Encyclopedia Brown and the Case of the Disappearing Roommate

You know what's stranger than waking up hungover to find a bird in your apartment, chirping away, twelve feet up in a little skylight nook in your bathroom?

Coming home and finding it gone.

If you've got any sense, you were just re-reading yesterday's blog.

If not, I'm about to fucking ruin it for you, I'll warn you...

I know where you're coming from if you did read it, though. By the time the ether wore off this afternoon, you had to be thinking, "holy shit, did I really read a story involving archangels, gnomes named Buddy and birdshit yesterday?"

Yes. Yes, you did.


Or maybe you were like me. You spent all day wondering, "what the fuck am I going to do about this bird?..."

Until inspiration struck.

If you were, indeed, like me, you were the only white guy on the J train at 7pm...



And you were trying not to look at the pimp carrying a blood-stained pillow and his working gal "friend" in a Bedazzled t-shirt and red fishnet stockings, arguing about the best cheap vodka.

And you scratched at your broken nose, wondering, "will I ever breathe normally again? And, seriously, what the fuck am I going to do about this fucking bird?"

Then it hit you, a few seconds after it hit me.

Like some sort of fancy sports car that a guy gets after his mistress catches him cheating on her and his wife with some shameless Internet hussy and leaves him for good, my mind was racing.

The ideas just started coming, as if the Holy Hand of God, The All-Seeing And Unknowable But Certainly Doing His Part was drawing some sort of Wily E. Coyote sketch in my brain, with crude images of me, the bird and our cat.


[Naturally, despite the sketch's advanced use of engineering symbols, complex logic and language, cat would be spelled with a "k."]

It was clear as fucking day, thanks to The Lord.

First off, I'd need to protect my eyes from his fearsome beak, so I'd put on swim goggles.

Naturally, I'd don some gardening gloves, and throw on my hoodie to keep my head clear of the inevitable shitstorm that was to come...

Next, I'd take that pole that we used to paint the ceilings and screw the rolly paint thing back onto it. I'd then attach a pillowcase to the rolly paint thing with some twine. After that, it was simply a matter of channeling my mad lacrosse skills to snag the bird, trap him inside the pillowcase and then fling him out our back window before our kat even had a chance to ask, "why the fuck are you wearing swim goggles?"

It was going to be awesome.

Was.

And I wasn't kidding around.


Instead, I came bounding through the front door, all full of Moxie, ran to the bathroom, and gazed heaven-ward to the skylight.

No bird.

And here I was, bounding for nothing...

Naturally, I assumed the bird finally lost his shit, tried to escape and the cat broke his neck, played with his flimsy wings until the bird got all stiff, and then dropped the corpse on my pillow.

At least, that's what I would have done.

No dice.

The only thing on my pillow was a toxic mix of booze-sweat and drool.

The dead bird would have been an improvement, in many ways.

Now I had a regular fucking mystery on my hand.


I was on it.

There were a lot of feathers in the sink, but the windows were closed...

The cat seemed neither happier nor sadder than he normally does.

Poking a few nooks and crannies with the aforementioned pole, hoping to dislodge a disoriented house finch didn't get me jack shit.

I realized, in a rare moment of calm clarity, that one of three things had happened:

• The cat had chased, caught and completely consumed the bird, down to the last tiny pebble in his gizzard (very unlikely)
• The bird had died on the skylight ledge from eating all that lead paint up there (not unprobable)
• In a spectacular deus ex machina, the bird, as the only sinless beast on Earth before the End Times, was taken in The Rapture (not as likely as the lead paint explanation, but more likely than the first option)

This meant I was either in the presence of a remorseless eating machine of a cat, I was due for a really bad smell in three to seven days, or The Rapture wasn't total bullshit and I was most certainly going to hell, as I've feared since I was 8.

Suffice to say, I was vaguely dissatisfied and somewhat disturbed.

I stood there, staring at my pole-thing, my goggles and my gardening gloves, thinking, "so much for that idea."

For a moment, just one sweet moment, I thought, "I'm sure I could figure this out, too."

But then I was like, "ah, fuck it. At least I'm not going to get shit on tomorrow when I shave."

Ave atque vale, Finchy!