There it was, this morning, lying limp and embriotic on the concrete of my balcony… right there in front of my face, calling me with its primordial incipience, involuntarily enflaming my curiosity.
I kneeled down, yielding both to a pulverizing Japanese-beer hang-over and a nagging sense of inquiry. Yup, there it was….
A dead baby sparrow SPLAT on the floor. A dead, featherless bird inches from my bed!
There were no leads to be found at the crime scene. No feather-printed weapons to suggest murder, and the autopsy showed no signs of struggle.
Perhaps this was simply a suicidal act of a woe-fully depressed, Japanese sparrow, deprived of its right to Riddilin. Or maybe, just maybe (as an adroit Freudean pedant might suggest), this was a far more scandalous and Oedipusian affair than we thought…
Let's try this for a scenario:
The poor, young fledgling had a fight with his brother. Maybe he saw that his co-habitating sibling was feasting on worms a pin-head longer than his own and was receiving more mama-sparrow attention than himself. Maybe jealousy engulfed him and he thrust his little, under-matured beak at his brother's naked wing, but unfortunately over-shot his destination. Maybe our talon-less 3-day old hero then fell from his nest and landed, rather unfortunately, on the floorboards of a residing foreigner's balcony.
A possible explanation, I'd say…
Well, all I know is that the sparrows are back. And this is my third year as a Sparrow-suicide Witness. I'm now in the process of contracting a sparrow-speak translator to put up a few signs around the nest reading: “Don't jump! Life is good!” and “Uncle Sam says 'Wait for your Wings before flying!'”
Sunday, May 08, 2005
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1 comment:
In the immortal words of Thurgood from Half Baked after listening to Brian recount a hypothesis on how and why Killer the dog had died..."You smoke entirely TOOOO much reefer!!!"
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