Pour Les Oiseaux

I saw a single starling once and there was absolutely nothing wrong with it. It was a shapely thing, proportioned and curved like the living dart it was born to be. It was appointed as comely as you might expect, a shifting ombre of chocolate and plum streaked with jade and sandstone, with a startling beak of sharp lemon and feet a fallen orange. A masterpiece of Darwinian engineering, molded and honed over generations of survivors into a near perfect Platonic form of an avian. I might have wept at the sight of this cosmically captured moment of fleeting, flawless bird-dom had I been in a more Byronic mode, but who does that since about 1840, what? Standing there in its pointy and feathered presence, all I could think of was: where the fuck are the rest of them?

You don't want to see a single starling, do you? No, that's not what starlings are known for. They're known for great mile-long packs of them blacking out the sun as they careen and wheel in great acrobatic murmurations, dancing with the precision and joy and primal unconcern like the cast of a great Broadway musical who are also really good at dancing, but are people instead of birds.

There's intrinsic value in the thing, yes. A bird is here mostly to be appreciated by us as things of a near-magical nature as they can partially repel the fundamentals of gravity* without the aid of a propellor of a jet engine but still be solid enough that we're mostly confident that they are not in fact fairies. At least I don't think they are. I've never tried to negotiate a wish from a bird before, but I think it's safe. Nothing that was actually arcane would ever shit in public that much.

So you see one starling and in your heart, all you can feel is longing for the fireworks show of flock behavior. Because you're a greedy human bastard unfamiliar with gratitude as an idea. Go ahead, say it out loud. I'll wait.

This is sort of how I felt last Sunday as I watched my team lose Super Bowl LIII. I was alone watching it (circumstances, it's fine, it was a good day for an introvert after an uncharacteristically extroverted weekend). I had all the time and space in the world to gather in, process and hold whatever feelings I was going to have. It was the first time in my life I had a team in the Super Bowl I gave a shit about. Being the age I am, I understand exactly how rare this is and how it's not likely to ever actually happen again. I'm looking at you Browns and Lions fans, with your zero combined appearances despite having been in the league since its inception. You'd like to think you'd snap my hand off if I offered you the chance to be slowly pulled apart one fly's wing at a time by the aggressively unlikeable New England Patriots before the eyes of an impatient and increasingly disinterested nation. But you know once you got there, it wouldn't be enough. Ask any Cubs fan if they'd have been OK losing to Cleveland a couple of years ago. Did they say "yes"? Cubs fans are sanctimonious lying bastards, so maybe keep that in mind.

It's not like I couldn't appreciate the Patriots' sublimely conceived and perfectly executed defensive scheme and the relentless raw athleticism of the Rams' defensive players keeping the score low. I could and I did. I've even defended the game that has been mocked as boring. It's being seen as a lopsided drubbing in the end, but the Rams dropped two passes in the end zone. That's the whole difference in the post-game narrative, which instantly flashes to an immovable solid, like Lot's wife, but with more salt.

In the end, no, it was a single starling. It was a thing to behold on its own, a precious, glorious creation lending proof to the virtue of cosmic patience. But you don't want the one stupid bird, do you? No, once you get a glimpse at it, right up close, a REALLY good look at a thing you think you've always wanted to see, you're immediately broken by the irrational sadness of retroactively always having wanted more, without actually knowing it. The feeling worms its way backward in time throughout the entirety of your life, tainting everything you thought you'd ever felt with the resounding, irrational, amoral disappointment of the moment.

Because next thing you know, the bird flies away. And you aren't sure if you'll ever see even one of them again. And you feel terrible for having forgotten your gratitude. Eventually though you give yourself a break because you realize you'd feel less bad about it if your team hadn't just lost to the fucking Patriots, god, out of ALL THE TEAMS, why that fucking one?

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*Flying is such an impressive feat of un-nature, that the birds they can't actually fly, those are the ones we eat. I mean, they walk everywhere. I can do that. If you want to be spared, turkey, I suggest you come up with something more transcendently sublime than being delicious.