Kristin Hersh : Under the Gun

- "We (the bus) broke down by Lake Michigan, and our bus was leaking transmission fluid, which looks like... blood. I was not unhappy about this because we were next to a beach. You know, Lake Michigan actually has a beach on it, and it meant that I wouldn't have to cross the border into Canada, which I can't seem to do, they don't like me very much. I like them, they don't got no Bushes over there. But they always make me sit in an office under florescent lights looking at posters that say things like "Canada, The Real America." And then they take all my stuff and make me buy it back. Anyway, I was walking on this beach thinking "yeah, a weekend off with my broken-down bus." But the beach got yuckier and and scarier. The first yucky, scary thing that happened was there was a dead dog on the beach. Yeah, it's not fun. Plus, we didn't know it was a dead dog because it looked like a hairless, black, bloated pig. We were kind of standing there, looking at it wondering, "well, how does that happen? How do you get to have a dead dog on your beach? You just pitch a stick out to the sea?" Then, moving away from the dead dog we came across a dead seagull, which happens, I know, but this dead seagull was in the middle of an arena-sized, circular area of other seagulls' footprints. Exactly. Some... Roman thing. So we go away from the dead seabird and unfortunately, walk towards the parrot lady. Who seemed interesting because she was walking her parrots. She turned out to be interesting but not in the way we had hoped. Their wings were clipped, so they couldn't go anywhere, so most of them, she was wearing. One of them, she put on a railing over a drop-off. And she seemed to be talking to us, not in the way one human being talks to another, but the way some pet-people talk to you through their animals. But, the monologue was... "Poppy says 'hello,' doesn't he? Poppy, say 'hello'." And Poppy would go "hello." Which is okay. Then, she would say "Poppy said 'hello' into the telephone when daddy was dying of throat cancer and couldn't say 'hello' for himself." That was when we began backing away from the parrot lady. But, before we were out of earshot, we heard the parrot that she'd put on the railing over the drop-off, he was sidling back and forth along the railing, going "I hope I don't fall! I hope I don't fall!""