Felony most fowl

Gosh you guys, I think the hardest thing about getting back into a regular blogging schedule is going to be the title crafting. Headlines have always been a real Achilles heel for me because gosh darn it I JUST CARE TOO MUCH. Which can frequently result in analysis paralysis and just clicking “leave as draft” and letting many a post languish in blogging purgatory.

Not this time. Prepare to be underwhelmed by the depth of thought and the precision of language I will employ. And bear with me as I coax my atrophied writing muscles out of hibernation.

Anyway, last week I was driving in a … let’s call it a “gritty” part of town. Lots of pot shops and pot holes. Not the country club district.

I’m driving the speed limit and I’m relatively undistracted because I’m alone in the car, sans kids. A pair of Canadian goose come into sight on the road up ahead, sauntering across the busy 4 lane highway at their leisure.

I glanced in my mirror and saw a car behind me and a car in the lane next to me, so there would be no slamming of brakes or switching of lanes.

They’ll probably move in time, Thought I.

Spoiler alert: they did not.

This is the part where I reassure my gentle readers that I actually quite enjoy Canadian geese as a species and don’t even overly mind their horrific toileting habits since I don’t see too many of them in my immediate neighborhood, so homicide was not on my radar that morning. Weighing my options between swerving into the occupied righthand lane, hitting the brakes with fingers crossed that the guy behind me did the same, and just, um, soldiering on, I soldiered.

It was a rather stomach lurching “Fwwumph” and then it was over. I may have let out a little shriek in panicky disgust. Bracing my hands against the steering wheel and trying to calm my nerves, I saw out of the corner of my eye, a car pull up next to me, the driver gesticulating wildly for me to roll down my window.

Shit. Did I lose part of my bumper? Wait, I drive a giant van that could take out a 96 gallon trash can. Is that even possible?

I cracked the window and tilted my head toward my neighboring driver, who, as it turned out, was not interested in the wellbeing of my bumper or any other part of me or my belongings.

“YOU STUPID (CENSORED) (CENSORED), DIDN’T YOU (CENSORED) SEE THOSE (CENSORED) (CENSORED) GEESE BACK THERE? YOU ARE GOING TO (CENSORED) HELL AND I HOPE YOU (CENSORED) DIE AND THAT’S A (CENSORED) 10,000 DOLLAR FINE YOU (CENSORED) (CENSORED).

This time I did swerve just a tiny bit over the yellow line, trying to put a little space between myself and the C list extra from Breaking Bad who was leering at me with his 6 remaining teeth and trying to ram his duct taped gold minivan into the side of my substantially larger could-pass-for-an-airport-shuttle monstrosity while letting fly a string of curse words and gestures that would have made Kid Rock blush.

This guy is going to kill me because I ran over a goose, I thought wonderingly, slowing down to let him weave crazily ahead of me.

As he sped off, he and his co-pilot saluting me with their tallest fingers, I burst into adrenaline driven tears and told Siri to call Dave. I needed my husband to tell me that my goose and run wasn’t a felony (it’s…complicated. But also, the City and County of Denver made thousands of Canadian geese into goose tacos and fed them to the homeless last year, so…it’s also not?) and to generally calm me down.

The moral of this story is, our culture is in its death throes, and a toothless meth head tried to run me off the road in an act of solidarity with our feathered friends.

Just kidding! Or, maybe. The real reason I’m writing it is because Dave laughed so hard when I related the entire affair to him afterwards, and then he said “you should blog about it,” and I said “yeah, if I blogged still, I would totally blog about it.”

And so here you are. Front and center for my writer’s version of a couch25k while I try to reclaim some muscle memory in these typing fingers of mine.

p.s. I’ve decided to leave commenting closed for the foreseeable future. Thanks for stopping by, even if you can’t tell me directly, you’re telling me with your clicks and shares : )