My whole life, I've always been a bit of a cartoon character--nothing about me feels completely real.
One of my best examples of this is from the day before the lockdown in 2020. I was at work, 15 minutes before we closed, contemplating what it would mean to be in isolation and potentially not have an income for two weeks (how naive that feels now!)
Then a woman walked in, balancing her toddler in her arm.
"Excuse me," she said, "I don't know if you care--"
Which, if you've never worked in the service industry--I don't. 15 minutes before I close? If I cared less, we'd both be dead.
"I don't know if you care," She said, "But there is a harpy eagle in your trash can out front."
Hey.
Well done lady, my interest is piqued, but my gut reaction was also that she was dead wrong. Harpy Eagles are enormous birds--they're also the National Bird of Panama, which would leave one in our Denver trash can pretty fucking far from home.
Harpy Eagles are so large they have been mistaken for full-grown people in bird suits. So what this woman more or less said to me on the last day I had before the world shut down was, "I don't know if you care, but there is a full-grown person in a bird suit in your trash can out front."
It's a bird, it's a plane, it's a person in a bird suit in your trash can!
So, as the curious person I am, I went out front to see what she was talking about--and there is no Harpy Eagle in the trash can, she was just a dumb lady. I think about her twice a day. I don't think she was very smart.
But what IS in the trash can is a duffel bag, and what's sticking out of the duffel bag is a pair of bird feet. And I'm a curious, intrepid little person so I got the duffel bag out--doesn't matter how--and I opened it up to see that it wasn't a harpy eagle at all.
It was an owl.
And my immediate reaction was, "Who throws out an owl?"
I know they're not recyclable, but c'mon!
I would eat it, is what I'm saying. I'm a vegetarian and I can feel the aura of a comment section getting mad at me already, but just think of what a missed opportunity that was! You bring that sucker to Thanksgiving dinner you think anyone's gonna talk about politics? Not on your life!
I didn't eat the owl. Animal control took it and life proceeded as normal (for a few hours before the whole insanity that was quarantine, anyway.) I was relating this story to a friend of mine, and he told me, "Kira, you can't eat owls, it's incredibly illegal to have them in your possession at all. They belong to First Nations, you'd go to federal prison."
And that was nice to know about myself, that if I was going to go to Federal prison, huddled in a cell with other inmates exchanging the "What are you in for?" stories, and after one woman with a scar down her face said, "I ran a cartel that trafficked drugs across the border and destroyed communities," and another woman admitted, "I embezzled billions from my company and investors committed suicide when they lost everything."
And then it would be my turn and I'd just have to be like,
"Oh, I ate an owl. I wanna know what secrets taste like!"
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