duck duck death

[f0rrest]

There's this duck in my neighborhood and she's always laying these eggs, and she chooses to lay these eggs right up against my house, under this little awning above a dirt patch, for shade or something, even though it's not all that shady, so most of the eggs end up unhatched, probably because of the extreme southern heat this time of year, and there's always a few that, when they do hatch, the ducklings don't make it out, so they poke through their half-cracked eggs like little balls of mangled fur, contorted in this awful way, their once nascent faces frozen with slack-jawed looks of terror, like their only experience in life was death, and it smells awful, and then ants raid the nest, devouring the corpses, all while mama duck sits there on her doomed, ant-infested nest, seemingly oblivious to the horrors going on just beneath her, and there are all sorts of cats that hang around, many of which are not above stalking and eating ducklings, especially Shark Tank, my neighbor’s cat, who is a total asshole, so I always try to chase him off, but I can't keep tabs on him all the time, so inevitably, when some of the ducklings do make it out of their eggs, he finds a way to eat at least one of them, sometimes leaving the bloody half-eaten body on my doormat, which means that my front yard is basically this little microcosm of kill-or-be-killed that, frankly, is the type of thing that I go to extreme lengths to not think about, as I imagine most of us do, in our quaint little homes with our quaint little jobs and our quaint little communities, meaning that, every time this duck lays some eggs, the veil is lifted, and I am forced to come face to face with cruel mortality.

And then I start to think, like, maybe, if I were a little duckling, incubating in an egg, maybe I wouldn’t want to come out, maybe I’d be better off.

I mean, I even tried to help her a few times, one time I boxed her eggs and took them into a shady nook in the backyard, but somehow, by the next day, she had moved them back to the original nest, like she rolled them with her beak or something, and when I try to give her food, she just quacks these angry little quacks, and sometimes she hisses at me and does this scary thing with her wings. It's like, ma’am, I'm trying to help you here, I'm trying to save your little ducklings' lives, but she doesn't get it. I wonder if she's even aware of what's going on, or if she's just going through the motions, ten to twenty hard, oval-shaped white things just popping out of her every now and then, and she’s just biologically compelled to sit on them and nurse the little yellow furballs that come out, and this thought makes me feel a little better, because, if that’s the case, then mama duck truly doesn't understand, she doesn't understand that her babies are being born into this cruel world wherein suffering is not a bug but a core feature, or maybe she does understand but, due to her limited awareness, she just doesn't care, she just doesn't possess the faculties to get all philosophical and sad, like I do.

And then I start to think, like, maybe, if I were a duck, oblivious to the grand scheme of things, unable to dwell on the horrors of reality, unable to type up depressing little journal entries like this one, then maybe I’d be better off, maybe all this “higher thinking” stuff us humans do is overrated, like maybe it just serves to drag us down, break our spirits.

I guess what I’m trying to say is, I'm just tired of this duck laying all these fucking eggs.

Comments

[asakiyume]

Been thinking of this entry on and off all weekend! I was away from my desktop and couldn't reply. (I mean, I could have logged in via my phone, but the number of typos I would have made trying to write a reply on the phone is not something I'd want to inflict on you.)

And yeah! I'd be tired of it too!

And another yeah: thinking about what the duck's thinking about. On the one hand, we have to use empathy to even begin to understand how other creatures are feeling, and on the other hand, we have to also let them be different from us (I mean, it's the same with understanding other people: we have to use our empathy and at the same time allow room for the fact that other people don't necessarily react the same way to things that we ourselves would.)

And a third yeah: the world is incomprehensible, the way it works. For us, anyway. Some things make sense or seem "correct," but so much doesn't. And philosophies and religions twist this way and that trying to either assert it does make sense or to explain why it's the way it is or to tell us ways to get out of the horrors, and yet each one of us, individually, is still here grappling with it all.

So this is, for me, a three-yeah essay.