Chicken Run

It’s splattered everywhere; you are bombarded with the news. At the end of the day you resemble a stuffed chicken, heavy and about to burst.

At the crack of dawn you are awakened by the rooster’s call, while the alarm clock’s stand on snooze.

An egg delivery guy forlornly rode his bicycle through the lane, as I was preparing breakfast I opened the door to pick up the newspaper and there it was, the egg beating headline about the bird flu. I ran my eyes over the rest of the news for a bird’s eye view before dragging myself back to the chicken – sorry, kitchen.

On my way to the city I stopped my car as the signal turned red, a tempo full of chattering chickens pulled up next to me. Later, I caught up with some friends at a café.

My friend’s brother was thrown out of the class for posing the big question in his philosophy class, “What came first, the chicken or the egg?” His teacher, a strict vegetarian and a very finicky health food fanatic, faced the chicken attack from the kid. The fellow placed a chicken sandwich on the teacher’s desk during lunch hour, called one of his classmates an egghead during lecture and cooked up an idea for the college newspaper. The content goes something like this: Cutting egg news, Chicken update, the flu report, a chicken column (Idiot with an egg) and Chicken chat.

Conversations at campuses are peppered with poultry related phrases and jokes. Somebody lost all his money on a bus as a result of pick pocketing, advice started pouring in, never put all your eggs in the same basket.

After listening to more such stories, we reached the conclusion, bring poultry in your conversation and watch the chicken conscious lot shift and fidget in the long awkward pregnant pauses that follow.

Back home, during channel surfing I came across a Friends rerun, where Joey leaves Chandler’s apartment to live on his own at his new place, but Joey gets jealous when Chandler finds a new roommate. The fight erupts when the new roommate makes eggs for Chandler, Joey asks him to choose as to whose eggs he likes best, Joey’s or the new roommate’s. Another rerun, both get themselves a duck and a chick for pets.

Well, maybe an old classic would provide a better change I thought, Hitchcock’s “To Catch a Thief”, as fate would have it, the chicken followed. Cary Grant and Grace Kelly had a picnic of chicken leg, chicken breast and beer.

The rooster was still calling out when I turned in for the night, the next morning I got chicken pox.