blue jays, cardboard boxes, odd conjunctions

My Internet Explorer started doing something eccentric and viral-looking, so I yanked it off the network. And when I say "yanked it off the network" I mean "unplugged it from the cable modem." The infection had kind of an interesting effect, in that it created weird fake links all over whatever page I was accessing. It seems I am not the only one experiencing this or something like it. Nice to know even the semi-famous suffer. Well, nice if anyone suffers, really. If I am.

The upshot of this is that I feel oddly cut off. The co-conspirator is kindly sharing his nerve center, but it's not the same as having my own access. I feel like the cyborg in the movie we're all going to make one day, when the reversed electromagnetic field makes all their implants go dead and suddenly there's just the silence of being.

Blue Jays

The blue jays that built a nest in our front tree (the same tree that brought us Gay Squirrel TV) have been keeping my co-conspirator awake at odd hours.

You get used to them as background noise after awhile, and then you notice when they're squawking more than usual. One day not long ago just that increase in volume and intensity (and full-bodied sheen)happened; and the c-c looked out to see a baby blue jay in the middle of the lawn, with two fierce noisy parents circling it like vengeful hornets, and a circle of interested neighborhood cats on all the fences and cars surrounding the yard.

A neighborhood rescue came together immediately. We live on a very co-operative block. A ladder was produced, and some guys down the block built a birdhouse out of a bucket, with a conical roof and a perch, and hoisted it up on a kite line flung over a branch (so it could cleverly be raised and lowered.) The conspirator and unnamed acquaintance got the bird into a box and thence to the entry slot cut into the bucket. Up went the baby bird, applause, go to commercial. (For gelato perhaps.)

Well. Little did we know. We became the Disneyland of our one-block no-through street. Everyone who walked by paused to look at the nest. Many paused long enough that we considered asking them to split the property taxes. Fatboy TV no longer enthralled. People no longer lingered on the curb to watch us rock out to the Buffy theme song. Now they walked right into our yard. Examined the clever rope system. Discussed the engineering of the bucket. I'd be wandering around the house in my Athletic Underwear, looking for something to pack my collection of Kindertoys(tm) in, and look up into the eager faces of a pair of Blue Jays fans. I took to throwing shoes at the window to see if I could scare them off.

They're worse than seagulls.

One day we came home to find someone had lowered the nest by several feet. The baby bird dangled now at chin level, gaping for food whenever anything remotely blue jay shaped went by. Much commotion among the committee members. Had it fallen again? Was it Tourists? The bucketeers were indignant. The bird was re-elevated and a secure knot tied.

Then, last week, I was leaving for work a few minutes early, dreaming affectionately of the smoothie I anticipated using those minutes to consume, and I heard the mad squawking again. I tried to pretend I thought it was something else, but I knew. I looked out the front window. There was the baby bird in the middle of the lawn, and there was my cat stalking up to it.

Now, I am not sentimental about baby birds, or any other edible creature. If I see a cat leaping on a wee little mousie, I don't cry, "You brute!" and nurse the thing back to health with an eyedropper full of ewe's milk. I think, ah well, circle of life, evolution, one must eat the other, blah blah blah. But there is no way I can let my cat eat the neighborhood's pet blue jay. It's our last week. We want to go out on a high note, not get rotting soy curds dumped through our mail slot.

Fortunately, three neighbors from two different houses came by in the nick of time. One called the Wildlife Crisis Line, one scooped the bird up in a shoebox, and one gave helpful suggestions while I grabbed Mao the Left Shoulder Cat and dumped him inside. He was livid. "I could have caught that one!" he glared at me.

And, Dog help the cat who's never in his life brought in a dead bird that hadn't been that way for a long, long time, he was probably right. After about the third jump to ground, you have to ask whether this bird, cute or not, really has the stuff that makes for survival.

(*A note on this bird. Everyone involved, the night team, the day team, the paramedics, and the press, insisted on calling it a "baby bird." I hate to quibble, but the thing was massive. Every time I looked at it I saw a sullen adolescent of 13, eating everything in the fridge and refusing to let its mother pick out its clothes any more.)

A couple of days ago, we came home, and it was gone. The bird, the bucket-- even the parents. Not a squawk. The co-conspirator fears the worst. But he does sleep better now.

Further Thoughts on Cardboard Boxes

An urban saint dug a couple of dozen boxes out of dumpsters and liquor stores for us, and this is a very good thing, because I was having absolutely no luck trying to buy the bastards. I don't know in what dimension the U-Haul website was last updated, but of the five locations I've visited in the last week, two no longer existed, one didn't exist yet, one was a tiny empty cubicle located behind a maze of hostile truck parts clerks, and one was closed for Victoria Day. That last didn't matter so much, since I only came across it accidentally while discovering that the Brussels Chocolates factory was also closed for Victoria Day. (Bit of a blow, that.)

I like to think that if I'm going to compromise my anti-capitalist principles enough to pay for something that should be easily found for free (like boxes, like coat hangers) then capitalism should bloody well be there to support me.

-rf