Being Grackles

Crows, Ravens, and Grackles are quite creepy to me. I read “The Raven” in grade school and spent weeks crossing the street every time I saw one. As I got older, they became fascinating because of their creepiness.

When I was in middle school, we moved from Kadena air base in Okinawa, Japan to Lackland Airforce base in San Antonio, Texas.

In San Antonio, Texas, I remember whole flocks of Crows infesting trees. The locals would run out with pots and pans, or even the occasional shotgun, to try and make enough noise to scare them away.

I would sit transfixed, watching the black phantom mass of birds easily glide through the sky like a single cell, swishing and swirling, dancing with the hot night air. Manipulating gravity and spirit as easily as I might open a physical door.

They danced through the air, never thinking, just doing, just being. They were the ideal of the Tao, or the Stoics, or the Mystics, or the Beats. They also weren’t Ravens or Crows. They were Grackles.

When I was in in my twenties, I hit a period of drifting. Not the aimless drifting everyone seemed to think I was doing—I was in search of something I couldn’t explain. At least not to my parents and grandparents, as great and well-meaning as they were. Finding yourself was never a luxury they had.

I drifted from college to college never quite seeming to find my place. I read everything I could get my hands on, gliding through poems and prose and fiction. I also consumed and craved music like an aural junkie.

Somewhere in this lucid daydream I dove deep into the works of Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, and Allen Ginsberg. I dove deep into The Road and Mugwumps and OM, their Junkie poetry/prose covering my mind and body, quenching my thirst. I had the freedom to immerse myself—skinny dipping in all the words and music I craved.

That was my Nirvana. That was my bliss. My ecstatic, life-altering bliss. That was also over twenty years ago.

I’ve felt out of sorts and out of control for a few years, maybe decades. Approaching fifty, sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference between years and decades. I was told if I ever grumbled about it, that’s just life. I believed it for a while. It was convenient to believe it. It was easier. Questioning is a luxury that the suburbs and kids and jobs seem to take away from you, forcing you to only see them. Only allowing you to remember, with great nostalgia, the world before them, leaving you out of sorts and feeling out of control. You quit being and simply run through the motions of everyday, just trying to get by and survive, like a parking lot Grackle scavenging for food.

Parking lot Grackles look like crows on meth. They’re not afraid of people, but they are wary. They always seem to have one eye on you and one eye on the French fry a toddler dropped, as their parent tried stuffing them from their car seat into a shopping cart.

This makes parking lot Grackles look twitchy, like they’re in need of a fix. It makes them seem out of place like they are trying to remember something they’ve forgotten. Like they have some faint memory of what their lives were before they became Parking Lot Grackles looking for toddlers’ dropped French fries.

They may remember their past. They were regal, prized birds in Ancient Mexico. The Aztecs brought them to North America from Central America. Scientist say this is the first recorded incident of humans importing an invasive species and permanently altering an ecosystem.

The Aztec rulers loved the Grackles’ plume, and Grackles were not to be harmed. They lived freely in Tenochtitlan, as well as every other Aztec city. The people planted trees surrounding the squares for the grackles to live in and gave them daily food offerings. The Parking Lot Grackles may remember that past. They may instinctively be attracted to our modern parking lots. Their twitchy junkie appearance may be the effect of remembering the Aztecs who adored them, and only finding dropped French fries in Safeway parking lots.

They remember what was. They remember what could be. Like a giant single cell, all of the Grackles remember their glory, and they crave its return. Not for nostalgia and remembrance, but because they remember when they were whole.

While they live in parking lots, they know there can be so much more, and it twists them. They run on instinct and sense memory and have to accept their fate and the toddler’s French fries, which twists them into Parking Lot Grackles.

Modern life tends to do that to us. We know who we were in the past. We see what the world has made us. We know it could be so much more.

The Beats saw this and went inside looking for the better path. Searching for their Dharma, their Tao, and fighting their demons. Humans have that choice. We have the luxury of changing our sense memory and our habits and our nostalgia.

We have the luxury of change.