Open letter to the tech bro who spat at me, from that pigeon eating a noodle on Market Street--which was not just funny, but a good look at how some facets of humanity deal with small, common animals who are perceived as easy targets, low, and expendable--lead me to Palomacy, Pigeon and Dove Rescue and Adoption Agency.
PEEPS, how did I live in San Francisco and not know about this place? Maybe, if I had adopted a pigeon through them everything would have been different, maybe I never would have left. So, yeah, peeps, go get a pidgin for me. One who is tired of traffic and cold and high prices and one who will feel like a very slow pace and lack of cultural synergy is something they can endure. Pidge you can live on my balcony that faces the bay, and even more up your alley, also has a Parking Lot Vista. The only thing is that the balcony is right above the pool and my downstairs neighbors are the ancient reptiles who run the HOA. But you can handle ancient reptiles, right? We will just have to figure out what to do about your natural and copious shitting upon the cabanas.
But, in lieu of this plan, just buy cool pigeon shit, like this mug, at the Palomacy website. Sales go to support diplomacy for pigeons!
And, in the way my mind works, reading these articles at the same time as I have been reading Fire in the Belly by Cynthia Carr, the biography of David Wojnarowicz
--I think of the surreal horror of the government AIDS denial in 1980's NY, for these men who already felt isolated by trauma from growing up queer, and I imagine David would have liked pigeons because Carr talks all about his relationship to small, scurrying animals. I think about how I was alive at this time and watching Sesame Street, which made me very much pine to live in New York. And that was all I knew then, about Wojnarovicz or Hujar or Fran Goldin, etc...all of them very much in line with the what i think of as a larger pigeon aesthetic.
