Mockingbird, Mockingbird

Look at this little bastard. Mimos polyglottos, you are a desperate, desperate soul.

There are a few of these guys in the neighborhood now. I have only ever had one around at a time in the past. It surprises me that three or maybe even four of these birds are within earshot, since they tend to be highly territorial. Maybe there's some kind of weird demographic bottleneck of a surplus of males all hollering endlessly for the attentions of a very few females. From the sound of it, they are all desperately ineffectual and the female birds can't be bothered. Because they never shut the fucking fuck up. Loud, obstreperous, unpleasant and crazy-making even in the singular, ridiculous with three or four of them pitching their most urgent pick up lines all afternoon, all night long and into the dawn. Fortunately, for the most part, with the air conditioner on, they are inaudible. I was half hoping that the 30 feral cats in my neighborhood would gang up on these warbling monsters and kill every last one of them, but the other day I saw a badass mockingbird attacking a cat repeatedly, and the cat trying not to run but also obviously cowed and humbled, head down, slinking along guiltily, an embarrassment to his tribe. 

Perhaps Jung would say that one reason I hate these fucking birds so much is that they remind me of myself. If you spot it, you got it, hurr durrrrr. But he'd be partly right. Their attempts to communicate are endless, they refuse to give up, they seem to hope for a response at all times, and yet, from the sound of their uninterrupted stream of bird gibberish and desperate bird-verbal  inventive and ornate posturing, to no avail. Or to little avail. Intermittent reinforcement is the most powerful kind. So I suppose every third day or some shit one of these little noise machines gets laid and shuts the fuck up for a minute. 

This all goes to a few themes lately for me. Since I've been banned for 30 days from Facebook for posting this photo: 

I've had a lot of time to detach from the Facebook mindset, for real. I tried to disengage back on June 1, but then the family separation at the border outrage hit and I waded back into the fray. The universe may have said, well, no-- and thus the ban. Who knows? If it goes against the Facebook "community standards" to post a pic of triumphant American soldiers holding a captured Nazi flag, then isn't that a sign of some kind? Jk. It's just their idiot filter bot, thinking I am a white supremacist. But that in itself is a sign, right?

Anyway, with even more distance from Facebook than before, I have started to get perspective on the shape of my addiction. Simply, Facebook created the illusion for me of being heard and being seen. Here's an amazing thing, I'll post it, look! Some likes, reactions, hearts. Ah, an audience. To call all Facebook addicts narcissists is overly broad, but performers? Stage hogs? Attention seekers? More like it. And in these shithole times of fucking awful stupidity and emerging authoritarianism, it's okay to want to sit around the campfire and tell tales. Shared pain is halved, they say. Times are painful. 

The downside is the biofeedback intensifying spiral of despair, and the reshaping of a community into a cabal of constantly outraged, constantly grieving and offended, constantly horrified pawns in an endless troll war. That's a big downside.