Still Drinking

(Note: due to the last few days of digging up old passwords and finding old writing on other sites I kind of liked, I'm porting stuff over here just to have it all in one place. So if you've read this before, sorry. I didn't realize I was going to live so long I'd have to get organized.)

So it was in Northhampton that I was finally hit by a kamakazi sparrow.

Despite harboring a small number of people I carefully avoid, Northhampton is my adopted heartland, seemlessly stitching together cityish overtones with rural roots, the finest hub of culture in a valley brimming with failed experiments in five college mingling. This extremely biased opinion depends on several important points: I have never actually lived there; it is the lesbian capital of the world; one of my closest friends lives there. I can feel months of tension being squeezed out of my shoulders the moment I hit the town border, in preparation for a weekend of video games, good drink, meditative conversation, and the occasional severe muscle injury from attending one of my friend's martial arts lessons.

The weekend crawled by in the way vacations should crawl by but rarely do, and eventually it came time to catch a ride early Sunday morning, to avoid being the dirty punk asleep on the couch when my friend's fiance's parents came to visit. I packed my gear, said my goodbyes, and stepped out into a flawless Sunday morning sun to procure some coffee while I waited for my ride.

Coffee obtained in a coffee bar so hip it should be shot, I walked out, lit a cigarette, and got hit by a bird.

I caught a flutter in the edge of my vision, and turned my head just in time to see a brown blaze of fury smack into the side of my chest and fall in the crook of my coffee bearing arm. I blinked the way you should blink when things like this happen, and moved my arm so it could get away. It promptly fell straight to the ground and landed beside my shoe, on its feet, looking at me with the a polite expression, or certainly more polite than the expressions I usually see on mammals when they run into me. I moved my shoe out of its way, and it jumped up on my shoe and continued to stare at me.

I stared back.

It stared back at me.

I reeked of smoke, cats, and an unshowered body, so I tried to figure what this bird could possibly see in me. I thought for a second that it had flown out of a Victorian poet's hack sketch of an ideal world, and was just looking for a daintily oustretched finger on which to perch and sing love songs. In such a case it would be dissapointed, because my hands were taken up with coffee and a cigarette.

So, coffee, cigarette, bird and I stood on the street corner for a bout a minute, until I lifted up my foot to properly introduce myself, at which point it flew away.

I looked around quickly to check for forgotten lovers, long lost relatives, and native american spirits, but didn't see anything, so I decided it wasn't an omen. Which is too bad; even if there is no metaphysical consciousness guiding events like these, you really want something huge to happen after getting hit by a bird. Like meeting a future hubby, an old friend, or maybe getting crushed by a piano, though that would only be funny if it happened to somebody else.

Anyway, I checked if off my list of things to do before I die, and finished my coffee.