on luck, good and bad

in toronto i had a apartment on the 26th floor of a building that had a fantastic view of the city. in fact, it looked like this:

on my floor there lived a silver-grey cat named nicky. nicky was allowed to roam the hall during the day, but being a scaredy-cat he would flee every time someone opened a door or exited the elevators. being a bit of a cat person myself, i gradually won over the affections of this little feline, and he got into the habit of joining me for late afternoon visits. we were quite close, and one year i even received a christmas card from him. i always felt lucky that i had such a privileged relationship with such a discriminating animal.

when i was at university i used to play a lot of euchre. during those years it became obvious that "clubs" were my lucky suit, and i often won games because of those clubs. so i was lucky with clubs.

but not with seagulls.

for instance: seagulls, it seems, really dislike heinz-harald. every morning when i head off to work i find further evidence of that fact. one bugger even managed to nail the driver's door handle. i've become a regular at the gas station up the road; the bleaching effect of ammoniac-laden seagull secretions on heinz-harald's black paint would have me looking like i was driving a cow to work if i did not clean the messes immediately. but this is only one in a series of seagull-tainted events, and i suspect that the seagulls are really after me, only taking it out on heinz-harald because he is more accessible.

i once had a jeep with furry black seat covers that needed to be replaced after a seagull - who might have recently dined at the dumpster behind taco bell, judging from appearances - unloaded its cargo on the jeep's interior. another time a motorcycle that i had left parked in an open lot needed a new instrument cluster after it was attacked by the seagull cavalry. most astonishingly, a seagull with a solid understanding of aerodynamics and vector physics once crapped on the outstretched hand of my passenger while we were driving down a city street.

upon further reflection i see a pattern emerging: heinz-harald is black, the jeep was black, the motorcycle was black, and my passenger was, erm, dark-skinned. could seagulls be racist?

because my apartment was on the 26th floor, i never had cause to worry about flies, or mosquitoes, or any other type of flying pestilence, and in the summer months i always left the balcony door open. one afternoon i came home after a particularly lousy day at work, and when i entered the apartment i immediately felt that something was wrong. i could not identify what it was, but something was amiss. i walked in to the living room and discovered the problem: there were bird droppings everywhere. absolutely everywhere. but mostly on the soft, absorbent surfaces: the area rug, the sofa, the curtains(?!?), the table cloth. and on my hifi equipment. i turned in a slow circle, disbelieving what my eyes were seeing.

the incredible volume of guano suggested that my apartment had been invaded by multiple seagulls. it was inconceivable that a single flying rat could have made such a mess. physically impossible, of that i am convinced. knowing that the longer i waited the worse the cleaning would be, i grabbed some paper towels and cleanser and started scrubbing. some things i was able to clean, but some things needed to be gotten rid of. after 45 minutes i had accomplished most of the work, and - still in my suit - i went into the bedroom to change.

four things happened, more or less simultaneously

: i discovered that the seagulls had been confused over whether to turn my bed into a garden or into a nest, and to cover both options they'd spread fertilizer and feathers over the entire surface;
: i realized for the first time that i had made a simple but dangerous assumption that the seagulls had left my apartment after doing their duty;
: a rogue seagull with silver-grey fur exploded from under the bed and tore out of the apartment through the door i'd forgotten to close; and
: i almost had one more mess to clean.

yes, clubs might be lucky for me, but seagulls most definitely are not.