Things previously unknown about pigeons

These pigeons sat huddled together like this on a 10th floor ledge for a week in August. It was really cold and rainy so this was likely a good place to chill, away from typical Vancouver dreariness. I think they're teenage pigeons who are siblings. They may have been using body heat to stay warm and alive. Their parents came to visit a couple of times to bring them food. I witnessed that also. Honestly, I used to check on them a couple times a day just to make sure one of them didn't fall off the ledge in a temporary brain fart which caused him to forget how to fly. I don't know what I would have done in that situation, maybe I could have given the remaining pigeon some counseling?

Previously, I thought pigeons were pretty disgusting and all they did was target people and clean cars to poop on all day. Apparently, pigeons and doves are actually from a common family - Columbidae. But the doves take all the glory associated with being bearers of peace, and pigeons just take the blame for shit.

Pun intended.

Pigeons seem to be pretty cool, contrary to popular belief. They help each other out, they keep each other warm when the weather sucks, and both the mom and dad help feed the kids. And I'm sure that when they get old and demented their kids don't ditch them in the hospital never to inquire about them again - in the hopes that they'll just get slotted into some nursing home.

Pigeons may actually be nicer then some people I know.

But their poop is still pretty gross and disease ridden.

The day we met

I met him one day, as I stepped outside
We’d passed each other every day.
And always there was that energy.
The kind that makes you raise an eyebrow in wonder.
The kind that sends a shiver up your back

He’d leave me speculating.
He’d leave me in awe.
He’d leave me wanting to ask a question,
Just so he would turn and look.

This day though, it was different.
We became friends that day as he swept on by.
He caught my hand up in his;
I was taken by surprise.

But that is his way.
He roams the cities and the towns,
One day he’ll trudge up a mountain top
The next he’ll dance in an alley.

Wherever his heart makes an argument to go.

Making friends, making enemies,
Making his own path and bending the trees along his way.

I didn’t feel I was like him.
He was unruly, and unkempt,
Wildly he undid the order in his path.
There were no rules, there were no limits.

And there was me.
Walking in lines.

He noticed as my hair blew up around my face
I made to calm it down.
‘Let it be’, he said.
‘You don’t know me’, I replied.

He stood back, and shook his head
‘I know more than you think. I know that you’re like me,
You rustle leaves as you walk, you move people as you meet them,
Always moving, always leaving.

But there is something else…’

And here he paused and a sadness came over him.
‘You’re like me’, he said.
He had wanted it to be true, he had wanted that bond.
But now he did not want to see his reflection in me.

I looked at him, searching for his averted eyes.
He did not know.
He did not understand.
My nervousness fell aside.

It was my turn to look at him in sadness.
He never left himself behind.
Always composed and ready to leave,
Wherever his heart makes an argument to go.

He had no home.
He made no home.
He left no bits of his heart behind
In little places.

We’re quite alike, the wind and I.
But unlike him, I’ve left bits of soul behind
Attached to bushes like memories,
In the corners of dorm rooms and the alcoves of apartments.

In the hearts of friends.

I did not eat crayons.

In the old cartoons I watched as a child, the main character would often get a devil and an angel on his shoulders who would help him reason out a crucial decision. Well, the devil and the angel never actually appear. Which of course was obvious; unless you were one of those gullible kids who ate crayons when someone tricked you into thinking that they were edible. But what they failed to tell you as a child is that even though our thoughts don’t personify into little creatures that speak either black or white and help us clearly decide what’s right and wrong; we also can’t clearly sort all that out in our minds either.

I would just like to say, I feel cheated. I mean when I started out post-cartoon exposure, it was pretty easy to make decisions; But somewhere along the way things became much more difficult. So much so, that occasionally I’ll need days, even weeks to come to a decision.

But all I have is a bunch of paper bag clothed thoughts on my ‘shoulders’, confusing the hell out of me.

And that’s how we end up with the ‘door slamming effect’. You’ve finally managed to point yourself in one direction, all your logic, all your reasoning, your history, feelings, shmeelings, all of it has finally just added up. You finally reach the critical point, the right circumstance, no time could be better and instead of walking through you slam the door in your own face and take a completely different route. One of the other paper bag thoughts jumped in and messed it all up.

Thoughts are tricky things. And on that fateful day, you won’t know for certain which one is going to sway you; until you get to the moment, on top of the snowy hill.

Puddle Vision

Do you ever get the feeling that something big is going on and you have absolutely no idea? That, not only are you, not in on it, but you also have the suspicion that you are the only one who doesn’t know?

Ok, before we write this moment off as a paranoid delusion, I think we need to consider the possibility that it is a healthy form of paranoia; normal, even. A defense mechanism of sorts that we’ve developed over the years to save us from wandering around aimlessly and getting hurt.

Sometimes, we have moments when we lose touch with what’s going on and the world has a way of drawing us back to reality back to our senses by throwing this feeling into our gut. Telling us, ‘Hey, something feels funny. Look around idiot, before something bad happens to your face.’

Let me try to explain.

Think back to one of those days – when you haven’t left your apartment in about 24 hours, no ones called your phone, the internet is so dead, and you haven’t used your voice in so long the next time you speak someone will surely ask you if you just woke up. Ok, so it’s one of THOSE days, and you step out and lo and behold the world seems to be completely deserted and you don’t run into a single human being for at least a good 2 minutes. In those 2 minutes, you are likely to experience some strange thoughts. Something along the lines of, ‘Am I extremely late? Is something going on that I should know about?’ And likely, as you reach the 2 minute mark – ‘Am I the last person alive?’

Is this an exaggeration, or are there other people out there who get this feeling. This conspiracy feeling. The kind that makes you question, like this quote– ‘Did you ever wonder if the person in the puddle is real, and you're just a reflection of him?’

One of those life moments where you’ve been obliviously preoccupied, really just don’t know what’s going on, and something stops you, and tells you to take a look around and figure out what’s what. To break out of your thoughts and to take a look at the present. For whatever reason, to stop you from stepping off the sidewalk and twisting your ankle, or to shake you into getting a grip on reality, or to give you a fresh perspective.

A defense mechanism, to protect us from what we do to ourselves – overthink.

Maybe it’s just me. Maybe this really is some form of a paranoid delusional tendency that is a consequence of the one time in grade 4 when I came to school an hour late because my family totally and completely forgot about daylight savings time. Talk about not knowing what was going on. The entire world was in another time zone and I was wandering around living in the past.

Bollywood Induced Delusions

I’ve always had an overly active imagination. And so, when the concept of Prince Charming first presented itself to me while hearing the Cinderella story back when I barely had the sense to know what an imagination was, I internalized it.

Over the years, the image of the perfect man took on a decidedly Indian spin, and the suave, blonde haired prince on a white horse was replaced with Shah Rukh Khan from DDLJ strumming his guitar.

The whole fairy tale thing really grew to become an aspect of my faith in happy endings. I had come to believe that we all have our own fairy tale, that we’re all the stars of our own Bollywood romance.

Not that I believed all this quite literally, but I was holding on to the hope that someday I would find the right guy; the kind of guy that would, if it came down to it – overcome all sorts of ridiculous challenges, one of which may likely involve some sort of fight on a moving train and somewhere along the way a song and dance routine in Sweden.

Jokes aside. Just like the stories, just like the movies, I deeply believed, there would be a happy ending to that part of my story.

And then somewhere along the way, disenchantment started to sneak in, bringing its ugly friend - doubt. As I became jaded time and again by the serious gap between what I thought Mr.Right was suppose to be and what it was turning out Mr.Rightnow really was. The average desi man I came across was falling short of the image I had. He seemed to be the product of an overly active imagination, he wasn’t in my life and he did not seem to be the other half of anyone else’s relationship.

So now here we are. It’s time to reassess the situation. Does the heroine simply close the diary and let go of the adventurous plans she had always had. Or, does she hold on to the dreams, hold on to the faith that one of these days some manifestation of that dream will come to life.

This is real life. This isn’t the movies. Our timing is all off, there is no laugh track to our jokes, there isn’t just one villain there are plenty, and there sure as hell aren’t 5 saris to wear every hour.

So where does that leave us? Do we just smother the great expectations? Do we give up on expectations all together? Or do we settle for whatever comes along, accepting that this must be it; that the writers don’t have some amazing twist planned for us in the upcoming scene.

I found this quote recently, by Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love:

‘It was in a bathtub back in New York, reading Italian words aloud from a dictionary, that I first started mending my soul. My life had gone to bits and I was so unrecognizable to myself that I probably couldn’t have picked me out of a police lineup. But I felt a glimmer of happiness when I started studying Italian, and when you sense a faint potentiality for happiness after such dark times you must grab onto the ankles of that happiness and not let go until it drags you face-first out of the dirt — this is not selfishness, but obligation. You were given life; it is your duty (and also your entitlement as a human being) to find something beautiful within life, no matter how slight.’

I’m an extremely confused individual. Not only do I not know what to think about the things that I do think about. I don’t even know if I should be thinking about the things that I do think about.

But in all the soulsearching, in all the metaphors, I think that I’m going to hold on to the faith. Maybe I’m not really looking for ‘Prince Charming’, but I’m looking for the kind of happiness that would leave any audience thinking, ‘Damn that was so good, I would watch it again.’ Even if that audience is just me.