The meaning of life is going to the park to feed the ducks, with the intention of only throwing fish food at the animals you like. A rare opportunity in an indifferent world to exercise swift and simple justice. A shitty ugly goose expelling undignified turds in the pond without remorse then trampling the ducks and the turtles to snatch away the food you meant for them? You’re on your own. The albino duck who is always floating around alone and seems really chill and has never been violent towards the other ducks and you’re plagued by the thought that maybe the other birds don’t want to be friends with him/her because he/she looks different and you know animals have some concept of difference because of evolution but you don’t know if it extends to a seemingly superficial difference like duck albinism and you keep forgetting to Google it? That duck gets all the food. I cannot throw an empty can into the recycling bin but when it comes to throwing fish pellets at deserving sea birds I become Nolan Ryan.

So justice is being dispensed. I can pause life and death as I pump quarters into the fish food machine and tell God himself to fuck off as I attempt to tell these ducks in the language we all speak that I see their actions and their worth and however life may have tipped the scales out of their favor I will correct it. I can correct it.

And then a huge vulture-like black bird swoops down from above. Heft in combination with precision always awakens some sort of core fear, like seeing an footage of an F-22. There is also something uniquely terrifying about a creature that clearly possesses grace but elects not to use it, ending a swift and silent flight with what can only be described as a plonk five feet in front of you. Honey badger don’t give a fuck.

So in awe and terror you begin frantically hurling all your fish food at this bird, just flinging handfuls at its head in homage. The bird just stares straight ahead, fish nuggets bouncing off its body. Stupidly you think, “oh my God, it doesn’t know it’s food! Eat the fish bird! Come on birdy!” And then you realize: This bird has feasted on the flesh of the living. It has no time for pellets, it hasn’t had the instinct bred out of it. I’m tossing a couple quarters worth of methadone at this feathery sea raptor and it’s been shooting heroin in its eyeballs. So I watch as it stands silently, stoically, like it was guarding the tomb of the unarmed soldier, until it dove under the water and started swimming. It was like watching someone drive a Ferrari into a lake and instead of sinking it Go Go Gadgets into an amphibious vehicle. The bird popped back out with a whole wriggling fish in it’s jaws and presented it to the horrified people of the boardwalk, then he leaned back and sucked that fucker down like it was oyster and crawled under the boardwalk but after five minutes of waiting for him/her to come out I got bored flew away eclipsing the setting sun.