Night Life

There's a raccoon under the house and I don't want to deal with it. Chances are it'll be gone by the time I need to go to work, if not I'll shoot it then and haul the carcass down the road for the crows. Speaking of which, I had an odd encounter with a Turkey Vulture the other day. This is the ugliest god-damn bird you're ever likely to see, and I still don't understand what was going on, the specifics of the situation. There must have been some carrion involved. People on Mackletree keep chickens (and ducks and turkeys and other more exotic birds), they're always in the road, and there's a certain attrition, so there are dead birds, which several of us stop and throw over onto the verge. It's all about dignity. And I was driving home, slowly, weaving through the birds. At the abandoned sawmill, where the grass is lush, the chickens were pecking at seed-heads, and I stopped, to study their technique, and there was a Turkey Vulture, acting like a chicken, strutting around with its wings folded in. That bald head and red wattles looked like something from Dante. The chicken from hell. Bosch. We made eye contact, and he was like, oh fuck man, be on your way, I have business here. It was a defining moment. You just have to leave some things alone. I know a stripper with a cocaine habit, I have a friend that robs people for a living. I can't change anything. A sense of helplessness. But the world, channeling Beckett here, goes on. Let's grab an RC cola and a moon pie. Stop, get a drink, roll a smoke, slow down. The world moves too fast.