Chicken Where Are You?

Vol. 1 Issue 19
You are walking down the street in Brooklyn and you run into a friend of yours, a stray black cat named Chicken. As you approach Chicken, Chicken runs away. Chicken doesn’t know that the two of you are friends. You never see Chicken again.

On a balcony above you see a very colorful bird sitting on the railing. You wonder what kind of bird it is. You decide to gain access to the apartment and ask the resident. You’re about to smash in the front door of the building with a rock when some other residents come and open the door with their key. They let you in. You are in the elevator with these two residents. They are speaking Dutch. They’re talking about a resident who is away on vacation. They mention the need to feed the bird on the railing. They say they will never feed the bird, ever. They laugh. They assume you don’t understand Dutch, but you do.

You think it’s an emergency. The bird is going to starve. You decide to feed the bird yourself. You violently kick down the door to the apartment where you think the bird is. It’s the wrong apartment. You break into two more apartments before finding the bird. When you get to the balcony you find the bird is a wooden ornament. You’re so embarrassed, and your distrust of the Dutch has been renewed.

Suddenly you realize that in some ancient South American Indian tribe mistaking an ornamental bird on a railing for a real bird is sacrilege, and can bring on a curse. You hate curses. Your only hope is to smash a fish tank, eat as much of the gravel inside as possible (within a 5 second time frame), and then jump into the ocean, a lake, or a pool.

Luckily, the apartment that you’ve broken into has a fish tank, which you promptly smash with a nearby 7 iron. You eat as much of the blue fish tank gravel as possible, but with no ocean, lake or pool to jump in, you are forced make a choice between allowing the curse to impose itself on you, or jump off the balcony. You decide to take your chances on the balcony. As you fly through the air from the 3^rd story towards the pavement, residents and passersby later claim you could be heard crying, “Chicken, where are you?!”

A year later, after intensive physical therapy, you are released from the hospital. You were seriously injured and now must walk with a cane. You have always liked canes. If anything, you think of this accident as a positive because now you can finally walk with a cane free of ridicule, and this in turn will allow you to get, and wear, a real top hat. It will match your cane. Eating the fish tank gravel turned out to be bad idea, but you will never admit it.

You later realize that jumping off the balcony was not a useful method for averting the curse because there was no ocean, lake or pool beneath it. You think about the fashionable top hat that you will be able to wear now as a result of the accident and see that the curse was really a blessing all along. You really want to find an older, battered, used top hat, one on which the top is peeling back. One like an old timey bum from London might wear. You feel this type of hats suits your personality. The impossibility of finding such a hat weights on you. You become depressed, but only for a short because then you realize that wearing a wooden barrel is in the same spirit as wearing a worn-out top hat, and so you decide that wearing a wooden barrel is what you are going to do.