Sunday, March 23, 2014

Once upon a time I kicked a dead pigeon down the street.  I guess it had been hit by a car, maybe, I don't know, but its guts were hanging out, and each time I kicked it, more guts would come streaming out of it.  You wouldn't believe how much guts there is in a pigeon, unless of course if you gutted one, I suppose.  There had to have been twenty feet of intestine there, and other organs too.  It was bloody, but it was yellow, sort of a cheddar and tomato paste lookin mess there on the concrete.  I kept on kicking it until I lost interest in it.  I still had some of it on my shoe.  Then I went home for lunch.  And guess what lunch was...  Pizza.  Frozen Tambelini's pizza, with a mixture of mozzarella & cheddar cheeses on it, and you know what it looked like?  Pigeon guts.  I said as much.  I told my Mom what it looked like, as I was eating it.  I might've been ten at the time.  It didn't seem overly gross to talk about kicking a dead pigeon, or that fact that my lunch looked like pigeon guts while I was eating it.  It still tasted like pizza.  Moms tend to think things of that nature are gross, though.  Mine did.  She asked me why I kicked it, I said I didn't know, because it was there.  She asked me if I washed my hands, and I said that I didn't pick it up, I just kicked it down the street.  She said that pigeons are like flying rats, they're full of diseases, and a bunch of other stuff, and then she noticed that there was still pigeon guts on the toe of my shoe...  Mothers don't really appreciate the subtle nuances of pigeon guts, or the way it forms a splatter pattern on a Converse shoe.  She really didn't appreciate the fact that I wore it into the house that way, that pretty much iced that cake.  The yelling began, and I decided that was a good time to beat feet out the back door.  Fuck the rest of the pizza.  I think I might've gone back to the dead pigeon and stomped it to make its brains and the rest of its guts goosh out and splatter all over the street, but I didn't do that right away.  I think I went and stole some cigarettes from the drugstore first.  I reckon a normal kid wouldn't have done that.  The stomping, I mean.  Maybe the kicking too, I don't know.  It was already dead, it wasn't like I stomped it to death.  I did that several years later.  It isn't easy to stomp a live pigeon, or even to kick one, since they tend to fly away.  You gotta find one that's sleeping, and then you gotta be lucky.  I used to walk thru the whole flocks of them in the park when I was a teenager, just to scare them airborne, and to piss off all the people who sat around feeding them.  Well, one time there was one asleep, and I just stepped right on it, kind of a jump-stomp, but I never broke stride to do it.  Just real quick like.  Goosh.  And I kept on walking, but I heard people freaking out over my shoulder.  I guess they were shocked by my actions.  I feel bad about it now, but at the time I didn't care.  Is that callous?  Probably.  Heartless? Cruel? Sadistic?  Yes, yes, and yes.  Even though feral pigeons do overpopulate in cities, especially when people feed them, and they do carry disease, and they shit everywhere, and where they roost stinks worse than a line of port-a-johns at a big festival.  It was cruel of me to stomp a sleeping bird, and rude to do it in front of old grandmas who feed them.  So I feel remorse for doing it.  I'm not going to take a knotted rope and flagellate myself severely about the head and shoulders because of it, but I do feel some remorse for it.  And who wants to come home from work to find a mess of smashed bird in the street in front of their house, with approximately twenty feet of pigeon chitterlings trailing out behind it... ?  Not me, I reckon.

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