THE NATURE OF ROOFTOPS

And the Birds that Love Them

I’m in Texas looking at the tall clouds from inside my hotel room. It's a very contained world when you are touring on a bus for nine-tenths of the year; it’s one refrigerator car to the next (at least during Covid). I bet there are business lunks who’ve been here 30 times and have no idea what the climates in the different cities of the Lone Star state are like. I’ve been that guy in the past and it made me feel really off. The idea that a person would have no interest whatsoever in the tiny plants at their feet or the scream of a grackle in their face blows my mind, even though I know and do celebrate that all people are different. It’s the disconnect that hurts a bit. I take it personally, even though I know it isn’t really my place to do so. Maybe it hurts because I know I’ve also taken it for granted at times and I have a deep sea of regret filled with the ghosts of what beauty I have failed to notice while speeding only forward in my strained body.

You can’t open the hotel windows in big city downtowns, so when you look out it’s like television. The pressure of a contained room with no air from the outside makes me nervous and often a little headache-y. The action program streaming through the amber-tinted glass walls are the high-rise cranes – building, building, and building endlessly, swinging tarped pallets through the sky. People are little ants on the ground or slightly larger ants attending to the machines and roofs. No matter how clever the humans may be, the scene-stealers are the birds – this is their state and they flaunt it with punk joy. They amass by the thousands in the smallish city trees and write their names in purple poop across windshields statewide. We move from one town to the next – Austin, San Antonio, Dallas, Houston. But the birds are the same – grackles, millions and millions of them. They shine like blackbirds dipped in a puddle of gas. Their gold dinosaur eyes blaze right into mine. They are fearless. Their calls are bossy and piercing and I admire their self-confidence. Your ice cream is their ice cream. They will have their wild diet of bugs, vegetable matter, smaller birds AND your tortilla chips, thank you very much! I love their audacity. They are elegantly unbothered by any human judgment as they eat molten garbage off the molten blacktop.

I’m told Texans hate grackles, but what’s more “Texan” (and much better than the obvious racist, woman-hating and gun-lover tropes) than the grackle?! It’s their state and they kinda let people live here, bless ‘em,  just not unbothered, as is their right! They OWN Texas!  The fact that they aren’t the state bird (the Northern Mockingbird is) offends them, I’m sure. It even offends me! They are the obvious omnipresent choice! Maybe if that change was made in the statehouse with a small ceremony and a commemorative stamp, they wouldn’t shit in Texans’ swimming pools? (There are a bunch of articles about this online, as if there were no other problems in the world…) I had one shit right on my shoulder in downtown Austin one day, which made me laugh. “Cmon, you guys!” I yelled upward at them and even shook my fist in mock-rage. But what I really felt was noticed and it felt kinda nice.