Well, it’s June at last, and it looks like Mother Nature is finally ready to comply with my desire to once again wander the grand outdoors half-naked, without fear of freezing my balls off if a brazen cloud decides to position itself unceremoniously in front of the blazing-ball-of-warmth-in-the-sky that I love and admire so much.
As I geared up for a morning run, I realized shorts and a t-shirt would be more than adequate to face the elements. Fuck yeah! But a few quick stretches revealed some tenderness in my stumpy legs… perhaps I pushed a little too hard to squeeze in a 10K jaunt yesterday. A 24-hour rest session would have been a more practical decision, but it was too nice out to pass up a tour strolling through the little parkette just north of my parents’ house, so I said fuck it, let’s rock!
As I hit the streets, my body told me in the first 30 seconds the plan for a 5K run was a piss-poor idea. It said, “Look jackass, today ain’t the day for this. I need some healing time. If you’re hellbent on being outside this morning, go for a walk. If you want to run, you’ll regret it.”
Bah, whatever.
As the waves of pain quickly inundated my left calf and right ass cheek, I immediately retorted to my body, “Look dude, we’ve been through this before! You’ll relax, ease into the zone, and before we both know it, we’ll be skippin’ past the duckies swimming in the river, lovin’ every second of the experience, pain forgotten!”
A kilometre and a half later though, nothin’ felt right, sparking the thought: Why the fuck do I always feel the need to push myself when my body says no? What the fuck am I trying to prove here?
In that instant, a bird swooped laterally across my running direction.
I’m familiar with this sight. It happens dozens of times when I’m driving recklessly in my car down the country backroads, and always think, “Fuck dude, you were almost feathers mangled in my grill! If you can fly, just do it 10 feet over the highway. Or a hundred, or a thousand. Why do you airborne critters insist on tempting fate?”
So as the cacophony of self-generated dialogue incessantly rolled through my muddled brain, a new pain arose… one I was completely unprepared for…
Have you ever had a dream where your dentist was really fucking drunk, and started drilling into your head instead of your teeth?
I haven’t.
Have you ever had a nightmare where eagle talons and beaks punched holes into your skull because you were a disgusting filthy orc, unworthy of travelling through the sacred realm of Gandalf’s high road?
Never happened to me either.
But now I know what that pain feels like in the real world.
After the fly-by flash of black wings marked with single red spots, my next memory was a skull on fire.
“Christ, what the fuck!” I yelled out.
I was under attack from the sky.
Shadows swooped and shadows pecked. Shadows clawed and shadows gnawed. My slow run quickly became a hundred-metre dash that would have put Ben Johnson and performance-enhancing drugs to shame.
I’m guessing I jogged by a covert nest, but whatever winged creature I pissed off was in no mood to negotiate my ignorant trespass. I was being blitzkrieged by claws and peckers, and the pain in my calf quickly became irrelevant to the newfound inflictions flaming the top of my skull.
With the playground finally open once again, after the latest iteration of this province’s fake virus lockdown, I can’t say for sure who witnessed my bird attack spectacle, but my cries of “FUCK OFF! STOP IT! I DIDN’T DO ANYTHING! WHY, FUCKER, WHY?” easily echoed into the distance of the last 3K I hoped to run.
As my pace quickened, every ornithoid shape my eyes could detect became a potential threat. The fuckers were swimming, the fuckers were waddling about on the ground, and thousands (well, maybe dozens) were gliding effortlessly in the sky, ready to rain down pain at any moment. From a survival standpoint, I was totally fucked.
Eventually I calmed down, and made it back to safe shelter. But in the writing of this piece, I haven’t felt a moment’s security each time I hear a tweet, chirp, or whistle. Fucking geese are flying en-masse right now in strategical formations somewhere over my fucking head!
When I told my dad about the excruciating pain of the unwarranted bird attack, he only had one concern:
Did they shit on you?
Fuck.
Note to self:
When the body says stay home, stay the fuck home.