The Bird Did That

There's this pigeon that has started showing up on the windowsill outside my kitchen, and today it did something so aggressively stupid that I had to stop writing mid-sentence and just laugh at it for a full thirty seconds. I'm not even going to explain what it did because I don't think the explanation would do it justice. You had to be there. I was there. It was perfect.

I've been sitting at this table most of the morning trying to get some writing done, not blog writing, the other kind, and the iced coffee has been doing what iced coffee does in June, which is sweat all over my notebook and make the pages curl at the corners. I've been sort of stuck anyway. The kind of stuck where you re-read the same paragraph four times and it sounds worse each time. And then the bird happened and I laughed and somehow after the laughing the paragraph sounded fine. Maybe that's all you need sometimes. One extremely dumb bird.

the setup to the whole story

It's been a quiet summer so far in terms of routine, the morning running club scattered when the weather changed and everyone's schedule did that summer thing where it just dissolves, and I've been figuring out what structure looks like when you have to make it yourself. Some days I do. Some days I sit at a kitchen table until a bird fixes everything. I don't know if that counts as progress but I'm marking it down as a win.

Fall semester feels far away and also somehow already breathing down my neck. Creative writing is still on my schedule. I haven't told many people. It still feels like a thing I did before I could talk myself out of it, which is probably the best reason to do anything. For now though: iced coffee, the notebook, the window. And whatever that bird is going to do next.