Funny sometimes how easy it is to get your buttons pushed.
Walking my dogs the other day, I got slightly wigged, passing a yard with a Halloween chicken holding a human limb in its beak.
Chickens kinda weird me out, especially big ones. Like to eat ’em, but don’t care to mingle with live ones. Touched on this previously in a prompt called Squeamish Scouts.
I can thank my mom for this phobia. She put the fear of God into me about chickens when I was a toddler. My folks were tenant farmers in Fort Ransom, N.D., when I was born, and my mom kept a flock of chickens as egg-producers and occasional table fare. The birds would rush to her in the yard, and if I was with her she’d always scoop me up for fear the birds would peck me in the eyes. She told me that story many times when I was growing up to explain my general uneasiness about handling birds.
My dad contributed to the mystique by saying Mom’s birds were like pets and a bit on the aggressive side. In my mind, my mother’s chickens were all monster-sized, as big as I was. Quick fuckers, too. Quicker and faster than I was. Never mind flying monkeys, these were winged nightmares with claws and bird brains tuned to only one station: peck-and-kill . . . peck-and-kill . . . peck-and-kill. The giant two-headed bird from “The 7th Voyage of Sinbad” movie (1958) creeped me out worse than any snakes or spiders. All I could do to sit through Hitchcock’s “The Birds,” too.
My Uncle Ole raised chickens in a big way and once took me into his bird barn that housed something like 600 birds in a single room. Still haunted today by memories of the half-dozen birds in that room at the tail end of the pecking order.
Not so many years ago, a good friend had a fighting cock as a pet, and no dog was ever a better watch guard than that feathered little fuck. He didn’t fly well, but he flew well enough to perch atop a swing set in the yard, and I swear that he laid for me every time I visited. If he wasn’t on the swing set, he’d come a runnin’ when you drove up and try to peck your ankle as you stepped from the car. I threatened to punt the little pecker into the next county on a number of occasions, by my pal always sided with his bird and made me behave.
Geese were also a bitch for me while growing up because I’d seen them chase people, bite them and beat them with their wings. Turkeys weren’t so bad, but peacocks always gave me the willies, and still do in stalking mode. I don’t really mind birds so much any more. But let’s just say I’d be in the last in line to pet an emu or ostrich.
Ransom Man 