Migrate Already!

Music: Sufjan Stevens: Welcome to the Great State of Michigan

The mood here is plastic, alternately pensive and sentimental, annoyed and appreciative. There is a tremendous flock of birds roosting above my house in The World's Largest Pecan Tree(R), a massive red-wood style monument to history that you can see from the overpass driving through Baton Rouge. In any event, these birds are chirping loudly--there is a sea of chirps, a wave that wafts like the sound of crickets. I was astonished recently to hear the cacophony come to sudden silence--precisely at the moment a song I was listening to by Sufjan Stevens ended. It was one of those perfect moments when meaning and materiality converge--"synchronicity," as my friend Tom would intone, a moment when I am supposed to recognize the radical monism of reality.

And then, I remember: these fucking birds shit like crazy on my car. And insofar as my car is black, it means this shit is really visible and ugly and I have to wash my damn car every other day as result. It's not even an aesthetic annoyance, but a one rooted in resale value: if I don't wash the birdshit from the car, it eats into the goddamn paint!