joecontrolshimself

[joecontrolshimself]

Feed the birds, tuppence a bag

Okay this is gonna be a really long post I think. It’s just a story about something kinda cool that happened to me last year. Not a typical “lead up to a punch line” one, but you can still skip down and read the end if you don’t believe me. The “too long did, not read” version is that birds communicated with me in a very strange way that made me feel spiritually connected to the Earth (and I won’t comment much on it, but kind of also lead a bit to my craziness on here almost exactly a year ago now, which I half want to flesh out and half don’t).

 Here’s the setup, and I don’t know if it even pertains to or correlates with what happens, but it’s worth mentioning:

After that already long introduction, I’ll preface this by saying that I have developed over the years a fascination with birds in general. Always have found them to be almost mystical, in that they live around humans, in such masses, in a way that no other wild animal does. So one day I’ll say a couple of years ago, I was living in a studio apartment in a business section of a suburban town, and I had food that was going bad. In a fit of “save the Earth” passion, I thought I would make it available to the birds. And I started making it a regular routine. I would take extra food that I made and had no use for, and I’d spread it around the ground in the back of my apartment’s property, thinking that the birds could take it or leave it. On an occasion or two, I lived next door to a bakery, and I’d see the birds trying to get to the tossed goods in the dumpster, and I’d get the top layer out for them and throw it in the back of the property, abandoned railroad tracks. It escalated to a point where I was like that’s a bit ridiculous, so in the supermarket I just picked up a bag of bird seed and started feeding them a few handfuls every day or so. This went on for a few months, I guess.

 Then I decided to go on my “road trip” or whatever you want to call it, because I only made it to a couple states before I made some bad decisions and went off the rails. But before all that, it was lovely. And this is where the real story starts, in Bennington, Vermont.

To start, part of my road trip was taking time for the first time in my life to learn a musical instrument. I bought this awesome mandolin before I left, learned a song or two and was having the time of my life playing around with it. I was in Bennington cruising around for a good spot to practice. I happened upon the grounds of a high school, empty because it was summer, and far away from mostly everything. There was also a covered pavilion there with benches.

I parked and walked up to the pavilion, and there was also a greenhouse right next to it. Turns out, there was someone working inside of it. His name was Frank, and he was really cool. He told me the greenhouse was the only one of its kind in the state I think (connected to a school) and it was mostly for at-risk students to help them get some hands-on learning, yadda yadda. He saw my mandolin, and turns out he used to play it! He taught me some very quick, very basic stuff about chords and just about learning music in general, and then took me inside the greenhouse and taught me things about the plants he was growing. We hung out for maybe an hour or two, and he mentioned he was going on vacation with his family for a week, so I was like cool, I can practice at this spot with no one really around. Didn’t think that he would have someone check in on the plants, I never ran into them so that’s a moot point, but that’s how little I was thinking ahead at the time just for context.

Now the next day I show up to the pavilion, and about 15 minutes into practicing, torrential, sideways rain comes out of nowhere, and I’m not protected, even under the pavilion’s roof. I make a mad dash for the greenhouse and take shelter. I take a look at the plants when a thought pops into my head “Hey, they always say talking to plants is good for growth, what if I sing to them while I wait for the rain to stop?” I decided to put on a concert of Frank Sinatra and Michael Buble songs, since I knew those the best and were the most upbeat. I had a good time belting out those standards, man. The rain stopped and I had other places to be, so I took off.

That greenhouse became my go-to spot because I had so much fun in there the first time. I think I went back one more day and sang, and then the next day is when the birds become relevant. Now keep in mind, that while in Bennington and the surrounding area, I had a bag of bird seed and had been leaving little piles of it everywhere I went whenever I saw a cluster of birds. So I don’t know if this all came about because I had a reputation with them, but again, think it’s worth mentioning.

Okay so finally, here’s the meat of the story. I’m in the greenhouse with my mandolin, a notebook, and my phone. I make a promise to myself “You are not leaving this greenhouse until you have fully learned a new song.” This detail is a bit irrelevant, but I’ll throw it in here why not. I was on a bit of an anti-Trump kick. I decided to try to learn “Something Wicked This Way Comes” from Harry Potter because Trump was gaining political steam as his regime was settling in and I thought I’d soon make this, like, share-able, hopefully viral, (ridiculous!) video of me performing it and somehow linking it to Trump. Stupid, I know! Whatever. I shouldn’t have said that, I shouldn’t have said that. Anyway.

No lie, about 5 minutes into getting ready to do this thing, the worst thing happens. I have to take a shit. Badly. And I mean, I’m nowhere near a public bathroom, and my calculations were slim that I was gonna make it to one. So I started looking for other options. I think I saw a shovel and I was like okay I’ll take a shit in the woods close by, cover it up, all I need is TP I guess, but I’m running out of time and kinda freaking out.

That’s when “it” happened. No, I didn’t shit myself. Disclaimer, I am 95% sure I didn’t hallucinate this. There’s just no way. But I mean, it could be possible. But this is where the birds came to save the day. As I’m pacing and stuck with my dilemma, two birds crash landed into the greenhouse from I think holes in the sides of the greenhouse where the wall met the roof, I don’t remember. I was thrown off, until my attention was brought to this thumping noise that I couldn’t see. I went to inspect further, and I kid you not, one of the birds is kinda slapping himself into this silver, like, kind of a tub, thing. It had handles, looked like it was used for carrying water or soil or something. I still remember seeing the bird’s wing print on the dust of the tub, it was propped against a table in the corner of the greenhouse.

Then the other bird starts making a noise. I follow that. The bird is on the very edge of the greenhouse wall, and once it has my attention, it hops along the edge of the wall to the other corner of the greenhouse and stops right in front of what turns out to be a hose. It took me a while I think to put 2 and 2 together, but I realized to handle my DIRE poop problem, I could fill the tub with water, poop in it, and then dump it in the woods, like a makeshift, portable toilet. Then wash it out and everything. I know, I’m a savage, but desperate times. As soon as I realized this, the birds exited the greenhouse. I’m not pulling your leg on any of this. This is impossible to make up for a person like me.

And the best part, I think, is that I shit you not, no pun intended, but as soon as I had a solution to the shits, I didn’t have to go anymore. The need to go was gone, just like that. So immediately this gratitude sunk in and then this flood of thoughts started filling my brain to try to teach myself a lesson from it all. Because in a sense, when I really needed to go, and had no place to go, I needed to go that much more. But when I had a place to go, I didn’t need to go anymore. Wild.

I’ll be honest, this is out of left field, but the first thing I thought of was that it was a perfect metaphor for why a person is usually more confident in a healthy relationship, and even why men end up having affairs. Because when they don’t have anybody, there are those that are more…not desperate…but have more of an urge, to make things work. And when they’re in a relationship, they don’t sweat much because they have something to fall back on. And other women are attracted to that I don’t give a shit mentality. I don’t know if that makes sense, if you’ve made it this far congratulations you get to learn the little-known fact that I was diagnosed as bipolar after my mess last year and one of the symptoms was going on strange tangents.

 Getting as back on topic as I can…after the birds left, and I didn’t need to take a shit anymore, I practiced the song for a few hours and left. Then life got in the way and I moved on to other things without completing my project (another symptom of bipolar), but I did keep up with the mandolin for a while (until someone STOLE IT! Still mad, it was a beautiful friend to me.)

 I could go on about how all of a sudden I felt more connected to the world and over the next few months with all my experiences, I started thinking I was this naturopath wizard or spiritual guru who was going to be the next Prince Ea or something, and how I started becoming “pronoid”, which means “paranoid, but positive” and interpreting every little thing as “signs” which ultimately lead to me posting cryptic shit and being diagnosed, but I think I just summed it up quite nicely just there now.

 So there you have it. I had the weirdest interaction with birds, these creatures that I thought barely gave a fuck about humans, and that, hey, I could have totally misinterpreted and they were just two dumb assholes that had nothing to do with me except pure coincidence, or I could have hallucinated it all. But as I said, there you have it. Just wanted to get that story off my chest, I felt like I had to put it out there, even a year later, because I’ve been so nervous to talk about things that went down last year and I’m just downright lazy to type this all out. But even if one person reads this and is like “Hmm…interesting”, then I’ll be happy. If you made it this far, I think I’ve said it before on long posts, but thank you very much for your time, I hope you didn’t feel it was a waste. And as several famous Instagram models put it “I’ll prob delete this later”, but for now, thank you again.