Chickens by the Car, Bizarre
I’m not one to delight in other people’s misery. Not ordinary people anyway. CEOs of corporations, politicians… for these people who have thrust themselves into the capitalist limelight, I have nothing but schadenfreude, and I am so hot right now for Tom DeLay to go to prison. But decent, ordinary folk get a variety of sufferings thrust upon them, and I wish it otherwise. Chris MacLaren’s blog entry about a neighbor’s burning house reminded me vividly of driving through Saratoga on my way to 9 Derby Drive and passing a house on fire. It was beautiful. The flames were spilling out of the front door and pouring along the roof of the porch. There the air currents caught them and pulled them back into the second story window, creating a swooping column of fire that curved and roared and pulsed like the most dangerous crazy straw imaginable. But even as I was awestruck by the spectacle, I knew that this was someone’s everything that was being destroyed, and I couldn’t, in good conscience, rubberneck just for the breathtaking physics and colors.
The other day, the house that is diagonally across the street from my window had emptied its contents out onto the lawn. I don’t know if the property was foreclosed or condemned or the tenants evicted… I can but speculate, but it didn’t look like the occupants were simply moving, and so it’s likely that the circumstances were unhappy.
However, as a result of the evacuation of this property, there is now a pair of vagabond chickens wandering the yard. And because they are feeling the liberty of suddenly being free range, they often leave the yard and explore the adjacent street and parking lot and the yards of the neighboring houses. I have long held the philosophy that any movie that has a shot of chickens running amok in a dusty road is going to be awesome, or at least that moment will make me more predisposed to ignore other glaring flaws. In any case, the occasional view of chickens nonchalantly meandering through traffic has increased the joy I feel while idly gazing out of my tiny kitchen. And while this probably doesn’t improve the circumstances of the previous owners of these chickens any, it feels good take some irrational, cackling cheerfulness out of the results of their misfortune. That probably makes me a terrible person.
(I have subsequently communed with and photographed these chickens, and I was hoping to have the photos developed and up for this post, but the likelihood of me actually getting this film to the pharmacy or even to SnapFish with any due speed is heartily unlikely. Don’t “stay tuned” or anything, but I will edit this post to include visual documentation at some point. EDIT: Which has, clearly, been done.)
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Chris McLaren said,
3 April, 2006 at 1:34 pm
I know what you mean about the beauty of the burning house. Definitely.I wish we had chickens running around here, but they would be less dissonant than in the city. Urban chickens are awesome.I do love it when I’m driving home and there’s a deer standing in the middle of the road, though. And our neighbourhood hedgehog, who wanders the streets at twilight. He’s great–he’s our version of the harmless crazy street guy that everyone knows.