Hunkabutta Archives
07.02.02

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Did you know that even God has a web log now?

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I've been having a lot of problems with my site host lately. Can anyone recommend a good web site host company?

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06.30.02

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My baby Jack is the best baby ever.

Last night Karen and I saw Stomp. We left Jack with my friend from work, Denise, and her fiance, who happens to be my old boss, Toshiro. They were pretty excited about baby-sitting because they are both eager to have kids soon, so I guess they looked at taking care of Jack as a bit of a dry run -- kind of like testing the waters of parenthood by dipping a toe in to the cool pool that is Jack.

Jack has been baby-sat a few times before but only in our own apartment, and his baby-sitter was a sweet little Japanese granny. This was the first time that we left him in a strange place with strange people (though they met once a long time ago).

We knew that our friends would take good care of Jack, but we were worried that he'd be afraid and would miss us.

We returned to pick him up at about 11:00 o'clock. As we walked in we saw him sitting on Toshiro's lap on the sofa watching TV. We called out to him but he didn't even notice us. We walked in and finally managed to get his attention. He was happy to see us, but it was obviously 'no big deal' in his mind.

It turned out that he had a great time with Denise and Toshiro. They took him out in the stroller and he fell asleep. They played games with him and he laughed all night long. Denise taught him how to say ahh and hit his mouth with his hand (kind of like an Indian war whoop in an old Western). They said he was the happiest and and most enjoyable baby they've ever seen.

Of course it was flattering to hear such nice compliments, but I must admit that I felt a bit disappointed that he didn't miss us more.

Is it possible for a baby to be too well adjusted?
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06.27.02

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Children grow up so fast, and my baby Jack is no exception. I don't know what it is, but he seems to have matured a lot in the past little while and it's starting to worry me.

It all started when he began hanging out with a strange new group of friends. Karen and I didn't say anything at first because we didn't want him to become rebellious. So, we turned a blind eye.

The next thing you know, he's drinking coffee. No big deal, right? Yeah, that's what we said. But before long I started to suspect that Jack was developing a drinking problem. Now I'm sure of it because last night I came home a bit early and found him completely drunk.

I tried talking to him, but it doesn't seem to be doing any good. I suspect that he's keeping secrets from me.

The worst thing, however, is that I think he's starting to develop an interest in crack.

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06.25.02

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I killed three pigeons last Saturday and it was one of the most difficult things I have ever done. I am not a violent man. As a matter of fact, not counting insects and fish, I have killed exactly two animals in my life.

The first was a frog. I was five or six years old and it was at my grandparent's house in Newfoundland. There was a pond in the pasture out behind their house. My older cousins played a game where they would catch small frogs in the pond, carry them to the road, throw them up in the air and watch them get squished as they fell on to the asphalt. I remember joining in on this, but not really liking it.

The second animal that I killed was a baby bird. I was six or seven years old and it happened at my dad's cousin's house. They had a son (I can't remember his name) who was older than me by a couple of years. He knew of a bird's nest in his backyard. We went to go take a look at it but we found that one of the babies had fallen out of the nest and on to the lawn. He picked it up and decided that he wanted to see if it could swim or not. We put it in a puddle by the side of the house and it drowned.

I have talked about my pigeon problem on Hunkabutta before, but I think that a recap of the details is necessary at this point. It all started in November 2000 after Karen got pregnant and we moved into our new apartment in Minami-Senju. The apartment was large by Tokyo standards, it had three rooms, a separate kitchen, a bathroom, and a balcony that stretched the entire width of the place. There were doors to the balcony from both the main bedroom and the living room. It was a bonus to have such a nice balcony because in Japan they are very utilitarian household features. We could use our balcony to hang our laundry to dry; to air out our futons; and to ventilate the apartment during the heat of summer.

What we didn't see until after we had moved in was that our neighbour had abandoned his balcony, netted it off partially, and then left it for what must have been a few years to degenerate into the most disgusting den of pigeon filth that you could possibly imagine. There were twenty or more pigeons at a time living on his balcony. They had nests and young. The blanket of droppings was inches thick and attracted roaches. Of course the pigeons also landed on our balcony too.

We let the problem with the neighbour slide for a while and just tried to keep our balcony clean, but we couldn't keep up with all of the pigeon shit. Eventually we started filing complaints with the building management. In Japan it is very hard to get people to take action in situations like this because nobody wants to be confrontational. It took months of letter writing and arm twisting but we finally got them to clean their balcony. Problem solved, you think? Well, you're wrong. The neigbours shooed the pigeons away, removed the partial netting, and cleaned the mountain of shit off of their balcony. Within a week they had moved out and the building management proceeded to completely net off what was once their balcony. Where do you think most of displaced birds ended up? I'll tell you: on everyone else's balconies.

It became impossible to use our balcony because we couldn't keep the pigeons off of it. They slept there at night and the droppings would pile up at an amazing rate. I tried keeping it clean but couldn't keep up. We had to start hanging our futons out in front of the building, which looks bad, and we had to learn to live with racks of drying laundry in our living room.

We began a campaign of deterrence. I stuck plastic bottles in the gaps between the railings where the pigeons liked to land and I strung wire along the railings: It didn't stop them. I made sheets of spikes by driving an entire box of nails into thin strips of cardboard and then taping the spiked sheets where the pigeons liked to roost: They learned to stand in the spaces between the nails. I cut the tops off of 17 pet bottles and taped them along the balcony divider where they liked to perch: They learned to knock the bottle tops off. We tried scaring them at night; throwing things at them; we even tried hanging up a fake owl that had mirrors for eyes. It all failed.

After a year or so it became harder and harder to find the time to keep the balcony clean and we would let it go for weeks at a time. Things started to get really filthy. Jack was a newborn and we began to worry about his health. Pigeons and their droppings carry a world of diseases. We decided that we were out of options and that the time had come to kill the pigeons, but how were we going to do it?

Neither of us wanted to kill the birds and Karen was particularly adamant about them not suffering. After stalling for several more months, and on the advice of a friend, we decided to buy a pellet gun and shoot them. We spent several weekends shopping around for the gun to no avail: We discovered that they're not sold in Japan.

Next, we decided to try poisoning them. The only problem was that you can't buy bird poison. Our solution was to buy mouse poison, crush it up and mix it with bird seed. It was a disgusting process. The poison came in little pink lozenges that looked like Chicklets (the gum). I had to stand out on the balcony amongst all of the shit and feathers and grind these poison pellets into dust. I crushed up a third of a box of the mouse poison, mixed it with a couple of cups of seed, and spread the concoction around on an old pizza box on the balcony. The birds ate the seeds and left the poison. The next weekend I tried the same thing, but this time I mixed the powdered poison with water to make a paste and then coated the seeds with the paste. This time it worked. For three days the pigeons gorged themselves on poison and seed. We sat back and waited for them to die, but they didn't. All they did was shit more. Karen decided that we didn't give them enough, so we did it again the next weekend, only this time I doubled the amount of poison. I used half a box (a huge amount). Once again the birds ate the mixture for several days and didn't die. I wanted to give up on the poison but Karen insisted that we try again. I repeated the process another couple of times but the birds would just not die.

By this point our baby Jack was crawling around. It was summer again and starting to get hot. We had to leave the balcony doors open a bit to air the apartment out, but all of that shit and filth and poison dust would just blow in the apartment. We couldn't even take Jack out on the balcony for some fresh air. My patience had finally run out and I decided that it was time to use the method that I knew would work but had been avoiding for months: Sticky traps. Imagine a giant piece of fly paper designed to catch rats and you've got a pretty good idea about what these things are. I taped two of the traps to the floor of the balcony beside the old pizza box and waited for the pigeons to come. I didn't have to wait long. Within half an hour the first bird got stuck. Karen and I were sitting in the living room feeling all nervous and gross with anticipation when we heard the fluttering of its wings and then a sudden silence. I looked out and saw that a small gray pigeon was stuck down flat on the trap.

I didn't know what I should use to kill the trapped pigeon. We have no tools or other heavy objects. Finally I settled on an old frying pan. I put the frying pan, a cheap little meat cleaver, and two plastic bags on the balcony just outside the door. Karen and Jack hid in the front bedroom. I stepped out onto the balcony and into my sandals. Then without looking at the franticly flapping bird I summoned up every ounce of barbaric violence that I could find in the dark corners of my mind, picked up the frying pan by the handle, spun around and with a guttural shout brought the frying pan down as hard as I could on the head of the pigeon. Then I did it again, and again one last time. I hit it so hard that I put dents in the pan. The pigeon quivered for a moment, and then it died. Then, just to really make sure that it was dead, I took the little meat cleaver, put it on the limp bird's throat and hit it with the frying pan so as to break the neck. I then used the cleaver to pry the trap free of its tape and I put it, stuck bird and all, into a plastic bag. I then put that bag into another opaque plastic bag so that nobody could see what was inside. I took the dead bird down to the garbage room.

After the first bird, killing the second bird was easier. It got stuck about twenty minutes later and I dispatched it in much the same way as the first. The third and final pigeon however was a great buck of a bird and he fought for his life. To my great disbelief he tore himself loose from the trap but lost so many feathers in the process that he couldn't fly away. I had to corner him, throw a table cloth on him, and then bludgeon him with the frying pan through the table cloth.

When it was all over and done with I sat on the sofa, clenched my jaw, put on a Chet Baker CD and tried not to think about what had just happened. I played with Jack for the rest of the day. I always used to say that any person who eats meat or uses leather should have the strength of character to be able to kill an animal, but I never realized how difficult it could actually be.

Looking back on the experience now, I think that the reason that the death of the birds was so unsettling is because it foreshadowed my own death, something which I tend not to think about. We all know that everything living must die someday, but in our little cloistered reality where meat comes on nice styrofoam trays wrapped in plastic we tend to forget how brutal and short life really is. That is, we forget until that day when the frying pan comes crashing down upon our head.
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