The Birds

When I returned home from Dallas, my grandfather was visiting from San Jose, and wanted to go the Indian casino in Oklahoma. Every. Single. Day. It was on one of these trips that I managed to hit a $20 jackpot off a single pull of a slot machine.

On the bus ride to the casino, I saw a sight I hadn't seen since I was a boy riding in the car on the way to school: an impossibly large flock of birds, spinning like tea leaves in a cup, shifting position from one set of telephone wires to another, sitting and suddenly moving, again and again. The birds were struggling to find peace, but found themselves endlessly agitated by some unseen force. I must have seen this phenomenon countless times driving up and down Hillcrest Rd. to school in the morning. And I still have no idea what they're doing, or why they're doing it. I can't even identify the species.

You don't see flocks of birds like this in Los Angeles, and you certainly don't see this particular specimen (like a blackbird, but smaller). Birds in Los Angeles tend to be more solitary, if the occasional blackbirds and sparrows I see in my neighborhood are any indication.

When we returned from the casino, the bus deposited us in the expansive tracts of parking lot in front of a Wal-Mart. The birds had gathered in the countless tiny trees of the countless parking lot islands, and were chittering to each other in a monstrous cacophony. It's utterly lame to describe natural phenomena in industrial terms, but they are the only references I have: the noise sounded like a thousand tiny car alarms going off at once. Conversation was impossible, as was thinking. The experience was one of the most eerie and unsettling I can remember.