Something interesting came across my desk this week. It was a cockroach with a little bit of toilet paper stuck to its left hind leg. I wondered how it got there and whether the cockroach knew. It wasn’t telling, but it doesn’t pay to assume that a creature doesn’t know stuff.
I mean, they’ve discovered that octopuses know when it’s the weekend and gather in greater numbers near boat ramps on Saturday and Sunday. Now whether it’s because there’s more bait being dangled about then, or if they just like to have a giggle at our reverse gear shenanigans with boat trailers, I really don’t know.
Sentient is the buzz word with animals nowadays. When I was a boy, the thing that set homo saps apart was using tools. Now chimps are into photorealism and getting hung in the Louvre, and palm cockatoos will grab a stick and terrorise termites in a knothole. Pretty soon parrots will be posting YouTube videos on the relative merits of Milwaukee vs Ryobi cordless drills.
I goosed the tissued cockroach off my desk and ended it. Sentient or not, you can’t let them win: it saps morale.
Then this from the Beef Week office:
Yeah, Bullrout,
Letter arrived today. Don’t know what gives. We’re snowed (or beefed) under, what with the impendering rain, and parade routes, and the risk assessments for “Led Cattle and Accompanied Beeves” and paperwork for the floats (and that bloody Mini Moke), and fuchsia versus sea spray for the Beef Queen sashes, and printing off two thousand fliers and someone swanning in and announcing that we’ve left a ‘t’ out of ‘Breakfast with the Buchers’( and the ‘k’ out of ‘Beef Wee’) we just don’t have time to be dealing with weird correspondence. You’re into all of that mad stuff, Bullrout, so please get to the bottom.
Yeah,
Herb Twilly
The letter goes:
One night, after some refreshments, a curry, a kebab and a head knock, I was wandering around the place, some place, trying to focus and/or walk straight. I’ll tell you now, it sapped me something severe, and I was just about to go un-consho when it loomed up before me in the night, huge and loomy.
A Kenworth. A very big looming bugger, parked haughtily right in the very path of my stagger. Some people say they’re sentient and that the ticking noise you hear when the engine is cooling is really the Kenworth keeping a diary of bad things humans have done. I’m not completely on board with that, but it pays to be alert, which I wasn’t.
I checked it out. Big mistake, because that’s when I saw them. Chickens. Thousands of them. Hundreds… ten of them. Trapped inside the monstrous Kenworth wheel.
All you could see of them was their little chicken heads and beaks, and they were struggling to get out of that wheel. It was heart-wrenching. They were giving it all they had, those chickens, struggling in silence. So brave.
What monster had imprisoned them? Imagine how dizzy they must have got. I know those big rigs are speed limited, but still. What could I do? I had to try something. One by one, I grabbed their little heads and tugged. “Come on, little chicky. We can do this!”
But we couldn’t, and one by one their little heads came off in my hand. It was too much. I swooned like a bodice busted corset victim and toppled.
I awoke to find the Kenworth gone and me lying in a pile of chicken heads, a broken man. Sobbing, I gave the little noggins a decent burial in a nearby skip bin and sent a fervent prayer to St Mathurin, patron saint of clowns and backyard poultry, that one day they would be reunited with their bodies, which were now spinning and hurtling down the M1 towards Perth, or Yagoona.
I couldn’t forget that night. As a sort of penance, I bought a rooster, which I named Kenworth. I pampered and petted him. I did, but he grew to be boastful and spiteful, crowing deplorably in the pre-dawn every freaking day.
Then came the night he teamed up with the tomcat and pinned me with a cock-a-doodle-yow-yow-yowling pincer movement of murderous sound. It was too much. I’d had a late night, a curry, a kebab and a head knock, and this was too much. I sprang from my bed, grabbed the feathery ringleader, marched out the back and shoved him inside the front wheel of my pushbike. That’d fix him. It didn’t. There was no inside, only spokes, and he immediately flew out the other side.
They returned. Night after night. I think they must’ve been working out, or getting tuition, because the racket got louder and louder. Plus, they followed me in the daytime. The neighbours blamed me. I lost my job. My bike disappeared. I sold my house and moved to a false address.
But it’s only a matter of time. They’ll find me. Oh, they will, but for now, please, please don’t tell anyone that I don’t live in Wagga Wagga.
A lesson to us all
Bullgoose