As you may remember I left the Bird Casino with a request to interpret my dream (previous post). Recognizing that only a few people read this blog, I was aghast when I got several interpretations of my dream in my email inbox. I didn’t know what was more baffling: why strangers would take the time to interpret my dream, or why strangers would take the time to interpret my dream in such hurtful ways? A small sampling:
-Here’s a better question than what’s your dream mean: why are you still alive?Part of me was excited that so many people wrote. A larger part of me was depressed. So I decided to give up The Bird Casino and took to my bathtub and pretty much did nothing but look through ornithology books and listen to New Order albums. At the holidays I got out of the funk a bit by having Christmas with Boyce and his family. On Christmas night Sammy came over too, and he and Boyce told me the present they got me. For the last year I have wanted to go to Central America to see in person the mysterious Resplendent Quetzal bird, and they’d saved up to pay for half of the trip. After Christmas I told Rex that I needed a few weeks off to get to Central America and go look for the Quetzal bird. He thought I said, “I need a few weeks off to get to Central America to get hooked on heroin,” so he just laughed and said sure. I figured that out because when he said sure, he then said, “Can’t wait to see you strung out, Typhus.” I owe him some shifts, but that’s no big deal. I like working at the Sleep Center.
-I’ve read your dream several times. The aliens coming from space are a symbol of you having no friends. Burn in hell.
-Hi Cyrus. My name is Cyrus, too. And I’m so ugly people know it from the way I type. Oh wait, never mind, we’ve already met because I AM YOU.
-DIE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
-Nice homo dream, homo.
So I spent January in Guatemala looking for the Quetzal bird. It’s a really, really rare bird that used to be a holy bird revered by the Mayans. I went to look for it in Guatemala but there’s only around 25 still alive there. So I took a bus to Costa Rica and in San Gerardo de Dota I finally saw the Resplendent Quetzal. That’s it’s English name. Resplendent Quetzal. I was so excited that I got dizzy. Someone on the tour said if I thought that was great, he knew a guy who sold Quetzales. I was still feeling down about The Bird Casino, so I told him I’d love to buy a Quetzal. That night his friend came to the lodge where we all stayed and I had to go down the drive and look in the back of this black van where there were two Quetzal birds in cages. I said I’d buy them both. They cost over 4,000 dollars! I told the guy I only had 300 dollars, but in the morning I could provide the rest of the money. He made me give him my driver’s license (I refused to give him my passport) so he’d know where to go to break my “spindly woman legs” if I never paid him.
He gave me both birds and I immediately named them Rachel and Hank. Then I told the bird seller, “Keeping birds in cages is dumb. You’re dumb, too.” Then I released both birds. I thought the guy was going to have a fit! He screamed at me, “You think I care what you do with the birds? You’re paying that money.” I told him I know that, but it's still a real jerk thing to do to keep birds in cages. I mean, the word RESPLENDENT is part of the bird's name! Even the scientist who named it in English said, "This is no ordinary bird. It's resplendent!" The bird seller said he didn't care, and that he'd be back in the morning to either have my money or my liver. So I went back to the lodge, packed my stuff, and got the hell out of there. I was on a bus back to Guatemala the next morning. The id I gave him was one of my fake ones with Boyce’s name and a bogus address. When I got home and told Boyce, he was really excited that somewhere an illegal bird trader is telling someone how much he hates Boyce Lancaster.
So now I’m back home and I’ve visited Hank’s gravestone a few times, and thought about Rachel a lot, and told Boyce and Sammy the story about letting the Quetzal birds go a hundred times. I still didn’t think I was going to go back to The Bird Casino, but then at work Marcel LeFarge gave me a note he got from Marty Bulfinch, Marcel’s neighbor. The note said:
“sitting in bed doing a crossword puzzle and i get the clue "barn bird", 3 letters. hmm... owl? owls don't live in barns do they? hmph, if they did surely cyrus wetherbee would've made mention of that fact. so where is old cyrus anyway? if my vote counts for anything, i cast it for the return of the wetherbee bird casino.”Marty Bulfinch, the answer you’re looking for is Owl! I’m back, baby.
