Pigeons
This confluence of pigeons, huddled on a shingled Sunnyside rooftop on a cold winters day, reminded me of some things. It looked like subject matter for a paint-by-numbers. It evoked memories of the Parc Lincoln Hotel, when fat clucking pigeons rustled on the windowpane of Room 317, those sickeningly huge beasts slipping off the pane and onto the mangy carpet, waking me from an always-shallow sleep.
I remembered an afternoon on Main Street, where I had a room for senior year of college and the following summer. Early that summer I lifted the blinds from one of two windows and found a blanket of flies. Thick, heavy, huddling flies that did not move when the light shone on them or when I waved my hands at them to shoo. They seemed primordial (a popular word in my head these days) and they seemed like evil. Flies, I thought, should fly, and in the instant after I opened the blinds I expected the room to fill with a cloud of frantic flies crashing into each other, slamming into the ceiling and the walls, shitting and vomiting but still growing larger until the room itself burst from the force of the pulsating throb of basketball-sized flies, massed into a moon.
Instead I watched as these buzzing, hairy wads danced on the window surface, crawling over each other in the comfort of their oblivious hive. But these were not bees. These were lazy flies, stupid flies, putrid flies, and I rushed to a convenience store for cans of genocidal fly annihilator. Minutes later I sprayed the carpet of flies, but they did not move. Still they clung to their mass, their beehive-wannabe, this mass of lowly flies aspiring deep into the evolutionary reaches of the flying arthropoda phyla but failing, one by writhing one, as the bug spray overtook their nervous systems and their bodies plunked to the floor, some landing on the heater forming small mounds of dumbly wriggling blobs but most landing on the carpet with a tiny, memorable thud. The flies dropped a few at a time before showering the floor in a cacophony, quickly clearing the window, letting the sun shine in and opening the view to Main Street.
Fast forward 20 years (about 2 months ago) and I am at a cemetery the day after a major snow storm. Just walking around, I have no reason to be there except to see how the dead weathered the snow and to check in on some favorite places at the big boneyard.
I approached a favorite memorial and noticed piles of dog shit on the exposed grass, with accompanying stains of urine in the nearby snow. I thought little of it, having seen some spectacular turds on these grounds, including a memorable series of shining dung piles, each pyramidic, candy-like squall elocuted onto the earth with a skilled sphincterial twist.
The yard mostly covered in snow I gravitated toward an open trail and walked on it, noticing again a conspicuous amount of animal droppings. At first I thought it was isolated piles of dog shit but I later concluded these turds came from the rears of large Canadian Geese which populate this yard. I walked for a full minute before looking north, looking south, and looking to both sides and discovering I was surrounded by bird shit. Canadian Geese, huddling to keep warm during the big snow storm, stood in place for 30 hours, all the while dropping an inch-thick, 50-foot-long carpet of their still-wet feces on the ground of the cemetery. I made the earthy, ghastly discovery that I had walked in Canadian Goose shit as casually as if I had just walked barefoot on the beach. I looked everywhere for a bare spot on the ground, a place where I might not feel the crude squishing of fresh birdshit under my feet, but as far as I could see was a field of deep turd.
