Autumn

Today, the Complete and Total Loser went bird watching on a guided tour in a national park he lives near. He is not a birdwatcher, but he has two friends who like it and, having been fired in July, the Loser certainly has his days free. 
Good people, bird watchers. If they're nerds, the only thing they're nerds about is birds. They appreciate the mannerisms of the birds and know their habits and calls. They see small things the Loser, whose binoculars were as good as theirs, don't, like rings around the eyes. Bird watching has little practical use, but doing it sharpens the senses and is a good reason to get outdoors, especially on a perfect autumn day like this one.
 

Birdwatchers.

Angry Birds

Are bird feeders good or bad?
Maybe good, in that they help birds survive in lean times. Maybe bad, because they keep birds from foraging on their own. And all that food seems to distract them, making them an easy target for cats, which decimate bird populations (Jonathan Franzen's "Freedom" describes this well with accurate numbers). 
The Complete and Total Loser's mother, who would have been 83 last weekend, liked bird feeders. The Loser would argue against her policy of keeping them filled all summer but she did it anyway. Good old Mom. The Loser hasn't filled them in the summers he's lived in his dead parents' house the past two years, but does after severe weather, like this year's winter. The birds fight each other for the cold seeds.

The Loser's Housesitting Charge

The Amazon parrot the Complete and Total Loser is taking care of now as he housesits in the suburbs for an old friend of the family's bites. Hard. He's been called a mean bird. Over the years he's gotten the Loser a few times, causing wounds just short of a trip to an ER. 

He strikes with reptilian speed. Once he bit the Loser's finger as he was offering him a favorite treat. Another time, when out of his cage (the Loser lets him out whenever he's in the house with him) he leaped from above in attack, his beak gouging the Loser's forehead as he tumbled to floor, clipped wings fluttering. 

The Loser doesn't think the bird is "mean," per se, but that he has a memory in his DNA that tells him his life is not as it should be. Though he was hatched in the U.S. and hand-raised by responsible breeders, the Loser senses that on some level he knows he should be flying amid tropical trees with hundreds of his own kind, happy in his flock, eating fresh fruit from branches instead of metal bowls, his droppings falling to hungry earth far below instead of on a newspaper, fulfilling his biological imperative. And that is why he bites any human who comes near enough and always will.

The Loser's Parents Return from Florida

They are back from Florida, where they stayed on the coast and watched the sun set over the Gulf of Mexico. The Complete and Total Loser went to a Midwestern college for four years yet in that time has never set foot in the Sunshine State like so many of his peers.
His parents used to go to St. Barts, but they're too old now to cope with the lack of banisters and cobblestone streets there. The Loser imagined all month they were better off in Florida, where he's pretty sure ambulances patrol streets like ice cream trucks and geriatric hospitals are minutes away.
"We didn't see one black face the whole month," the Loser's mother said. This is just reporting; she is no bigot. (If anyone's that it's the Loser, who lives in the city where a large percentage of blacks pose at least a degree of threat and where he has indeed been robbed at gunpoint in broad daylight by two of them.) They said also there were no Jews where they were.
The Loser's father found it extremely relaxing to watch the shore birds. Pelicans, gulls and smaller birds -- sandpipers? -- shared the same sea and shore. "How," he asks, "do they survive?"
This sounds like a dumb question, but it's not.
Twenty-first century Americans are so far from nature that when we observe animals close up, it is astonishing that they can live. No clothes, no shelter, no technology of any kind. No health insurance! Naked creatures with little beaks and webbed feet, surrounded by predators, chased by cars, filth and toxins they can't possibly adapt to quickly enough, their habitat torn down and replaced by inedible structures with confusing reflective surfaces.
Yet some of them survive. And even thrive.