Growing up in an Aviary
Posted on November 15, 2007
Filed Under Humor | 5 Comments
My mom couldn’t do ceramics like everyone else was doing in the early 80’s. Oh no, she had to pick the world’s most noisy and stinky hobby.
I was the son of a parakeet breeder.
So I lived in a house that smelled like a zoo and sounded like an aviary. We had thirty-four parakeets but not one of them could talk. Studies have shown animals become more intelligent when interacting with humans but not the case with these birds. They just stared at me and make annoying chirping sounds. You can only say ‘pretty bird’ so many times before you realize the parakeets are stupid.
Breeding parakeets was like being a drug dealer. Once a week we would go over to this house, which was apparently the next level up in the parakeet black market. My mom would get all her bird supplies there. We never went to an actual store for this stuff.
The old guy that lived there would talk about the future and how gas prices were going to be two dollars a gallon by the time I was thirty-five. He had his predictions right about the rest of society; seeing a Trump-like empire in the parakeet market not so much.
Chris Cameron is a freelance writer with an odd viewpoint of life skewered by years of disappointment and alcohol. He’s kidding about the disappointment but you can read his other tales of humor and oddness at Angry Seafood.
Comments
5 Responses to “Growing up in an Aviary”
Leave a Reply
hehe I just realized I used apiary which is bees not birds in the draft. Der!
Yeah. I saw that, and thought, “doesn’t he mean ‘aviary?’”
What the fuck does female reproductive glands have to do with birds? Your mom was weird.
hehe. I had to think about that one a moment before I got it.
[...] Another guest post, this time over at FIAR’s new blog: Humorblogging. This one is about growing up as the son of a parakeet breeder. [...]