These viscous nothings through the day that I do to myself. I don’t walk through the park but instead walk beside it, among the cars and bikes, the snow and vomit, yet still lean in and listen to the birds in the bushes, congregating like they have been waiting forever to share some secret, some gossip that is beyond me, or any monkey. A pleasant reminder of our own ignorance. A divisive interruption. Something I cannot allow myself to walk through, the dogs and their people. I always look at the dogs before their owners because they have an awareness and sadness in their eyes that the airpod people don’t. I can understand both sides, and wonder how many people are just getting paid to walk, rather than caring for their own animal. My answer is usually determined by their coats, how many dog bags are tucked in threadbare pockets. Status. I continue on the sidewalk. I know the park is but a block long and there is no purpose in getting semi lost in the little world because I’m already late. I must deny these small pleasures to ensure responsibility. 

A time of day that leans to the left is around 5 pm, because there is a neutrality and a knowing. Mostly because the birds have left the bush of their morning and midday and have found their way back home, their secret homes full of dissonant silent evening songs. The dogs are still there. The walkers are more tired and the airpods discuss happy hour, they have to get home soon and change if they are going to make it. I keep walking around the park, because now the time of day is too far gone and there is little joy in the block-long park as the birds have left and now someone is lingering ready to smoke fentanyl. Sometimes I try to catch a second hand high, but it just smells like burnt plastic and body odor, and nothing happens internally. I feel the same. There is an intentionality to a second hand high. Sometimes when im at a concert or enclosed space with many people smoking weed I can catch some of it. I have a hard time getting the same effect with fentanyl even if I’m enclosed in the same train car. 

My headphones play music and I wonder if I’m offending the people around me. I wonder if the book I’m reading offends the tired hispanic woman next to me, with 4 plastic bags wrapped around wrists, dangling and heavy, like udders. Then the women with babies on their backs ask if i want chiclets chocolates and I look down even though ive got money in my pocket. Even though my breath probably smells bad from all of the coffee I drank and water I did not. I feel like they must have some candy pimp.

Deciphering birds has nothing to do with species or song or environment, but instead knowledge of girls and gossip. Birds do nothing if not share information. I refuse to believe they are speaking about worms. Maybe worms are a part of the conversation, but only in reference to survival, and deciding, and decoding. There are many natural and manmade predators for birds, a most ancient and knowledgeable animal. Birds are descendents of the jurassic period and everytime I eat and egg or a chicken, I decide that I am stronger, and I like being strong, but I like that despite tiny brains and hollow bones, they reflect a world that never knew humans, shrunk down to bug-like-size (most of the time, or at least definitely in urban environments), and considered pests, even though they just want to build nests and fuck eachother and gossip. We are more like them than we think. Except blue jays, because my mom told me when I was young that they are evil so now they are forever evil to me. I don’t even know what they could have done to offend her so, maybe its something they did to someone she knew or loved, or to other birds.