Not an hour ago, I woke up. Now in the desert, I sat on the patio with gusts of wind hitting me and the sun rising. An oversized cockroach scurried under my table. I hoped it wouldn’t crawl onto my shoe. The thing was as hideous as all cockroaches are. They’re completely harmless but so ugly that people stomp on them with no sympathy, even when they’re living things. They don’t care. They would rather not see something so disgusting coexist on this planet. Why did God invent cockroaches?
I could understand an owl. Last night at the Dodgers game, one swooped down on the field of play. On the radio, the announcer mentioned it.
“Did I just hear that right?” I said. “An owl is at the Dodger game?”
“Rick Monday must be losing it in his old age,” my father said.
If there was, how was an owl able to feed himself at the game? Owls are nocturnal, but still, you would think one would keep away from a massive crowd, even if it landed on the field away from them. Owls hunt for mice, so there might’ve been mice in the stadium.
“There was a time when I was working for the county,” my mother said, “and we had to tear a building down, but we couldn’t because a barn owl was inside it. I went and chased it out anyway.”
My mother would’ve broken the law because of the World Wildlife Federation. I only know about it because the acronym is WWF, the same as the World Wrestling Federation before it became the WWE.
As a kid, I used to follow wrestling heavily. My favorite wrestler was Rowdy Roddy Piper, although I barely saw him wrestle. For whatever reason, NBC or USA Network never showed him wrestling. I loved his outfit. He was supposed to have hailed from Scotland, but when he was interviewed, he never spoke with a Scottish accent. It was always more of a New York accent. Either way, he always wore his white T-shirt with his plaid kilt and played the bagpipes through his entrance to the wrestling ring before he disrobed to his wrestling underwear, whatever they called it, along with his wrestling boots. His muscles glistened under the lights overhead. Wrestlers were always ripped with tanned skin as if they went to the tanning salon every week, and they were almost always hairless except for George “The Animal” Steele, an old man with pasty skin and hairy shoulders. He used to eat turnbuckles in the wrestling ring. Word got out that he used to teach high school science, I imagine not for too long. You never know. Some of us quit teaching and end up wrestling in front of millions of maniac fans. George and Rowdy Roddy Piper are both dead now. Hardly any wrestlers make it to old age.