Today wasn't the best day of my life.
I received a 2010 property tax bill with a $25 late fee from a city I fled 2 years ago and have been trying to put out of mind ever since. My several documented interactions with them over the past year, trying to prove I no longer reside in their fine city, have apparently been unproductive. Local governments either don't recognize or, as I suspect is more likely the case, deeply appreciate the sadistic nature of having non-residents prove a negative.
To boot, the dominant cable company in my area, whose name begins with 'Co', but doesn't end in 'mcast', fined me because my last payment was never processed. By them. Oh! I made the payment 10 days early, with the usual bank account, and I can provide the receipt to any doubters. However their online payment center wasn't working, and still isn't by the way, and they were never able to process it. Instead of informing me of this when they realized it, still well before the bill due date, they decided to send me a $50 late fee in my next bill, a full month later. To this day, they have not removed the late fee, nor fixed their online payment center.
So after a day spent waiting for and finally speaking with representatives of these municipalities and corporations, I called my mother to lament. Out of her wisdom she reminded me of the poem Desiderata, encouraging me to 'go placidly amid the noise and haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence.' She beseeched me to find the humor in these situations, to laugh at the inanity of daily life in the city, to paste my problems onto the day's collage and walk away, confident that I had at least learned something about myself from these interactions. After all, these bureaucrats couldn't care less if our conversations were draining me of my very life force.
My mother is very wise, and has been through unbelievable hardships for someone only now turning 50. I cherish her friendship and encouragement, as biased as it may be. And her advice is all well and good. Unfortunately, it begins to fall apart on any day in which a dirty Metro pigeon flies directly into your face.
You spend your day worried that maybe you're just sliding into paranoia and delusion. You reel back in horror from your own thoughts, that maybe these faceless bureaucrats are in cahoots, guided by some malevolent force whose only goal is to destroy your mind very, very slowly. And then you come face to face with a pigeon.
This isn't paranoia. This is my life. When you've been through that, you realize that the author of Desiderata would've serve us all so much more had he simply included a stanza on pigeon encounters. I desire 2 things from my interaction with that bird. 1) That someone witnessed the encounter and was enriched by the experience, and 2) that the pigeon picked up some human disease it never developed an immunity to and spreads it to all his Metro friends.
I will say, I've already come to appreciate the incident, because it was a catalyst. When that hobo bird's wing batted against my open mouth and I tasted the bum wretch he had been scratching through moments earlier, I realized that something had to give. Someone needed to hear this story. If only that my life would serve as an observational experiment, and a warning, to any who might read of it.
I'm hoping this blog will cover that experiment, the arrest, and most of the trial.
Edit:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDJsgtoizj8
Thanks, Mom. Glad you're still laughing.
