, and sort of just turned his head, with an Ah, well. His insouciance is not to be trusted. I gargled some sort of panicky noise from my throat, and I got SSW to quickly step up. I think he was feeling a bit nervous, himself, landing on the cat though he is known to take an open-beaked approach to the 17 year old cat, we now call the Old Lady, or the OL, because she’s so ancient. But you can’t exactly trust the OL either. She may be senile, but there is still a spark in her eye sometimes.

And the dogs? They tend to part like the Red Sea when SSW comes trucking through. I suspect they do this because they were bit once and because they know I will get very upset if they falter. Lulu takes a half-hearted leap in the air sometimes at SSW when he flies by and this stops my heart for a second.

So one must run interference. If he was bigger, like a cockatoo, I wouldn’t worry so much. But he is only about eight inches tall, and his little toes easily wrap around my pointer finger. 100 grams equals about 3.5 ounces. Mere air, really.

Locking the Bug up in an aviary would only make him sad, lonely, and loud. Locking the dogs out the rooms I am in all the time makes them lonely and whiny and neurotic.

All good advice recommends cats and dogs to not to be in the same room with a bird. The practicality of this stumbles. I do not leave SSW alone with the mammals rambling about with him, however.

SSW doesn’t think he is a bird. He acts more like a mini T-rex. But it’s the mini part that has me in angst, mini against the mighty tooth and claw of a cat.

For the sake of SSW’s safety, when our two old cats die, I will probably not get another, and this makes me terribly sad. Cats are my first true love--sleepy, independent, and sometimes snuggly.

There have to be pound cats out there that wouldn’t give a second glance to a bird, but finding one is too tricky and complicated a matter. Let me know if you hear of any, ok?

How Having A Conure Precludes One From Moving to Groovy Brooklyn

2008-07-28T18:56:00.011-05:00

Last January I went to NY and stayed with my French chef/poet/fellow cheese freak friend Robin. To show me world class fromage as well as poetry, Robin gave me a tour of Murray's Cheese's underground cheese caves, and we went to a reading at the KGB Bar. Back in her Brooklyn neighborhood, I walked her senior greyhound around the brownstoned streets, we ate delicious food a block from her house (arugula with thinly sliced pears and gorgonzola, a couple of blood orange cosmos, kale-stuffed ravioli served in a broth made of the rind of parmesan), got bagels delivered to her third story walk-up--that lovely apartment filled with light, books, and edible delights. Her apartment was a block from the subway where I had easy access to the likes of the Museum of Art and Design, where I saw a wickedly smart exhibit on embroidery (who knew it could be so cool?), as well as the delicious and famous St. Mark's Bookshop. In the city, we ate chocolate bread pudding in a store that only sold that dessert. I was too full to go to the pommes frites place (dammit! www.pommesfrites.ws), so sad, the two times we walked by. I was awed and addicted to Pinkberry frozen yogurt--tart, light, mine ordered: vanilla with chestnuts and monstrous blackberries, me wanting to order it all over again even as I finished the dish in front of me, me gasping that NY and CA are the only places one can get the stuff. I saw Paul Giamatti, scowling about the Village. I even met a cartooniologist--really! (www.tmotley.com) Ah NY, ah Brooklyn--

I went home after five days, not wanting to go, but Robin and her dog Hazel walked me with my rolly suitcase two blocks from her apartment to a busier road, I hailed a cab, and like that, I was gone.

While I was there, I started to exclaim in front of my hosts, I'm moving to Brooklyn! In my heart's core, however, I knew this to be a lie. Jonesy would never move there--she wants out of cities, not towards. Sometimes I do, too. I have a fear aggressive pup who would be impossible to walk nicely along the sidewalks of the burrough. And her barking tendencies would not make her a good apartment dweller.

And then there is the bird. Oh, loud-mouthed one. He would not make a very good neighbor.

I was implored on my visit by Robin to not talk about how cute SSW was, for her husband Evan needed the littlest of coaxing to begin bringing up again we should get a bird. Robin is wise and knows that a parrot's shrieking goes right through the walls of an apartment. A canary, a cockatiel, but, no no no, do not bring home a conure, dear.

I can hear my own SSW in the summer a block away when the window is open and he sees me leaving with the dogs in the morning. He has ears like a mother listening to her teen sneaking in after curfew (his acute hearing is due, of course, to him being a prey species protecting his feathery bum). Does he hear the dog tags jingling as we return? Does he know which car is mine as I pull up in front of the house? Or does he alarm at any random car door, any person talking/walking by?

So Lulu will live another 10 years probably. And SSW another 30. By then, I'll be 67 and my student loans will be paid off, but by then, the groovy brownstones of Brooklyn will probably be renting for a sum I can't even fathom could be real. And to be the rain on the picnic I am known to be, isn't vacation always so much more fantastic than the actual day-to-day, plod to work, go buy groceries, pay yer bills, that drags any good fun down, no matter where you live?

I could go for some Pinkberry and pommes frites right this minute.

The Moe Dilemma

2008-07-26T11:58:00.010-05:00

A few years ago I went to a wedding breakfast and sat next to a woman, who at first, appeared quite adjusted, normal, happy, just a friend of the bride. Then I heard her say she had nine children because she just loved babies so much. A random assortment of her kids rambled quietly by the restaurant. I wasn't sure which kids were hers--all of the them?

Now, babies are fine and all, but I don't seek them out. I am the type of person to go down another aisle in the grocery store if I come across children acting too loudly. I seem to only love the babies that I know, especially ones directly related to me. This, I suppose, has something to do with Darwin, how we protect those related to us, so that our gene pool can be passed downward. Regardless, I am 37 and have never felt the twinge of baby madness, that is ever-rampant in one of my friends to the point she will get up and leave a conversation/coffee/food eating with you to rush after some small pupa-to-toddler aged child. I find this perplexing and a little vexing. (E if you are reading this, you know it's true.)

Through my twenties, I told my mother how I didn't really care for the children out there randomly in the world, and she said to me more than once that I would feel differently about my own. I am sure she is right. She kept me around, even though I cried for the two first years of my life. There is a family rumor that my first word was dammit, as in quietly whispered, Dammit, Sara, can you please stop crying?

Anyhow, my dogs, my cats, and even my parrot were adopted, as strays or from humane societies.

I fight the urge every week when I come across some delectable dog/cat that is need of a home. Most recently, I turned away this magnificent pup, Moe. Click here--you know you want to take him home. http://www.petfinder.com/petnote/displaypet.cgi?petid=11086180

I don't think he is part saluki, fanstastic as that would be. Once you adopt him, you can send in a small blood sample to get his DNA breed profile.

The reason that I did not take Moe home is that my house is too full. That I cannot care for another animal in the manner that they deserve due to the saturation of small beasts in my 1060 sq ft home. That a parrot takes hours of attention each day so that he doesn't turn into a self-multilating-->bald boy. That I only have two arms, one for each of the dogs, to best walk them. This doesn't take into consideration the 6+ meals/day the old cat requires, or the fact that Lulu might turn soft-spoken, polite Moe into a barking, fear-propelled monster. I love Lulu to pieces, but she does cut down on friendly dog-to-dog interactions.

So my point here is if you love babies, with those big eyes and round faces programmed to demand your protection, and if you have the space/love/time/money, then, For god's sake, adopt! But nine children? Come, on, people.

The Cheaper the Better

2008-07-22T09:58:00.010-05:00

Forget the $15 brightly colored wood, plastic, metal, rubber toys made for our psittacine friends. Instead, make sure you keep the junk mail, the catalogs and phonebooks, the shoe boxes, the empty prescription bottles now filled with screws, the paper bags, and the newspapers. If you want him to have it, he will not love it. He will fly to the kitchen shelf instead, and proceed to eat the spines of your cookbooks.

And it's all the better if it can be thrown onto the floor.

I am trying to get a picture of SSW disregarding the proper use of metal measuring spoons. He, however, will not cooperate. He's a parrot, for god's sake.

He likes to grab the hole in the end of the spoon and throw it onto the counter, screaming each time it bangs down.

Here is the spoon, up close. You can see the appealing hole for grabbing.
These are good quality spoons that I like. So they aren't the cheapest toy he could've picked. The plastic spoons just don't make the same tantalizing sound when you fling them, gravity obliging, when they hit the floor.

And he loves the banging. Unloading the dishwasher should be done with protective ear gear. He tries to get on the top rack and peck at the clean glassware. But some things are off-limits, even to the tyrant.

Bird as Foodie

2008-07-12T15:01:00.009-05:00

Since winter I have realized a few things about food:
1. Arugula, as a salad green, is good.
2. Coarse salt, with olive oil and fresh cracked pepper, on arugula is fantastic.
3. The world is full of magnificent cheeses, and I try to buy a new fancy cheese once a week--the current cheeses in my fridge are the deliciously crumbly English Stilton with dried apricots; a creamy yogurt cheese, like a gouda; a yet to be opened medium, yellow cheddar; and the remnants of a hard goat cheese dusted with cocoa. (I have a shirt from Murray's Cheeses in NYC; the front says: You have a friend in cheeses.)
4. I almost fell off the couch eating a chocolate bread pudding, warm, with peanut butter creme anglais, which had been delivered to my house, along with a sweet potato quesadilla, full of carmelized onions and feta and a cucumber yogurt sauce.

Are you not drooling?

And SSW realized this month:
1. Dipping your bird pellets in your water bowl is very satisfying.

He leaves a sludge of cracker in the bottom of his bowl every day, that I imagine in the summer heat if I let go too long, might evolve from bacterial soup to land crawling mammals.

I give Bug little treats of my own food, which he sees me eat and so then he enthusiastically eats too, his pupils dilating and constricting with excitement. I realize his gut does not process dairy very well, but he does love a nibble of cheese. And I smile a little at the cannibalistic whiff when he eats scrambled eggs.

Put walnuts on your salad, though, and he is utterly impolite, and will land on your arugula with coarse salt, cracked pepper, and olive oil, rules be damned.

He cares not that walnuts on his cage are different than walnuts on my salad. He thinks arugula is terrible boring, phooey!, and deserves to be flung onto the floor.

Dried cranberries, on the other hand, are perfection. And half of grape is a dream, intact, to be devoured.

Deep Spiritual Lesson, or Wanton Destruction?

2008-07-05T08:59:00.009-05:00

I have a favorite shirt. I bought it while on holiday in the Caribbean and it immediately became my favorite shirt. Each time I put it on (or I should say both times - I only wore the damn thing twice) I swear I could smell salt, feel the soft grit of sand behind my knees and taste the vague linger of some froofy rum drink rolling around in my mouth. Yes, I drank girly cocktails, concoctions of rum (and rum and rum) with a splash of fruit juice, the sort of silly drink that I wouldn't even consider ordering while locked in the center of this vast beer guzzling continent, but so easily became a part of the afternoon routine during our ridiculously brief respite on St. John. I tried to bring the "no problem" attitude of the island home with me by buying a bottle of Cruzan rum, but the little umbrella here in the heartland was like Christmas in July--all wrong.

The shirt, however, transcended attitude and distance. Soft cotton the color of faded blue jeans with a Jolly Dog logo creating the fabulous image of dog as pirate--my little scrap of the island and it made me happy.

Now comes the unfortunate incident.

Last Saturday Bubby got a pedicure. Much to my dismay the nails sometimes bleed after being clipped, but not much and a little styptic powder usually solves the problem. The clipping routine is a traumatic event for both of us, but Sara is calm, grasping him in a towel, pinning his head between thumb and forefinger, leaving him desperate to bite the crap out of anybody, but completely unable. I peel his little toes out of his tight fighter's fist and hold them steady for the toenail guillotine Sara wields so confidently. I flinch feeling it all as I imagine he does. But I know, no matter how unpleasant, it has to be done or his nails grow back into his feet (yet another reason birds shouldn't be captive - but that's a topic for another day). The whole thing is over in a matter of seconds. With a chunk of walnut in his beak Bubby forgets all about the trauma. I need a beer to repair my nerves.

Once we'd both returned to normal, Bubby flew to my shoulder, as is his habit. We both enjoy the game: I say "Garr! Ye be me parrot!" and he bobs his head, imitates my laugh and plays along. This time, however, he landed on my shoulder and his toe immediately erupted in blood, a shockingly large bright red circle spreading out over my shirt making it look like I'd just been tragically shot by a hidden assassin. (Yes, I watch too many bad movies.)

After helping Sara control the bleeding I took off my favorite shirt to hit it with the stain stick. Right on the damn package was the claim that it could remove blood stains. I won't tell you what brand it was, but it certainly did remove the stain, along with the jolly blue jean color, leaving a large bleached out spot in a pattern that I think looks like Africa. Or Martha Washington's profile. Hard to tell which. At any rate the shirt is ruined. I draped it over the upstairs railing to dry and tried not to look at it.

Later that afternoon Bubby followed me upstairs and while I thought he was playing in one of his many boxes filled with shredded bedding of junk mail and LL Bean catalogues, I looked around to find him ripping holes in my formerly favorite shirt. Just for good measure, I suppose. I watched him having a grand time, shaking the cloth in his beak and making his happy sounds. It's just a shirt, I thought. Just a thing. Maybe he's come into my life to teach me lessons that I should have learned by now: to let go of the material and embrace the spiritual; to celebrated joy wherever I find it--a piece of cloth to shred or a flower to rip the petals off of. I learn so much from such a tiny creature.

But, a part of me resists enlightenment and hopes that Sara will read this and order another really cool Jolly Dog shirt for me.

A Few Minutes Alone, Please

2008-06-29T16:24:00.015-05:00

I hear him in the other room, where he's in his cage, upset I won't come get him. If I just sit quietly as I can, not moving, his screams will taper, then abate. He will think I have gone.

I just need a few minutes to myself.

The little terrier mix, Lulu, wants to go out and bite the tires of the lawnmower Jonesy is pushing around the yard. L yips in frustration.

TK, our Rottie mix, harrumphs from her dog bed under the kitchen table. Ignored again, she sighs.

It's Sunday and the week is about to begin, and I cannot breathe.

I should be folding laundry, buying food for the week, looking for and applying for a job. I should be weeding and scrubbing and sweeping.

In the novel Allen Stein, Matthew Stadler writes about Sunday being the "bruised, tail end of the weekend" if I remember it right. I have carried this quote or its semblance around for years. Allen Stein is a book I took months to finish the last chapter--it was too painful a subject, and too beautiful in its language. I did not want it to end. (Lolita, though, I cannot seem to persevere through, despite its lyricism.)

At last, SSW stops.

Not for long. He starts his repertoire of pleadings. The insistent mememe's!, the call he uses when he sits on top of fridge when I am cooking and my head is about to split from the noise. Then there is his upward glissandoing whooooeeep! whoooeeeeep! Then, the three-noted wree--eee-op!

I let him out. He drags his beak along the kitchen table in tight circles, repeatedly, churruping with each cycle. He hisses as he cleans his feet, as he reaches back to groom his wings and back. He moves his lower jaw up and down, mimicking me chewing gum.

He has a slight limp, a subtle shwawush when he walks across the table. For two days he has been holding his left foot up when he sits, but he can use it to grasp a piece of food, climb on his cage, or grip my shirt. He misgauged a landing two nights ago in the dark hallway, taking the corner. He might've torqued his foot in the missed calculation. I squeeze his toes and lets me, only bites, I think, out of frustration, not pain. Is his foot swollen or warm, is he not gripping my hand as readily as with his other foot? I cannot tell. He is a parrot of fragility, made of air, his voice excluded. I give him minute, regular, aliquots of oral pain meds to little improvement.

He is trying to open my mouth with his beak, rubbing his face against my lips. He bobs his head as he regurgitates. I love you, too, I say.

He is quiet on my shoulder, and I can think. If even for a moment. His feathers rustle as he maneuvers around my shirt collar, and he utters a few, soft staccato chup-chups.

I get him to step off my shoulder onto his rope perch and he begins his subdued Donald Duck routine, if DD's speech was blurred and unintelligible, muttering to himself.

I put a few cheerios in a box and he purrs, his food-happy acknowledgment. He hold a piece in his left, bad foot, and trills as he eats, spilling a fine silt onto the kitchen counter.

The dogs are silent, laying on the floor of the kitchen. Lulu is looking out the window, TK watching the bird make crumbs she cannot reach. I should feed the four mammals, and fill the bird feeder outside--the house finches and house sparrows fighting over the dregs of spilled sunflower seeds on the ground.

SSW is shuffling across the counter, looking for other things to nibble now that the cereal is gone. The rim of a glass, the edge of a tupperware container, the zipper on the lunch bag. He cocks his head at the knife block, at me, at the dogs. He flies to his cage and climbs to the door to sit and stare at me, bite the fabric that lines the cage top.

He then flies to the top of the fridge to commence the shredding in a box, and the Donald Duck impression begins again. I know right now he is happy, churring to himself, despite the fact it is Sunday evening and most of the world is on edge, the week about to tumble upon us.

I Have a Stalker, and He is Six Inches Tall

2008-06-20T18:55:00.006-05:00

Someone is chewing my clog and pulling on my pant cuff as I brush my teeth. Someone is watching me from the shower rod while I am in the bath, and he is shouting at me. Someone is chasing me on foot like a kitten after a string, pigeon toed feet racing after me. Someone is flying from room to room, like a green shadow. Someone is in my sheets, chewing the fabric. Someone is trying to bite me as I sweep the kitchen floor. And someone is trying to get under the crack of the closed bedroom door, running his beak back and forth along the wood floor.

His nickname is Bug and I am afraid I might accidentally squish him like one.

The dogs make a wide path as he passes, but the senile cat takes him for a friend before I steer her away, saving her a nip in the nose.

He wants death to all washcloths, all rags, all laundry folding. He wants mememememe. That is until he needs his nails clipped. Then I become the Hated One, the one he shall inflict many a wound upon the slow sleight of hand.

I have to walk softly and slowly and I need to look down at where I am going.

What is that scritching sound? What is that silhouette on the edge of my periphery, pupils locked on my back, wings about to take off?

That Jagged Crescedo

2008-06-12T12:20:00.010-05:00

I grew up with cats. They are quiet, sleep most of the day, and mine have been only rarely annoying when I step in a fur ball-vomit pile in the middle of the night. The most pesky thing my current cat does is purr all night long on my pillow.

After college I went to the pound to find the gentlest, calmest, friendliest dog there. I left with a red lab cross who infrequently barked, and he and I spent 14 years gazing into each other's eyes. He did have a strong hatred of the UPS truck and deep-woofed at it when it went by. I always knew when I got a package.

I moved in with my partner a few years down the line and we now had two dogs, hers and mine. They liked each other. They barked only when necessary, but two dogs are louder than one.

In my dog's senior years, I decided to get another dog, a third dog, mind you, a dog to help me bridge the gap of sure grief that would come with my big red dog's eventual death. I lost my mind. I adopted a terrier cross. She had been abandoned at the vet clinic by her previous owner, and yes, she put her head on my shoulder when I carried her. She was really good at showing you her belly, too. She wore me down. I took her home.

The first thing I noticed about the small gal was she paced. From window to window, barking. She had big ideas, from a 30 pound body, that her territory to protect included anything she could see. This meant even the dogs being walked down the road across the creek from our house. Arfarfarf.... Click click, her nails went.

She barks all day--at dogs, children on bicycles, car door closing outside our house, baby strollers, the mailman, kids walking by, roller bladers, lawnmowers, garbage trucks, guys playing football, cats, rabbits, squirrels...

After I adopted her, and the thunder storms started, I realized I acquired a whining, high-pitched yelping, fearful friend. She trembled, she paced, she got as much of her body as she could under the bed.

I have had her for five years now, and well, I guess I am used to her noisy ways. Once, just once, I would like a nap, a deep, luscious, uninterrupted nap, free from that startling bark.

My lovely red dog died two winters ago, and we did not want any more pets, no dogs, no cats. The maw of his absence was too ragged and deep.

And then there's the fact that I am not a morning person. I like to wake up slowly, have the day seep, not zap in. So adopting a parrot seems counterintuitive to my basic core.

I am not sure what overtook me. Maybe it was watching The Parrots of Telegraph Hill. Maybe it was the fact I could hear him screaming from the entrance to the humane society. He had been a conure on the loose, and the cops had brought him in. I mean, a parrot with a record? I should have had some idea.

Oh, Sweet William, oh Bubbie, our green friend. Your morning exuberance has creeped in and I no longer wince when you call repeatedly from the top of the fridge before I have had any caffeine. You've been asleep for 10-12 hours and you have a lot to say. You just want to share. And you want your damn breakfast.

Breaking Up With Bubbie

2008-06-06T20:20:00.002-05:00

Jonesy has a multitude of nicknames for SSW. The list can be a little nauseating to the outsider, so I won't reveal it. She does call him Bubbie, maybe because she's a Southerner. She calls him that when she is madly in love with him, kissy-faced and good-bird-ing it to him.

Regardless, when SSW/Bubbie bit me 10 times in five minutes, I had to break up with him. The list of no's: no more shoulder rides, no more free snacks fed directly to him (root around already, dammit!), no more freedom while we ate dinner (that fork, connected to the soft flesh of my hand, needs to be avian-free), no more picking up. Scream all you want, dude, because you've pissed off Mama.

I mean, how rude, this biting fest, this mawing on the one who feeds you, your savior from the shelter, your daily bread. What a little bastard, says Jonesy, when I tell her what he did.

It's a pain in the ass for me. I duck to get out of his way as he flies through the hall, and I almost bump my head on doorknob. He gets on my shoulder and I make him step up to his rope perch, over and over and over again. The numbskull figures it out. That one, stay off the shoulder, just until she weakens.

Jonesy puttered around the kitchen talking to SSW: Now look what you've done. Your girlfriend dumped you. She doesn't even want to talk to you. At all.

I didn't. He could go sulk his little green ass in some other corner. I had wounds to heal.

Topics He Insists We Cover

2008-06-03T12:41:00.002-05:00

1. O! immediate abandonment from the next room, tho I can fly and find thee!

2. My minions, or those other large, bite-able beasts

3. I bite because I love thee--let me count the ways

4. How my breakfast needs vast improvements

5. I shall shat near your coffee cup whenever I please, and land upon your dinner plate, thank you very much

6. Upon finding your smallest skin flaws with my impeccable tongue, a study in imperfections

And why not, Jeeves?

2008-06-03T12:28:00.000-05:00

Here are Sir Sweet William's loyal staff:

Jonesy, parrot butler #1

Sara, parrot butler #2