You and your significant other walk along the shore, admiring the sights and general hullabaloo of the beach. Children laugh and scream and act generally obnoxious as they build sandcastles and refuse to put on adequate amounts of sunscreen. Old people cower under their umbrellas, afraid to get skin cancer in the last remaining months of their lives.
All these sights are common, even comforting. A seagull flies overhead, and you admire the rather large fish he seems to have captured. Another seagull flies past, this time flying curiously low. "Wow," says your boo, "the birds here are so gosh-darn friendly! Let's see if he'll eat some ice cream."
Unwillingly, and thinking this is a pretty stupid idea on boo's part, you give up a precious morsel of your ice cream. The bird swoops from above, nearly taking an arm along with it. Several minutes later, the children (bastards, now) are running from the shore towards shelter, screaming and clinging to whatever hope they have of a future. The older people have realized that this is their time of judgment.
There are several hundred thousand birds swarming above, carrying various human appendages, swooping, squawking and poking out eyes. The birdie apocalypse is nigh!
Replace seagulls with pigeons and you have sophomore Devin Toohey's worst nightmare. Pigeons are everywhere: in cities, in suburbs, on farms, in chimneys, in schools - I suppose if they wanted to stage a world takeover, they'd definitely have the manpower (or rather, birdpower) to back it up. [Editor's note: Devin Toohey is also an arts columnist for the Daily.]
For most people, pigeons are just ugly birds that poop on statues and scorn those oh-so-distinguished famous people of old. Toohey feels their malevolence goes beyond the defacing of expensive monuments; he can see straight through their "soulless eyes and hooked beaks that tear our flesh."
Toohey immediately asks me if I want to know where the fear originated. "Of course," I reply, and Toohey begins to recount a painful childhood experience.
Apparently, at the ripe young age of five, his mother took him to Universal Studios and cajoled him into walking through the Alfred Hitchcock exhibit.
Later that day, Mrs. Toohey, seeing her son's obvious fear, did what any normal mother would do: tease the heck out of the frightened young'un. "The pigeons are coming!" she screamed while poking him on the back of the neck, simulating the knife-like beak. "They're going to peck out your eyes!"
What a great mom, I think. "Yeah," says Toohey, "my mom isn't exactly a Carol Brady kind of lady."
I ask Toohey if there was ever a time when his fear of pigeons has interfered with his normal daily life, or if his friends even know about his fear. "There have been times when I have been outside a caf?© somewhere, and I wouldn't be able to enjoy my food because I'd be flinching every few seconds. Pigeons could swoop at any moment!"
Once, pigeons even precluded young Master Toohey from enjoying a trip to Venice, Italy. "Ever been to Piazza San Marco?" he asks me. "At the piazza, there were people feeding the pigeons out of their palms asking to die."
I can't say I exactly disagree with Toohey, either. Pigeons are pretty scary. With their grey empty bodies and red, beady eyes, you wonder if they really are planning something beyond our knowledge. They do, after all, carry all sorts of diseases. If avian flu ever hits, it definitely won't be from any dead swans. Pigeons are going down, and they are bringing us down with them.
Toohey and I aren't the first people to think about the pigeon problem; I've even heard rumors of pigeon population control, code name for "mass pigeon genocide." Sounds good to me. I watched "Captain Planet" as a kid - he never said anything about pigeons. They seem pretty resilient to me. Do we really need them?
Well, for one thing, I'd definitely miss the poop if they were gone. Toohey agrees: "Poop is funny, because poop is always funny." Less pigeons mean less poop - thus, less fun.
Then again, Toohey thinks the trade-off is fair. "I'd be in full support of that [mass pigeon eradication]," he says.
A broad general loathing of pigeons seems rather questionable; you can't hate all pigeons, I think. What about messenger pigeons? They're pretty cute, especially the white ones. "Well," says Toohey, "I've never quite seen a messenger pigeon. I'd imagine it would be a lot like when Magneto teams up with the X-Men; he might look good on the outside, but you just know there's still pure evil beneath the surface."
What about baby pigeons? You can't possibly hate baby anything: too cute, too young, too innocent. There might still be time to decide for a future of non-evil pigeonhood. "Kill 'em while they're young," Toohey says.
Possibly the only redeeming quality of pigeons (outside of their capacity to poop) is their sound. What I perceive as a soothing coo, Toohey sees as "cute but in a creepy, dead-children kind of way: ... trying to be cute to throw you off of their evil nature."
He briefly mentions that pigeons are undeniably evil, and the evidence lies in their ugliness and stupidity: "Seriously, mass pigeon eradication is sounding pretty good."
Well, if pigeons need to die because of their ugliness and stupidity, what about comparable people?
"I plead the fifth, Olivia. I plead the fifth."
