 “It looks a lot colder than it looks,” I thought to myself as I was walking to work. Not really all that cold to begin with, my eyes saw cold, therefore my mind thought cold, therefore, reflexively, my mind sent signals to my arms to put my hands into my warm coat pockets.Just as I felt the CD cases of my Guns-N-Roses albums, a pigeon landed in my path. I slowed down so as not to ram the bird (in hindsight now I know that had I just kept on the bird would have flown away, but read on if you’re such a smarty), yet continued in my straight path. The bird wouldn’t move. I approached the bird, step by slowing step, until I was barely covering an inch with each stride. The bird wouldn’t move, mocking me with its mere presence. I stopped. The bird defied me. I used my entire body in a broad, arms spread wide, jump forward to scare the bird. I even coupled that shocker of a scare-away tactic with a bit of a shout, “MOVE!” The bird, small, grey, and probably diseased in one way or another, stood fast. “Please?” I bargained… The bird, with its pea sized brain sitting atop a more dominant and in-command spinal cord, wouldn’t flinch. Its silly little eyes mounted in it silly little head, snapping left and right and left again without any measure of self control – daring me to pass. “This bird has no fear,” I said to myself, “This is Dare Pigeon!” I started walking towards my morning nemesis, and it continued to hold still. As I passed the twitching bottom feeder capable of flight, it began to walk alongside me. I was stunned. This bird, the pigeon without fear, this Dare Pigeon, walked a good ten feet with me before, I assume, learning that I wasn’t going to feed it and flew away. You’re probably thinking that it’s just a bird, well, it might have been. But having both grown up and worked in a city my entire life, don’t you think I’d have written about other pigeons? No. I ignored those flying rats for they feared me. They deserved not to be written of. But this one, Dare Pigeon, challenged me. Oh, sure, he’ll probably burn off a toe or two in the future when he improperly times his landing on a power line somewhere, and he’ll eventually fall dead and rot in an alley somewhere – but for now, right now, in my eyes that one pigeon is the King of All Pigeons. He is Dare Pigeon. Footnote: What did I truly witness? This is surely the first pigeon to ever defy the human race for if there were others we, the members of the human race, would have heard about it by now. A pigeon, by definition, is a flying rat of sorts, a bottom feeder that lives in the cracks and corners of an otherwise busy and bustling city. They’re seen by billions of people each and every day and the only reason nobody ever talks about them is the same reason nobody ever really talks about the leaves, the ten or twelve people who think they’re explorers by living on Antarctica, or the fact that Saturday Night Live just isn’t funny anymore. These are all known facts that we all have stored away in our subconscious, little facts that we instinctively turn to when engaged in conversation or motions that carry us through day to day life. That said, if someone went to Antarctica and then released a statement to the world that there was, truly, nothing there other than ice – we’d know about it. That said, if leaves one day, suddenly, fell upward – we’d know about it. And, that said, if Saturday Night Live ripped out one hell of an episode one week that literally kept the viewing audience floored throughout the entire program – that, too, we’d know about. Whenever something breaks the norm, the status quo, it’s a news maker and therefore it’s something we end up knowing or hearing about. We never hear about pigeons because they never do anything new or different. And we’ve pacified ourselves as a species for getting too comfortable in the belief that pigeons are after our breadcrumbs and nothing more. What if I just witnessed some kind of evolutionary leap in pigeon brainpower this morning? What if what I saw this morning happened in dozens of other locations and I’m the only one who didn’t think, “That was odd,” and then move on, forgetting about, further pacifying myself...? They’re rising up, my friends, my fellow humans. They’re rising up, slowly. First, now, they’re simply testing us – but pretty soon it won’t simply be your freshly washed cars they’ll be after… No, they’ll be after much, much more. Soon, they’ll be after our very lives. |
