Some birds aren’t real. It’s true! There’s a plastic owl on top of a streetlight in my neighborhood, which, according to a lazy internet search is there to scare away other birds and small mammals (I don’t know why people want to scare away birds and mammals; I didn’t take my cursory internet search that far).
Some birds are real. It’s true! There’s a hawk currently outside my window who visits most afternoons. He appears real; I don’t think that kind of wing control could be mechanically replicated.
Between those two extremes lay the rest of the world.
The Birds Aren’t Real movement first showed up as a meme on my Facebook feed, and it has thick swaths of hipster irony smeared all over it like butter. Birds, goes the meme, are government surveillance devices. Dig a little deeper and you see revealed a deep distrust—ironic or genuine—of the everyday reality we see before our eyes. I assume most of those pushing the notion of unreal birds do so with the requisite ironic distance, and because this is America in 2021, I know there are a few hundred thousand people who believe it to be God’s honest truth.
The truth is, of course, in the vast expanse of the middle: most birds are real, a few birds are not. I’m even willing to entertain the idea that some of them really are government surveillance devices (I’m not saying I believe it, I’m saying I allow the possibility). I’m uninterested in litigating what specific percentage of the birds we see are actual birds, beyond knowing that the number is neither an absolute 0% or 100%. I’m interesting in how we navigate the space between the two poles, since it encompasses the overwhelming majority of our daily life.
Birds aren’t real. Biden didn’t win. The moon is a hologram. You’ve already heard any conspiracy theory I might trot out as an example, and the fact that you already know them all supports my point. We didn’t land on the moon. 9/11 was an inside job. We live inside a computer simulation. Most of waking life is built on faith, and we base the decisions that confront us on incomplete information. Aliens live among us. The government does not have our best interests at heart. Climate change is a hoax. We stumble from sunrise to sunset, and base our actions on the forever shifting ground of what we think we know. Is the novel I’m working on any good? Do my loved ones truly love me? I think so, on both counts, but I have no way to really know, and part of the ability to live in the modern world relies on the need to make decisions without knowing all the facts. Covid-19 is man-made. Our atmosphere is being seeded with chem trails. The Earth is hollow. All I can do is understand the nature of my own local reality the best I can, and base my decisions on what I think I know.
Those of you who’ve been reading the Oort Cloud for awhile know the general trendline of my thoughts these days. I’m retired: I get up when I want to, I go to bed when I want to, and I spend the majority of most days writing. My world has shrunk in the last year, mostly by design. I go to sleep with my wife, and wake up next to her, and I consider this a foundational rhythm to my days. I trust the motion of the moon and the sun, the stars and the planets to show me the passage of time. I prefer watching baseball in as close to real time as I can. If I wake up in the middle of the night, I know my wife will be next to me, sleeping, and if I can’t return to sleep I can turn on the radio and listen to more late night conspiracy theories to keep me awake.
Believing the conspiracies is not the point, as I seldom do. But knowing the data points is important. Most birds may be real, but the possibility, however slight, that the bird directly in front of you right now may not actually be a bird is something you should always keep in the back of your mind, because there is a non-zero chance that bird is something else entirely.
The links. If you like the writing, buy a story. I forgot to push a story last month; things got a little hectic toward the end of the month. One of my favorite stories of the past couple years is coming out this month, in Amazing Monster Tales #4 (thanks, DeAnna and Jamie!) so let’s call September’s story my tale published in Amazing Monster Tales #2, Exit Ramp.
Peace.
September’s story: Exit Ramp
August’s story: Monster
July’s story: Goodneighbor.com
June’s story: Feral
May’s story: Nine Lives
April’s story: Prince Albert in a Can
March’s story: Fuck, Marry, Kill
February’s story: Veronica Scissors