The Life of Riley

“In the eyes of the corporate world there are few finer things than the level promotion.” I explain to Riley, my new pigeon friend.

Riley has taken shelter from the cold brutality of the snowstorm on the back stairs of my apartment complex. At first, our relationship started off rocky but after several casual accouterments and whiskey sevens I was able to explain myself and we became fast friends. Now he just shits at his own leisure and proves himself to be a most adept listener.

Pedro, of course, has not grown accustom to him and screams his wild cat cries from inside of the apartment, stomping his peg leg in furious territorial taps. Unbeknownst to me, yet beknownst to young Pedro due to his recent loss of a back leg, he has been able to catch up on a lot of reading (to my own knowledge I didn’t know that members of the feline persuasion could read). But because of these readings he has taken to interpreting signs: that there is no Free Will and that everything happens to us for a reason.

So, to Pedro, the coming of Riley does not signify a potential new friendship, but that certainly Riley was sent by the Gods as a gift. That for me to deny him the fruits of going out and eating Riley as a meal doesn’t bode well in my standings with the Gods and that surely they will smite me. I can actually verify this fact as Pedro has erected an altar to Sredni Vashtar, sacrificing an old GI Joe of mine that he, in cat scrawl, penned my name upon and burned with my Zippo.

Pedro has played this role before and having known him for several years I know he will soon become bored with the entire proceedings and will eventually simmer into a mutual respect for Riley. Or perhaps it’s not so much respect, perhaps it’s even more than adaptation, perhaps it’s just acceptance.

Smelling the gross smell of burnt rubber that doesn’t leave the unstirred air of my apartment it would be forgiving to believe in Free Will. That everything does pay its’ own sacrifices to the Great Wheel and we are merely fools dancing to the groove of it being amplified through the record player. That the seizures and walls that crumble in around us are all done for a reason, that they give purpose to this play that happens everyday.

But it can’t be that way; it can’t happen this way. I’ve attempted to explain this to Pedro, but he’s not as good of a listener as Riley. There is Free Will but that is not the content way to move through life: the norm. The norm, the easy way is to lay yourself down in the stream of life, to feel that water wrap itself about you, to feel it lap so high that you don’t know oxygen from water and you grow gills. And then the banks are lost and the current of the river is all that we know.

This afternoon Riley flew away and Pedro has yet again turned his back on the Gods as my smiting has not come quickly enough by his mind. So tonight the two of us will turn our own record player up far too loud, drink some beers in the spare time and dance the dance of those that know that Riley never left and we'll see him again soon.