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Avian Issues Plague My Mother before/after And then there's my mother. She's even crazier than my dad. She takes it all in, and then freaks out every couple of weeks, crying and being angry and taking it all out on me. And dad. Mostly me. She came in from the outside tonight, and approached me with a concerned look on her face. She's been doing yard work all day long, as well as watering the lawn. Later, she will complain about the grass being too long, and growing too fast. "Argentum..." she begins, like she's going to tell me something horrible. And she sucks horribly at giving me bad news, but I've covered this in the past. I look at her with apathy. "I just wanted to tell you why the hanging geraniums are down." Dude, I really don't care. You could not tell me the rest of my days, and I wouldn't care. I would not be on my death bed thinking 'goddam, what...what about the geraniums'. Parents, as they get older, they just want your attention. They just want to be validated. Yes, you are still my parents. I give my mother a look that says a mixture of 'what the fuck?' and 'I give a fuck' and 'why are you telling me this?'. Neither slows her down in the least, nor has it in years. "There were these birds, and its late in the season, I don't even know why they're doing this now, but..." Mother is really smart. The unpredictable throws her everyonce in a while, and she has some issues. Its helped me, her being smart, in many ways. One of which is that I learned to fool smart people. Yes, that sounds horrible, but if you never tried to slip one past your parents in your whole life, you are doing it wrong. She's had birds try to nest in her geraniums before, which is amusing, because for some reason, in the past, they would swoop on her, likely because she got too close and messed with them somehow. I, on the other hand, learned long ago, that it pays to leave strange animals alone. Also, I realized this is her second run-in with birds in a week. A day ago she talked about birds nesting on her boat hoist up north. [mother: ...so, now, instead of a bird with eggs, we now have baby birds and a momma bird. argentum: (feigning interest): oh. mother:...yeah. And the mother bird keeps swooping on me. argentum: sweet. mother: no, not sweet, she gets really close to my head! argentum: (long since given up paying attention) cool. ] "And," she continues, "I saw some with some straw trying to build a nest, although I don't know why they would build a nest so late in the season." "You've got bird...karma, avian karma. Lots of it." "what?" "You have bird issues." "Oh." (pause) "And I wanted to tell you that I saw a bunch of ants on the lilac bushes." I didn't answer. "I saw tons on tiny little ants crawling all over them, so I put some white powder on them." she said. "Hey, dude, what you do with your white powder is your business." I say. (pause) And I looked at mother, and it was as if I were looking at a computer that read 'does not compute, does not compute' on it. I could see the wheels grinding. "Well, I just wanted to tell you, in case you looked at those bushes and saw white powder all over them and wanted to know what was going on." Like I'm going to be cruising around, see something like that, and it will stop me dead in my tracks. My day is fucked, at that point. Nothing to do but crawl back into bed. "I never look at those bushes." I say simply. And so it goes. On and on and on.
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