Birds Are Migratory?

I'm going to Las Vegas in December to see twin sisters, Paulina and Mercedes, competing in dance competitions. For some reason it's never quite slipped off the edge of my memory that Mercedes was once my girlfriend... living proof of my conviction that there is such a thing as love at first sight. Thanks to the balmy medicinal magic of time we find ourselves friends. Mildly sweet to each other after nearly a decade's estrangement. So while there is none of the feverish passion and drama remaining from our college years, there is an unmistakable determination on my part to look good when I arrive in Las Vegas. I mean I am motivated to manufacture lean sculpted muscle anatomically wide... biceps... triceps... pectorals... quads... pentaceps... hectoceps.... whatever.

Imagine my disappointment this past week, then, when I developed a little cold. No one wants to challenge themselves physically when they are sick, do they? So from Tuesday until Friday I did nothing but stay in bed , take medicine, and watch as all my physical fitness drained away. Today I woke up feeling a little more capable, consumed a dark chocolate Acess nutrition drink (distributed by Melaleuca), and headed out to the track across the street. On my way I saw this little bird... so little... and I stopped to watch him only a few feet away as he was hunting and pecking at every little speck of potential food within a ten foot expanse of embankment. I watched him for nearly a minute imagining that I was James Audobon or Charles Darwin and intensely fascinated by every little characteristic of this bird. I noticed how slender were the legs upon which his entire weight was balanced and at what angles they were supporting him. I noticed how these legs were not used at all to hop from one spot to another... nor were the wings perceptibly employed... but that apparently the body of the bird simply willed itself to flit about sporadically. This is all foreshadowing... done most artfully except that in really stellar literature this particular asseveration mentioning the foreshadowing itself in a none too subtle fashion would be omitted.

So I arrived at the track and surprised myself with running two miles in just under 17.5 minutes... my best time since February... perhaps I've not suffered so bad from being sick as I feared.

And while I'm bragging I might mention that at midnight I will have abstained from gambling for 100 days (42 short of the record).

So when I get home I hear this fantastic tumult up in the ceiling somewhere. My apartment has a vaulted ceiling with windows in it all the way across its apex. At first I imagined some large and menacing wasp or hornet, but really it generated too much noise for that. And upon further investigation I confirmed it was a small bird. See how that foreshadowing thing works? Really useless literary device if you ask me. What's wonderful in literature is when you don't know what to expect. So why, unless you wanted to be intellectually irrelevant, would you go around all the time giving hints about what's goig to happen at the end of your story?

So pretty quickly I gave up on diplomatically persuading this frantic creature to depart from my home. I realized my best chance was to invite the feline half of my apartment's residents to take a rare excursion into the outdoors inasmuch as her incessant inarticulate announcements that she would like nothing better than to use her jaws as a makeshift guillotine with which to decapitate the little bird were not helping. That being done... the bird commenced to make a little less noise, but still seems ridiculously certain that the only way to vacate my humble abode is through one of the window panes in the ceiling.

And that's how I came to ask myself, "birds are migratory, aren't they?" I mean seriously... how is it they fly back and forth each year from Alberta to Peru and yet the one chirping away in my ceiling right now can't remember that he flew in through the goddamned sliding glass door which is even more open now than when he entered it approximately 45 minutes ago?