I went to the grocery store today to get three items. Nice and simple. In and out.
No mess; no fuss; no lines; no drama.
My kind of shopping. No
terrifying encounters inside the store.
Outside, though, that was another story.
You see, I have been thinking about ways to get healthy (and
trying to convince myself that Reese's Peanut Butter Cups are health food since
they contain peanut butter which has protein, right?), so I parked my car way
out in the lot at the store. It was fine
when I walked to the building because my mind was on a mission: Remembering my
list items (which, remarkably, I did).
When I exited the store, I patted myself on the back. After all, I had walked a little, found the
items I intended to find, and was preparing to walk back to my car at a
reasonably brisk pace.
That's when I heard it.
Far above me and getting louder and closer, a strange
screeching noise shattered the relative quiet of the semi-busy lot. I craned my neck to see what was making the
sound: A seagull.
Now let it be known that we live about 20 miles inland and
are such an inconsequential town that even the pigeons don't bother hanging
around. But every so often we get some
errant, retarded seagulls that seem to think our tiny river (that only swells
when it's spring sports season and it buries the lower fields) is the highway
to the ocean. They are wrong, of course,
because as I already mentioned they are retarded. And errant.
They are errantly retarded. Maybe
retardedly errant. Either way, they damn
well shouldn't be here.
As I stepped off the curb to begin the half-mile hike to my
vehicle, I noticed something I hadn't seen except in a movie. I noticed that there were hundreds of gulls
littering the parking lot like balls of trash.
I also noticed a few dozen in the sky actually dive-bombing toward
people about ten feet above our heads.
My first thought, of course, was to shoo the dirty bastards
away from my car so I might be able to unlock it and get in, hopefully still
carrying my bag of goodies. (There was a
huge gull at the beach, you know, the beach twenty miles to the east, that
could steal two large lobsters off a take-out tray in one fell swoop, and he'd
been dubbed The General.) As I ran, as did several others, across the
pavement, I thought to myself, "Come on, kid. How often do ya get pooped on by a bird? What are the odds?"
And then it hit me - no, not turd, but an observation. I noticed that the tar all around me was
coated with white bird bombs. Honestly,
it looked like some kind of a bizarre game:
It was Pooh City all around my car.
Not ON my car, thankfully, since I just washed it. Well, I washed it the day before it rained,
but that's another story.
I finally reached my car after performing several tactical
swerves in the lot trying to avoid becoming some kind of doodoo target. The birds sat there, mocking me like extras
in an Alfred Hitchcock movie. I was
sorely tempted to beep my horn at them when I drove by, or maybe even take a
pass through the whole lot and wipe out the minions.
But I got scared. I chickened out, got bird-brained, was a
few feathers short of a pillow. Besides,
those gulls had been watching me, mocking me since I parked. I'll bet they even called The General with my location and took
down my license plate number. I shifted
the car quietly and crawled my way out of my parking spot - any sudden movement
might spook them - then drove carefully around and through the massive squalls
of birds everywhere.
Damn birds. Damn
Alfred Hitchcock.
Filthy bastards.
