Birds Are Fucking Stupid

Like any decent American with a penchant towards the irrational, I hate birds. First of all, once you finally get to that point in the year where the weather has turned from “This giant purple coat-beast is the only thing standing between me and frostbite but makes me look like a shriveled eggplant with no curves to speak of” to “IT’S PATIO SEASON, BITCHES,” your slumberous dreams of accepting a Pulitzer for best pizza-related nonfiction are interrupted at an ungodly hour by the chattery little bastards perched outside your bedroom window yammering on and on like that coworker you have that goes to the gym before work and wants to talk to you about almond milk at a pace akin to an auctioneer on speed before you’ve had your morning dumptruck of coffee. Look, I get that you’re just happy to be alive because you have tiny little brains and don’t understand such atrocities as running out of toilet paper in a Joann Fabrics bathroom or Donald Trump’s sniveling little mouth, and you probably found a dope worm just now and have reason to celebrate, but it’s four o’clock in the morning and ya’ll are partying like that neighbor I had once whom I dubbed Cranky Gymshorts for obvious reasons whose late night/early morning routine consisted of blasting terrible country music and yelling at his girlfriend. Some of us were up till three trying to determine if Ross and Rachel are ever going to make it and need some freaking sleep. Stop your damn selves.

My hatred toward birds stems from the fact that they fucking started it. On my walk from the train to my office, there is a gang of pigeons that lurks in the parking lot I cut through, weaseling around eating garbage and splashing about in that puddle of presumed poison in the corner by the fence that is there regardless of whether it has rained or not. And they wait for me, they watch me as I trepidatiously sneak through them like Frodo into Mordor, and then just when I’m almost through this hellacious demon landscape, they all take off like a burst of evil confetti and fly around my head as I run away screaming and waving my arms and this is probably why I’m on YouTube somewhere.

Word got out about this amongst the bird community and their power over me spread. One unsuspecting day, when I was driving out to the suburbs to see a friend, I pulled onto a one-lane exit ramp situated rather high above the ground, and there before me were dozens of birds, just chillin’ on the ramp like they owned the damn place. I slammed on my breaks and inched toward them. They may be the devil’s henchmen, but I’m not a monster. And the little fuckers wouldn’t move. I kept inching forward and they kept chittering and bopping around like there wasn’t a two ton hunk of steel (well, I drive a Yaris, so plastic) coming at them like that giant boulder in Indiana Jones. The brazenness of these little jerks! I rolled down my window. “MOVE!” I yelled. “MOVE, YOU DUMB BIRDS!” But they wouldn’t move, and I kept inching closer, their lives in such terrible danger that their idiotic pea-brains couldn’t even comprehend. “OH MY GOD, MOVE! WHY WON’T YOU MOVE?!” By now, a line of cars had piled up behind me, and about a dozen drivers were honking at me and screaming out their windows. So, it sounded something like this:

“GET OUT OF MY WAY, YOU STUPID MORONS! I’M TRYING TO SAVE YOUR LIVES!”

“Tweet, tweet, fuck you.”

“DRIVE, ASSHOLE! WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING?”

“MOVE, IDIOTS! MOVE!”

HONK HONK, HONK HONK HONK!!!

Until finally I thought, well your lives are in god’s hands now, and I closed my eyes and floored it. And the little assholes just flew away. I swear one of them flicked me off as he took flight. People were still honking and I waved my arm out the window to say, “I am the savior of bird-kind, you barbarians. How dare you judge me.” But the birds don’t care. They are soulless. They follow me with their beady little eyes– in the park, on the street– watching my every move, plotting. They are cataloguing my weaknesses. They know.