Get That Bird Some Chocolate

It's turning out to be a tough morning.

First I got up and found an anonymous link to a Youtube video in my email, and I felt compelled to post it (see previous entry), and then when I sat down to write, Maynard sat behind me in his cage going "weeeeeEEEEeeeeEEEEEeeeeeEEEE" in a tiny, mournful voice, which meant I had to take him out and pound on him to make him feel loved.

The more I think about it, the more convinced I am that all parrots are women. Two days ago, Marv bit the pee out of my thumb because of some bizarre instinctual thing that makes him fiercely territorial before 9 a.m., and now Maynard is being needy and interfering with my work.

Women will yell at me for saying this (as always) but they have all sorts of insane hormonal and instinctual drives that kick in for no apparent reason and make them do things that even they themselves later disavow as crazy. Men, on the other hand, have something like five instincts. The food instinct, the beer instinct, the violence instinct, the sex instinct, and the laziness instinct. And they function at all times, very predictably.

I knew a girl who went nuts cleaning the house once a month, even when she was visiting other people. I figured she was just tidy, but she told me it was a hormonal thing a lot of women get, and she called it "nesting." The idea is that your ovaries tell you you're about to foal, so you try to get the burrow ready. I had never heard of it. But that's one great instinct. I wonder if they have one that makes them want to mow yards.

I wish some brave, honest person would put out a comprehensive list of insane female compulsions, saying when we should expect them and how to handle them. I think even women would find that useful.

Anyway, much like a woman, Marv has these weird drives that conflict with his other emotions and urges. In the morning, he craves attention desperately and wants to be handled. But if you stick your hand in the cage before 9 a.m., he may take it off. And then he's mad, but also upset that he's not being handled. So when he squawks for attention in the morning, I blast him with the water bottle and go back to work.

Will that work with women? It will probably buy you a DV beef and a ride to the crossbar hotel.

Cockatoos are like girls from Boston and New York. They demand constant reassurance. "No, you're not fat. Yes, your tits are fine. Yes, I love you. No, I don't mind that you call every fifteen minutes. Yes, I will drop the restraining order if you promise to let me sleep for eight straight hours."

I think that if we really want to get information from Al Qaeda prisoners, we should have Northeastern girls fall in love with them and then whine it out of them.

People who own wild-caught parrots are even worse off than I am. Birds that have lived in the wild have a ritual where they scream their lungs out at sunup and sundown. I have only seen it once, at a breeding facility with hard sheetrock walls and tile floors that reflected sound. I honestly thought the noise was going to make my eyes pop and run down my face.

Now Marv is giving me Grunts of Resentment. He sits on his food dish and looks at me and goes "Unk...unk...unk...unk..." with the "unks" about three seconds apart. I couldn't do what he wanted because of HIS craziness, and now he blames me. Hey, it's great that women never act like that, isn't it?

Shut up, guys.

I'm still working on the "Fight Like a Pirate" chapter. So far, it's mainly about the tremendous advantages of treachery and cowardice. I think mine may be the first really accurate book about pirates. They were assholes, and I point that out constantly. Maybe September 19 should be "Talk Like an Asshole Day." Either way, people would still end up impersonating Johnny Depp.

More coffee is needed. I feel ready to proceed. Damn the torpedoes.

Just to prevent confusion: that's not a reference to the video I posted earlier.