rICEDoUTyUGO ~ operanting cawnditionally

<--- Previous post Random Post Next post --->

operanting cawnditionally
the crows again. and again and again and again. my current nook is, thankfully, free of crazy neighbors, but there is a little unrelenting echo of a certain someone in there: every morning, the crows wake me up. there is a big tree right outside my window that is a tree island of sorts. every morning, crows begin to gather in the tree: caw! cawcaw caw! they are incredibly loud, and the position of the tree places them very close to my ears as i sleep. they wake me up. then they either keep me up, or wake me up right after i fall back asleep. their peak starts at sunrise -- 5 or 6am -- and lasts for hours. there was the familiar progression: "wat? oh. crow." to "lol" moves to "alright stop please" moves to "this is getting irritating" until finally "i am mad" hits after a week and a half and i am yelling out my window. at crows. they stop, briefly, then resume as they were. now wat? clearly, i have to take a more targeted approach. i surmise that the caw-ing is a form of sonic dominance, announcing claim over turf. the crows fan out and stake out a good spot and defend it like small air-raid sirens. at 5am. you bastards after outright yelling a few times didn't cut it, i'd like there in bed, making noises. singing sometimes. lip fart noises. seeing how much it took to get them to notice -- and i'd know when they noticed, because they'd stop caw-ing for a moment. it's like scene from austin powers where dr. evil is going: zzzip it! zippitudinal! zipps mccguillicutti! when a problem comes alonCAW CAWWccaAzzzip it! then silence... caw. cawCA- ZZZipp it! i'm gonna let you caw, but.... zip it. this was mostly done because i was too tired to get up but too harassed to fall back asleep. so i lay there, fucking with them. eventually, they left. for a few minutes... whenever they bothered me after that, i'd do the austin powers/zip it, i'ma let u caw, but... shit. i got very good at it. it actually began to get proper deep, in a sleep haze. my eyes closed, just listening for the caw. to do the "zip it" routine, you need rhythm. you suss out the rhythm of the party to be zippinated and lay in wait. sto- ZIP IT! why are you ju- ZIP IT! are you quite finished? becauZIP IT! you know? you have to play a little rhythmic chess game with the opposite party for it to be optimally irritating. the crows spike up when another noise -- say a passing car -- spikes up and dies off. on the tail end of the noise (relase on an ADSR) they begin to caw. noticing this, i listened for the cars, as this often put me in the perfect spot to tell the croZIP IT! this was remarkably effective. i became able to drive them off more quickly. but how can i do it even more quiZIP IT!? i realized that it's like a crow has just found a way to make cold fusion work and he's stepping up to the mic to claim his nobel prize, saying, "i made the cold fusion re-ZIP IT!" i made it. not you, crow. i lay claim to your invention. the hijack, i realized, is where it's at. dial into their pattern and be there to claim it. bookend the whole thing in your own noises, so the crow's loud trumpet is buried in the middle like nougat. it makes it seem like the crow noise is simply a small part of my own noise. they've put so much work into cawing, and now i've taken all the credit. they absolutely hate it. there is so much more to it: lying in bed, eyes closed, i started to be able to pick out individual crows and maintain a sense of where they were in relation to me. this allowed me to irritate individual crows in the swarm. once i had this down, i realized that certain crows are more dominant than others, and if you're all ZIP IT to the dominant crows, it dominoes, and they leave, and the other crows leave, and other crows see those crows leaving and also leave. the crows are like little clusters of neurons hooked together into a LAN. they form a sphere of influence that belongs to the CROW namespace via squabbling with each other noisily. predators disrupt the network and trigger the crows to move on. in a distant sense, it's like the crows form a hive mind, and this, truly, is what you are trying to irritate the living fuck out of. the hive mind has to notice you, get annoyed, and roll off like a tumbleweed. i've gotten exceedingly good at it. in the time it took me to smoke a zigguruaut on the porch, i managed to clear out every crow within earshot. not a single crow for a half-mile in every direction. i know this, because i can tell very clearly when they can hear me... but i don't need that, this morning, because i can't hear any crows at all. you'd think the problem would be solved, at this point, but they'll be back tomorrow. at 5am.
Posted by Reverend Tedward Q. Porktanker @ 2016-11-23 16:02:38
Direct link to post	Write comment

<--- Previous post Next post --->