Two cockatoos and magpie.
Surrealism. It's a fascinating subject, but not something you encounter everyday whilst churning out your regular 5km round the local streets. But today I had one of those illuminating moments where the fabric of reality cracked open just a little and allowed me to see the underlying weirdness of the universe. Or maybe I was just overtired from too many night shifts, I'm not sure.
On that matter, let me say that today's run, the second of my Almeria campaign, was very pleasing as I ground it out despite the torment of four consecutive all-nighters. Normally I don't run at all, or at least very rarely when working the graveyard shifts as it's just too difficult, both mentally and physically. However the Yoda discipline is strong with me just at the moment, and I was very pleased to get this little outing completed. And what a day it was too, with the first genuine signs of summer in the air. A pleasant, warm day in the low 20s, with that maddeningly indefinable promise of summer which was lingering, almost tangible all about the place.
Running in the afternoon is not my preferred time of day, especially when working the dreaded nights. It isn't like an early morning, when I can fall out of bed, change into the running togs and head out the door to hit the streets before fully waking until I'm well under way. No, instead waking in the afternoons takes time. The body fails to function properly for a good two hours after waking, and the brain is even less accommodating. So normally by the time I am alert enough to seriously consider running the day is nearly over, and the more pressing necessities of life demand to be done before once again I head off for work and my solitary duties through the night.
Fresh enthusiasm generated by the re-emergence of my participation at Almeria has however enabled me to finish two short, but important runs despite the chloroform-like unconsciousness of my nocturnal vocation. These runs are also helping to verify a report I read in the Australian Medical Journal that exercise prior to a night shift is especially beneficial to rotating shift workers such as myself. It's a little too early to say for sure, but these runs certainly lift my spirits, of that I am certain. Anyway, it was a glorious day for it, although following a wet winter and now a wet start to spring, the local birdlife is already up and at it, which means we have numerous baby birds popping up everywhere, and that in turn means that the magpie 'swooping' season is under way. At this time of the season the apparently Millwall FC-loving male magpies 'protect' their young by swooping anyone that ventures too close to the nest. Actually, being swooped by magpies isn't a problem I suffer from, although Mrs MLCMM does have to take extra care when running or walking the streets when the swooping is 'on'. Magpies are apparently petulant bastards and take a dislike only to certain people. According to research done in this country recently, they can recognise up to a hundred different human faces, and seem to associate certain people with danger for some as yet unknown reason. Those unfortunate people then get swooped, sometimes quite viciously, and children are particularly prone to serious cuts and gouging to the head if they don't take care. In busy areas where the birds are likely to encounter far more than a hundred different people they can instead categorise the people they see, attacking only certain types, and so it turns out that magpies have been using this technique of profiling the people they encounter to determine threat levels since long before Border Security even existed!
As I say, magpies tend to leave me alone, and although I have been swooped by another vicious member of the Australia avian community, the angry and raucous (not to mention nocturnal) spur-winged plover, around my local neighbourhood I am fairly safe from airborne attack. It's true that the local fruit bat community have taken a particular dislike to me, but they tend to just hurl abuse and guano which is easily avoided. I did however see the angry side of a magpie this afternoon on my outing. Its hooliganism wasn't directed at myself but at two far larger and quite different birds, which brings me back to the topic of this missive: surrealism.
John Lennon once said that surrealism had made an impact on him because it gave him the realisation that the imagery in his mind was not insanity as he had previously feared, but simple, valid creativity. Both he and Salvador Dali, that icon of the surrealist movement, felt the imagery of their minds was a completely normal reality and presumably therefore, that the outside world was the absurdity.
In hindsight, the scene I encountered this afternoon seems perhaps just a little humdrum, but at the time it struck me as significant, and as there's nothing else particularly noteworthy about my outing (other than the fact, as already mentioned, that I actually did the sodding thing), I shall tell the story. It was a busy street scene, with late afternoon traffic banked up and people scurrying about with end-of-day purpose and pace. I then stumbled on a scene that was just so strange and bizarre that it struck me as significant, though I fear now, as perhaps John Lennon did at first, that such thinking is just ... mad. Except for one thing; as I shall explain. The scene was a simple one, but somewhat paradoxical. Hopping around on the ground were two cute little baby bunny rabbits, utterly oblivious to the traffic just two metres away from where they played. On the ground just a further two metres to the right of the bunny rabbits was a bizarre fight scene. A feisty magpie was fending off the attack of two much bigger sulphur-crested cockatoos. They were after what the magpie had, which was a dead mouse firmly held within its beak as it tried to ward off the persistent but slightly clumsy cockatoos. It was simultaneously trying to swallow the mouse and take flight, but was having difficulty with either of those things due to the clamouring attention of the cockys.
The really bizarre thing (as if this wasn't strange enough) was the woman standing between them. Standing there transfixed was a statuesque blonde woman of about 30 years of age, wearing a lemon dress. She stood stock still just gazing at the rabbits with utterly no expression. So stony faced was she that I was immediately made to think of the emotionless aliens from the 1960s TV show Invaders. And so the juxtaposition was intense: on one side of the woman/alien in the lemon dress we had the adorable baby bunnies hopping about, and on the other a battle scene between a mouse-in-beak magpie and two querulous cockatoos. All the while the late afternoon rush of a town wanting to get home for Friday pre-dinner drinks swooshed past, myself included. As much as I wanted to stop and try to make sense of the strange scene, I felt like an intruder, and so ran on, puzzled but also delighted to have experienced something at least a little out of the ordinary.
OK so perhaps it was not exactly Salvador Dali or like the weirder parts of Magical Mystery Tour but it's all I have for you today. Oh, there is a possible foot injury to report, but I'll save news of that for tomorrow.
Asparagus butt-clenching furtwangler. Machine-wrapped with butter.
Ciao.
Schleptember
