Mark Twain

Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.


Dorothy Parker

Ducking for apples - change one letter and it's the story of my life.


Bertrand Russell

There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge.

Chickens of the apocolypse


2003-12-16 at 1:08 p.m.

I have no idea why I just remembered this. Maybe because I was eating a Swanson's chicken pot pie? I dunno. But here's the story.

January 2000. It was, er, not cold. It was not dark and it was not stormy. It was El Paso, people. It was probably like 90 degrees and I was probably wearing shorts. I long for shorts. Anyway, I digress.

I was home from college on break and was doing my break thing, which is where I pretty much lay around the house and be useless. So, I was full into my daily regimine of uselessness when I happened to glance out the kitchen window and saw...two chickens wandering around our alley.

Now listen, despite what Hollywood and some mis-informed people here in upstate New York who go on and on about the 'sand pits of Juarez', what ever the hell that is, say, El Paso is not a dry, dusty backwater. It's dry and dusty, but it's a big-ass city. Bigger than Minneapolis-St. Paul. And safer, too. It's a metropolitan city and my parents live in an urban neighborhood. Hence, my shock at seeing two chickens wandering about.

I blinked, rubbed my eyes and looked again. Yep, chickens. So, I wandered back to the couch and sat there, pondering the 'chicken mystery'. I might have also been eating a Klondike bar, although I don't really remember. It was strange, creepy and rather surreal. Chickens. Why? Why were there chickens in my alley?

I decided that it must be some sort of message. The two chickens of the apocolypse had come to warn us to repent and turn our backs on our sinful Colonel Sanders-filled lives. What can I say? It was 4 in the afternoon, I was still in my pajamas and it seemed like a plausible explanation at the time.

So, I was sitting there, pondering, when the doorbell rang. Oblivious to my dishevled state, I wandered to the door and opened it, discovering two little Mexican boys, probably around age ten, standing on my porch.

In broken English, they asked me if the chickens were mine. In broken Spanish, I said no. They were misterioso pollo loco. The boys politely thanked me and left.

I went back to the couch. Five minutes later, I heard some raucous sqwaking and then...silence. I got up and looked out the window, the chickens of the apocolypse were gone. That was a really wierd day.


Right. So, someone is over at the fire department, which is in the same building as the library, playing with the alarms. The fire alarm for the building has gone off four or five times today. And it scared the bejesus out of me. I mean, here I am, working hard on...this journal entry, heh, and out of nowhere, the loudest, most obnoxious and piercing alarm in the world goes off. I damn near crapped my pants.

After the third time it went off, I went next door and asked 'What the hell are you doing?' to which they replied, 'Oh, we forgot to tell you we were running tests on the alarms.' To which I replied, 'Okay, but you owe me some new pants.'



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