Monthly Archives: June 2017

Hideous little fact, but if you torture somebody long enough, they’ll
eventually tell you whatever they think you want to hear. Eventually
they’ll start confessing to things they haven’t even done. Spy-factoid.

In the face of internet spy accusations, I used to launch a rather pathetic
wail, “but I’m a real person!” Forget all that, from now on I’m just going
to run with it, embrace the idea. So, I confess, I’m a spy, like Agent 99 on
Get Smart. Sometimes they even let me use the shoe phone.

In truth, on the internet being accused of being a spy, an agent provocateur,
a subversive, a troll, a government agent, is a pretty routine thing. People can’t
see you and until they know you, they tend to perceive you as a threat. (Once they
know you, they REALLY perceive you as a threat, but I digress.) To make the whole

birdman by topinaris, flickr

My father is a birdman. By instinct the birds know him as a living man and not a statue and so they hover near his still, sitting frame, standing on their little bird legs, perching on his shoulders and knees, poking their heads into his pockets looking for seed.

My mother declared him petrified, useless. That was before she left him, she a bird herself flown from our little yellow kitchen of continuous spaghetti dinners and fried bologna sandwiches.

My father is quite an active man though as I grew I came to understand just not active in the direction desired by my mother. “Son,” he says to me, “Every bird in the city will be fed by sundown, he says, every bird will get their taste of my cones.” At night he coats pinecones with peanut butter and rolls them through birdseed.

He teaches me what…