The reason I wasn't sleeping well lately was the bunch of misguided gangsta birds fighting late night rap battles in the trees outside my house. They seem to have taken over the night shift in my hood from the local gang of nocturnal motor-scooter teens. Not too long ago, it had been them who ruled the darkness and gave my street its busiest time at around 1am. They would hang out under my window, race their little bikes up and down, make out and do other unspeakable things to each other and the street. But since it had become colder outside, their attention seeking hoots and the machine gun noise of their two stroke engines had been replaced by the evil twitter of MC Chirrup & Da WarBirds. At least I had thought that the reason was the falling temperatures. Only very recently I found out that the weather wasn’t to blame for the shift in the balance of power on sleeping Avenue E.
That night I came home late from a soiree hosted by one Indian chef, when the parking spot in front of my house was taken. Of course I was upset, rightfully so. Over the past year my car had gone to great lengths in marking its territory with a pronounced oil spill in the shape of a big black N, even blind people would have noticed, painfully. Still, that Renault Twingo had managed to completely ignore the ancient laws of the art of parking and blocked several spots, including mine. But since it was late and my usual contact at the police had probably long bedded his head on the pillow covering his gun, I bit the bullet and parked in the main street. When passing my neighbours’ houses on the walk back to mine, I noticed the blue flickering of running TVs in the windows. Normally that wouldn’t have caught my attention, but this time the same blue light emerged from every window in the street. As you know, peeking into other people’s windows has never given me a guilty conscience, so I climbed over every fence in the neighbourhood and pulled myself up to each window sill and took a look inside ...
... And there I found the scooter teens. Every single one of them. Each behind their window. Sleeping on their couches in front of their TVs. 104-button remote controls topping their stomachs, majestically rising and sinking to the rhythm of their breath, and dusty ashtrays sitting at arm's length on the glass'n'wood coffee tables. Their slumbering faces clearly showed the still unfamiliar burden of Responsibility, peppered with a good portion of Confusion. Their scooters, they had shrunk them to model size, so they would fit on top of the mantel shelves, where now they were meant to rest and rot and ring of riots past.
Kids no more they were. Evolved they had during the last month, from adolescents into adults.
Nonsense, you might say. One cannot grow up in a couple of weeks. But it’s perfectly possible, if you think about it. You know what these times are like and the kids of today. Everything runs so much faster than back when we were young and annoying. I’m certain nowadays the average boy starts shaving at age 13 to lure a beard. Girls probably even earlier. Cause hairy legs might cost you the popularity vote and Santa Claus doesn’t come to the ugly kid. And when they turn 16 they take daddy’s guns and head out to school to make the news. Yup, that about sums it up.
Anyhow, the scooter teens had suddenly grown up and when I reached my house, I got my gun and shot the noisy birds that had taken their place. I didn’t leave a single one alive and after it was done, I disassembled the rifle, religiously cleaned every single one of the 8 pieces and stowed all them all back in the black case on top of my wardrobe. It was the first time I had taken the gun down since my retirement in 2003.
