Last update: 12 days ago. Or so the little Buddy List prompts, anyway--an exclamation point of "SAY SOMETHING, DUMBASS!" admist a morass of buddies who have updated their diaries as long ago as three months plus. But such is life, as it goes. I'm quite lucky to be updating at all.

It's really not my fault my life gets so crazy and hectic, I swear. One day you're just laying back and consuming a book a day, reading Mike Moore and Steinbeck and whomever else you can get your grubby little paws on, and then BAM! you're acing tests on Castro and saving pigeons and calling the cops on the neighbors. It's a wild firedancing life sometimes, I swear--but somehow in the most laid-back way, as if the excitement waits soft and electric like those static-filled blankets hotels have. If you don't get that similie, don't worry. I didn't get it either, I just like those blankets.

Back to the pigeons and the cops, as that's probably what caught your soundbyte-based bourgeoise brain.

Every day, we truck the winding roads of sprawling suburb from the school to my friend's house. It's a good 10 minute drive, but someone needs to let her dogs out to go use the facilities, as it were, and someone needs to keep her company as she does so. So the four or five of us pile into her inherited SUV--the true mark of the child of a yuppie couple, I suppose--and drive up to the heights of town where the other half live, watching over from the Horse Heaven Hills on the river where bums still walk. As Leonard Cohen says, "The rich have got channels in the bedrooms of the poor," I guess. Money tends to corrupt, though. Get comfy enough with your Wal-Mart and your Ford Excursion and your tax breaks, and the bottom of the food chain can just go screw itself. Not human? I kill you! Not in the upper 15%? Get a job! This, unfortunately, is the attitude possesed by not a small number of my friend's neighbors, not the least of which the orthodontist right across the street.

When we pulled up, we noticed a small animal in the road, light brown and white. Chasing it down, it was a pigeon (a brush pigeon, light tan opposed to the city's grey camoflauge) with a wounded wing, unable to fly. Kat and I gave chase--we were faster than it, but afraid to hurt it by making the grab. Eventually, though, we caught it and took it, shivering, into the garage where Mia was scrounging up a shoebox. A couple of makeshift holes and we had the bird fairly settled, when in waltzed Mr. Highest Tax Bracket. He had been out in his driveway--right in front of where the bird had been laying, mind--when we'd pulled up, but we thought little of it. When he walked into the garage, he immediately became about as beligerant as he could.

"Don't save that thing. Here, I'll go get a box, and I'll throw it away."

Already, I was not happy with him. However, I was willing to follow Kat's lead of ignoring him, dismissing him with a "no, it's alright, really." After all, we can save brush pigeons if we want to. They may be sky-rats, but hell if we care. Some people, though, couldn't catch a drift if it landed in their hands and tied itself to their thumbs. Even though he looked like he was about to leave, he suddenly turned back and KEPT TALKING TO US.

"If you want to waste your money saving that, I don't care," (this at least was a positive--if he didn't care, he could LEAVE, and take his leather loafers with him) "But I don't think you should save it."

I simply answered that we'd still take care of it.

"Look, we have a problem with those things roosting on my roof, and I'm going to set some traps anyway. I don't want you saving it."

People are morons. If he didn't want us saving it, WHY DID HE INSIST HE DIDN'T care? Still, at this point, I was no longer contented with Kat's plan of quiet resistance. I was born and raised to kick your ass if you're a big enough one.

"I'm sorry, sir, but I am not impressed by your inhumanity. So I'd like it if you kindly left."

"Pigeons are vermin, like mice or..."

"Look, sir, I'd save a mouse if I could. I don't even kill spiders," all of which is admittably true. I'm a bit of an equalist, to the point of importing spiders to my room to take care of mosquitoes in the summer. Hell, it works better than Richie McGee's Ortho men, I'll wager. Any rate, it took all that to get him to really leave and to quit advancing into our garage.

"Waste your money on saving that thing. You have no idea how the world works," he called as he walked off. I was tempted to yell "No, you've just replaced your morals and sight with dollars and cents," or "Fuck you Yuppie scum," whichever came out first, but by then we'd turned inside. Craig was already on the phone with the humane society. From them, I got the number for an eccentric old lady--Ramona, aka "The Bird Lady." Mia gave directions, then had to leave to take Beth to her classes. I was willing to forfeit credits to save lives, as was Kat, but each to their own. Kat and I waited for the woman to come--she'd got lost, and it took her quite a bit, but within a half hour or so (it seemed so much longer with what we considered a dying bird) she came, inspected the bird, and saw that the wound looked suspiciously like a gunshot wound. She also declared that the bird would most definately live, although it may not fly again (to which Kat and I volunteered to take care of it, Kat with better basis, as she has bird feed from her ducks and knows how to handle birds for that matter). This is, without question, the short version of what she said. Eccentric old ladies do adore talking. In fact, Mia and Craig returned to listen to her crazy stories. When she did leave, however, she confirmed that shooting pigeons is illegal, and, for that matter, so was shooting guns in the city limits if persons were likely to be harmed. We come up that road each day, as I said. A gunhappy yuppie does not bode well. We asked if she recommended calling the police, and she answered that she sure as hell would.

I, of course, was delegated to make the call. I always get said delegations. I'm quite surprised I'm not a telemarketer by now. I'm also surprised ANYONE CAN REPORT A CRIME IN THIS TOWN WITHOUT CALLING 911. Most of the phone call was me being placed on hold, and the other 10% was spent talking to vapid women who never listen to you any more than the hold music did. They take a name, a number, a location, and just decide to send a cop out after annoying you just enough. I believe this is a massive conspiracy to get me to hang up the phone. Little matter, the fact remained she EVENTUALLY deigned to give me a cop and hung up on me.

Little did I know that cops take at least an hour and a half to get anywhere. Actually, come to think of it, they stood me up once when we had to call them for trespassers on a neighbor's (my neighborhood, where people are a bit more human and actually KNOW EACHOTHER) property. Cops are always not there when you want them to be, and there when your left tail light is bust. When he DID show up, he was set, perpetually, on Skinheaded Republican mode. Every other line was "You know he can get a permit to kill pigeons, right?" When we got the message through his donut-ridden skull that we'd just quite rather not worrying about getting shot by an air rifle during lunch and about the road being coated in carcasses, he said he'd warn the guy and then left. We saw him talking to the neighbor for quite awhile, but could only be comfortable on one thing.

He probably started the conversation with "I'm sorry about this, sir, but you know liberal hippy teenagers these days..."