Field Dressing Garfield

The drive between Abilene, Texas and Austin, Texas is a long diagonal lined with cow pastures and Dairy Queens and tiny towns. You would imagine Anton Chigurh, the villain from, “No Country for Old Men” to be stalking about, turning on the hissing air supply to his weird pnematic gun whenever someone’s pace slows in his facinity. While riding back from Abilene to Austin I looked out over a field and saw an enormous flock of birds in the sky, flowing up and swooping down over a distant field like a huge sentient ink blot in the sky. Like a colony of angry bees, turning into a fist and chasing Garfield and Friends around.

It seemed to be one alive thing, lumbering in the sky like a monster. It was  not one thing though, it was a million things. It was a million tiny birds all flowing and working in perfect tune with one another.

But then you look at your own for real fist as it forms, forming to chase Garfield and think, “Isn’t this fist made of one million tiny things? One million cells? I am so deep when it comes down to it. I really am. Why was a chasing Garfield again?” And you can’t remember, so you get dressed in a fancy suit in order to go out and GET A JOB but you are too depressed and cannot leave the house in your fancy suit without looking up at the overbearing sky and thinking, “Was it a mistake to move to a city where I know so few people?” Maybe this is why you had planned on murdering Garfield. For the same reason that Luke Morris, the school bully when I was a kid, would come up to me before music class and say, “I’M GONNA KICK YOUR ASS FATZINGER. TOMORROW FATZINGER. RAIN OR SHINE. YOUR ASS IS GRASS.” and then walk away. You want to beat up Garfield because you are sad and feel that you are an incomplete person. In that case, Luke Morris felt incomplete because his parents were divorced, but in this case you merely feel incomplete because you have no job and are too poor to eat foods.

Maybe I’ll be clipping coupons one of these days and John Mccain will call me up and say, “I know we’ve never met before, but baby, we’re going to the White House!” Isn’t that what each of us is waiting for?