You can take the hen out of the country, just don't bring it into my city
I’ve woken up to some strange noises before. Once when I lived off of Colfax, I awoke to the sound of a prostitute being beaten in front of my apartment building. I did what any Cap Hill resident does in that situation: Called the cops, made another notch on the beaten-hooker-on-Colfax chart, and turned my face away from the window. Once when I was in Africa, I awoke to the insane mewling of a hyena that was brushing up against my tent. I did what any Serengeti visitor does in that situation: Pissed myself, slept clutching my Swiss Army knife, and hoped that the salt from my tears didn’t entice that jungle-beast further. And, of course, who can forget all the times I awoke to the pathetic weeping of the teenage runaway I bedded the night previous?
And yet the oddest thing I’ve woken up to by far was the sound of clucking hens.
My bed is right by a window, and out that open window I can hear the neighborhood’s birds coming to life every morning. Amateur ornithologist that I am, I’ve gotten to know their sounds. Flicker hammering on a telephone pole? I can identify that shit with my eyes closed. I can even tell when the pecking is less emphatic and deduce that it’s a downy woodpecker, not a flicker. I know the sound of robins and finches; I can identify a starling bitching cattily from the branches. But clucking? I speculated that it might be the sound of rheumatic, fat-fuck pigeons, but that didn’t sit right with me.
So like a birder possessed I marched down the alley, peering through the slats in my neighbors’ fences peeping tom-style, until I finally found the culprit. And it was fucking hens! Three houses down, a chicken coop in a backyard! On my goddamn block! And it wasn't a trashy chicken coop either—it was the well-maintained, immaculate hencoop of a white, yuppie couple; the kind of couple that watches Top Chef and believes in the slow-food movement. And while I could probably be lumped into similar categories, the discovery of a yuppie chicken coop on my block, not 50 yards from my pillow, annoyed the shit out of me. I live in the city because I like living in the city. All of a sudden it was like I was living in the country, but with none of the advantages of cousin-fucking.
When the neighbors on the other side of my house began spilling over their property line with all the vegetables they were growing, I didn’t complain. The plants are beautiful and they hook me up with harvest-time extras. And when my other neighbors got beehives, I said nothing as well, even when those bees stung my dog on the tongue as she ate 37 of them. People like honey and Annabel is old enough to learn life is shit. But hens? Fucking hens?
Urban hen-owners chime in now and refute my ignorance, but what the fuck do you need hens for? How many eggs do you eat? Enough that the price of a free-range dozen is so thoroughly raping your checkbook that it’s cheaper to own a chicken? Michael Moore doesn’t eat that many eggs! And, foodies, shout my treason to the heavens, but outside of a hangover brunch or two, aren’t eggs pretty disgusting? Think about it: They’re chicken fetuses, just unfertilized; that’s like eating a used tampon.
I appreciate organic as much as the next guy, I really do. At Chipotle I read the signs about free-range pork and I open-mouth kiss the checkout girl out of gratitude. But that doesn’t mean I want pigs in my backyard. (Unless they’re the fat, drunken mistakes I made, exiting through the back out of respect for my reputation. That I do appreciate—a shit-ton—actual barnyard animals not so much.) And down-the-block neighbors if you’re reading this and you want to try to sway me over to the hen side, do me a favor and don’t bring me any of those organic eggs your noisy-ass hens keep shitting out. Stop on by when you kill one of those fuckers instead. I’ll fire up the grill.
