by Avi Hoen (’15)
From the Sarah Fontaine Unit

The world is stupid.  No it’s not.  Well it kind of is.  It sucks sometimes.  When you’re on top of it, it feels awesome.  Not awesome as in “new pair of shades,” but awesome as in, “a bird just gave birth to an elephant.”  That kind of awesome.  But it’s only “elephant-birthing awesome” some days.  Most days, it’s “bird birthing cockroach” awesome.  Not very awesome.

Today the world birthed a bird and that bird birthed another bird so it isn’t very special today.  There are a lot of birds being birthed in the world.  Some birds are awesome and some birds just shit on your car.  A year is like birds.  Each day is an egg.  From each egg you don’t know what kind of bird is going to hatch.  Today could be a “white-throated kingfisher” day, or today’s egg could be scrambled and stuck to the frying pan.  As I said you never know what kind of day it will be.

Birds live on the world, usually they don’t live on top of.  Birds get the short end of the feather.  But know that some bird out there had an amazing day.  Be sure to know it had a great time eating berries and shitting on your car.  The world is full of chain reactions like this.  Bird eats.  Bird shits.  Shit on you.  Bird is happy.  You feel like shit.  You shit on someone.  You feel happy.  Someone feels like shit.  The world is one happy piece of crap.  Get used to it.

I got used to this bird eat bird world when I was little.  I always knew I was an insignificant little red berry, soon to make it into a bigger birds stomach.  Maybe that bird would be Big Bird.  Big Bird taught me the world.  Elmo has one messed up world.  I hope a bird shits on Mr. Noodle.  I take that back, I didn’t watch much TV as a child, probably because most kids shows were like that.  A three-year-old shouldn’t be filling their head with singing cloth puppets.  A three-year-old should be filling their minds with enlightening thoughts, such as Icarus and how trying to be something you’re not is just a stupid waste of time because we are all gonna die and melt away when we get to close to reality.  Sorry, those would be horrible thoughts for a toddler.  Maybe they should keep their minds on T.V. and birds.

When I was little I had a bird feeder.  It hung from the tree.  Then one night a raccoon came and ate all the bird seed.  As I said, birds always get the short end of the branch.  It’s the circle of life though.  Actually it isn’t.  Hardware Store Brand bird seed has no place in something as significant as life.  Except it does.  I eat food from a grocery store too.  I do not partake in the natural circle of things.  Therefor I am a bird.

Life sucks for birds, some days.  Life sucks for me, some days.  It depends what kind of eggs I buy at the grocery store.  Free-Range, Organic, Cage Free.  Life is full of options.  I also have the option of buying the Caged eggs.  Funny how they don’t specify on those packages that the chicken never saw the outside light.  Of course when I shop at the Costco I have all these options and more, but the assumption is made that I am going to feed the entire flock with 18 dozen eggs.  That probably stems to the idea of cannibalism.  It would be a bad idea to feed eggs to birds.  I feel bad for chickens, their young is always sold off, and what isn’t eaten by the humans is given to the pigeons who don’t know what they are eating.  Pigeons truly are “chicken-brained,” I don’t blame them for being content with their stupidity, I wouldn’t want to know if I was eating monkey fetus.  Makes it seem like pigeons have a pretty good life.

Maybe I’m a pigeon and I can peck morsels of Doritos from the sidewalk cracks.  No roses, just chips.  Did you hear about the pigeon that grew from the crack in the concrete.  You probably didn’t because it didn’t actually happen.

A lot of things in life don’t actually happen.  In fact most of the world doesn’t actually happen.  It’s a whole sea of thought, full of fish getting eaten by birds.  What actually happens is just bird shit.  Damn.  Oceans seem pretty bleak now.  I’m sorry for blowing your mind in depressing amazement.

I read some bad rhyming poetry in a book that went “A geek with a beak will have a life that is bleak, don’t be a geek and speak what you think.”  I never actually read that.  I don’t need to cite a source.  Birds probably don’t use quotes, or MLA 7 or APA, or EasyBib.  If I am a bird I can sing my own songs, that I make up in my bird brain and sing them from the branches of the world.  No citation needed.  Unless… do mockingbirds cite what they sing.  No, they probably don’t.  The way they find love is a whole lot of bird shit.  The way people find love is pretty stupid too.  As I said earlier, I am a bird, therefore people are birds, and the world makes the same amount of sense as a fresh splatter of bird shit on the sidewalk.

Birds should probably be recognized because they are related to dinosaur ancestors.  Which is pretty cool.  That’s only if you like dinosaurs.  When I was little I told people Rumpelstiltskin was my great-grandfather.  No one believed me.  I didn’t believe me.  A bird might have trusted my statement for a minute, but even a bird brain is smarter than a  lie.  Besides, birds are related to dinosaurs, that has to count for something.

OK, it probably doesn’t count for much.  I mean, look at how we treat dinosaurs.   When we find a dead one we display it, and when we find a decomposed one, we drive cars.  It might be a double standard.  One day, birds will be the source of petroleum gasoline, and also petroleum jelly.

You know what’s crazy, is that during the oil spill, the birds ancestors, the dinosaurs, killed the birds with their decomposed fossil fuel!  Talk about a great way to avenge your death.  So I guess having dinosaur ancestors is a double-edged sword.

My guess is that birds have a hate-love relationship with swords.  Actually, they probably just hate them.  Swords are only good to kill birds, birds would need opposable thumbs to use them properly.  Video games lie.

As Peter Griffin agrees, “the bird is the word.”  I’m not sure if this has any relevancy to birds and the world, but words are also the world.  Words are the sword that the birds can’t use.  Blue Jays can’t say great words like “hootenanny,” “cautious” or my personal favorite “cooties.”  Despite birds not speaking words, they communicate in their ways.  This enables them to be functional members of society.  Just like you and me.  In fact, I would go so far to say that they are more functional in society then the average human being.  After all, they understand the defiance of gravity.  And if life has taught me anything it’s that gravity brings you down.  Unless you are on the moon.

Scratch that, birds don’t teach us diddly-shit, except what shit is.  WAIT! So, basically if the world is shitty, and birds are the all-mighty creators of shit, then technically speaking birds are god. HOLY SHIT!