Chickens

While I’m knocking back mojitos and Carl Hiaasen novels in Blogger Rehab this week, a few friends will stopping by to keep you entertained.

Today welcome The Holmes, a colleague from DadCentric and one of my true favorites in the blogosphere. He has illustrated chats with his testicles about his vasectomy, even stranger human encounters when he has to provide a follow up sperm sample and, as you shall read, a chicken fetish that would make Gonzo from The Muppet Show blush.

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“Those two are Spanish, that one is British, that one is American, and those three, I think, are Australian.”

I listened a little closer, but I couldn’t detect any accents.

“Like, that’s where they all came from?” I asked.

“Like, that’s where they’re all descended from. I’m pretty sure they all came from here.”

“Ah, so that’s why all their clucks sound the same.”

My wife had just run through the breeds of the chickens that we keep housed in our backyard, including their names, national origins, and some interesting factoids. Like how some of them will lay blue or pink eggs, hence the name Easter Eggers. We cooked up a blue egg for our 4-year-old and he got pissed that only the shell was blue. He looked at us like he’d been tricked.

My wife knows a lot more about all this chicken stuff than I do. She should. I’m just the insanely handsome muscle. This whole chicken-and-egg project was her idea. Which came first? Who gives a flying cluck, they’re both plenty tasty if prepared properly.

Ever grilled something dead while the live version of it was clucking around at your feet? That’s a weird feeling.

Does anyone remember that cartoon Chicken Boo? It was one of the features on Animaniacs. It portrayed this human-size chicken that people kept mistaking for a real person in spite of the fact that the only sounds to come out of his beak were clucks and ba-goks.

Anyone remember this? Anyone?

My wife doesn’t believe me that this show ever actually existed. I sing the theme song at her and she just looks at me like I laid an egg:

“You wear a disguise to look like human guys, but you’re not a man, you’re a chicken, Boo.”

Dude, I couldn’t have made that up! Look, here’s a picture even:

Every episode ended the same. The people would realize, “Hey, he’s a CHICKEN!!!” and then run him out of town, as if to drive away their own shame at having been so foolish as to place their faith in an oversized rooster.

We don’t live on a farm or anything. This is chicken husbandry of the urban variety. Step out our back door, and right there off of the end of our deck is a real live honest-to-hen chicken coop. The enclosed house portion stands eight feet tall, is painted bright green, and is topped with a slanted metal roof that I imagine sounds plenty hellacious when it rains. Chickens are sound sleepers, my wife tells me. Good for them.

Off of the house there’s an eight-foot-long by four-foot-high run enclosed in hardware cloth in which our seven lovely ladies spend much of their days. They get to come out and wander free when we’re home to keep an eye on things, but when we’re not around, they stay on lock down so that they don’t get eaten by neighborhood cats, so that they don’t eat stuff in our garden, and so that they don’t wander off and get mistaken for real people and cause all manner of confusion.

Because they could, you know?

Aside from being sources of fresh eggs and free entertainment, these chickens that we’ve taken under our wings are in possession of full-blown personalities. They’ve got swagger. Attitude. Sass. In fact, as they’ve grown out of their chickhood into full-fledged chickens, the ladies have become much sassier toward us, their human protectors.

For example, time was, herding them back into their coop was as simple as walking up behind them and just keeping on walking in the direction you wanted them to go. These days, they scatter in five, six, seven different directions. You get one in the coop only to have it come right back out again. Every other cluck sounds like a “f**k you, buddy.” They’re like children in that way, except they pop out an egg every so often. Children only pop out non-edible items.

So the image of a chicken sashaying about in say, some designer silks wrapped around its neck like some sort of anti-chopping block talisman, maybe a jaunty little hat over its comb, yes, it all seems rather plausible. True, their vocabulary is limited, but since when do we let limited vocabulary act as a barrier to becoming a full-fledged human being?

And we didn’t go to all the trouble of raising these chickens only to have them escape, cause a commotion, and then get run out of town. I don’t care where these chickens came from. We want our free eggs, dammit.

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Don’t forget to vote today and every day through the end of the month to help Cure JM win a $250,000 Pepsi Refresh grant. We need to be No. 1 or No. 2 by Sept. 1 to win the grant. If you can, also vote for these other great kids’ causes we are supporting.