Birds are scary

I think I might be a little afraid of birds.

It's a new development, really, since I've never really thought about it before last night, when I was on a search for a little carribeener-type thing for Donnie and I really had no idea where to get it. So I went to this hobby store in our weird little Chapel Hill mall and the boy said they didn't have any but that I should go try a pet store; he uses one on the cage for his macaw, and he was pretty sure I could find it there. I was skeptical.

But it turns out that we have a pet store called Dubey's Pet World right in the mall, which perplexes me for a few reasons: old-school malls like this one don't actually have doors, just those grates like a roller shade, but of course they're only lowered at closing. Also, Dubey's has a couple of large tropical birds literally inches from the wide opening where a door should be protecting shoppers from sudden movements.

Last night, I was the kind of jerky shopper that shows up at 8:50 looking for a relatively obscure item. As I browsed the wall of bird items, I noticed a young East Indian couple looking intently at every animal in the place - first at the brightly colored parrot (I'm assuming, since I don't really know how to distinguish it from a macaw), then in the way-too-small glass room filled with tanks of reptiles and amphibians, then into the little glass cat room, where the woman let out a skinny white cat that rubbed all over her legs. Since the man seemed terribly interested in the big red bird, I thought he was the voice of the loud "goodbye" that I was hearing over and over. I thought he was trying to get the bird to repeat him, which seemed pretty irritating, not to mention embarrassing for him. But then I discovered it was, in fact, the bird, and eventually he stopped saying the word and began a slow crescendo of intense squawking, which his counterparts in the store - also just sitting on a branch out there in the open - quickly began mimicking.

Meanwhile, the nice helpful boy working there was digging through a fish bowl he had behind the counter that was filled with random things like opened cat toys and dirty leashes, most of which didn't look saleable to me, along with the occasional pen and paperclip. But at the bottom, he found 2 fasteners for me, so he started to ring me up and all of a sudden I realized I couldn't even hear what he was saying over the din of the squawking. It was ridiculously loud and of the pitch that breaks windows in movies. And I said something like, "Doesn't that make you insane?" He told me that they do this at closing every night. "How do they know what time it is?" I asked. He shrugged.

So I left, but there was a girl trying in vain to sweep off a rug that was underneath a pale yellow squawking bird, and she just stood in the way so I had to get way too close to it. I was pretty nervous, and I realized I was pretty nervous the whole time in the store.

I guess it means I'm scared. And it's not just of the big ones, either. We had this little parakeet named Jordie who would come out of his cage occasionally when some brave person would dare tempt the pecking, and I would generally want to run away from the room he was in. I nearly went crazy if he started to flap around and go up to the ceiling. Birds just seem so unpredictable, like are they going to come land on my head or try and peck my face? It's probably a pretty slim chance, but I prefer them in cages or in trees, high above my head.

Maybe it's more accurate to say that birds make me very uneasy, since I don't have the same kind of psychological and physical reaction as when a mouse or a rat even thinks about being near me. My toes curl up and I can't really breathe. That is what I call fear, and it sometimes causes me to scream loudly in small spaces when everyone else can calmly say, "Someone get a mouse trap." Give me a squawking parrot over that any day.