My First Crippled Chicken Encounter

Allow me to clarify this article’s title. Crippled Chicken is not a fast food, to be ordered at the drive through window, and nibbled on at every red light on the way home. The future is unpredictable. However, yesterday’s encounter with a nice lady caring for a crippled chicken in a tattoo parlor is a story that must be told.. Safe to say, it will never happen to me again.

You may also be curious about the location of my first crippled chicken encounter. What’s a 77 year old boring guy like me doing in a tattoo parlor beside, of course, being tattooed? Well, my granddaughter made me do it. And, she also manipulated my emotions into agreeing to pay for her getting a new tattoo for herself..

So, there we are waiting for the voluntary pain that is a tattoo and I see this nice lady sitting on a sofa tending to what, from 20 feet away, appears to be a baby in a baby carriage. A minute later, and a little closer, I can tell that the carriage occupant has fur?, Feathers? and, is constantly twitching. Definitely not a child.

Enough with the suspense! This nice lady is, in fact, caring for a crippled chicken, by the name of Crystal. I never use people’s real names in my writing but I will name chickens! Crystal is attractively colored white and beige. The nice lady, who said she cares for 4 other disabled chickens, feeds Crystal intermittently while her legs, bound together, tremble and wriggle.

I am a reporter, of sorts. I want to uncover the who, how, what, where of my experience. I have learned that a reporter may never uncover or understand the “why”? So, I just report what I see and let the reader judge and speculate on their own.

As I’m sitting there questioning this nice lady’s motivation, I remind myself that what brought me here was a willingness to endure extreme pain to carve an outline of Spain on my knee which will only be seen by my wife in cold weather and by the guys at the gym. It cost me $70.

Is my behavior more rational than the chicken lady’s?

Unpredictability may be the only common denominator in all human behavior, which is to say, there’s no common denominator. If you’re a comedian, this unpredictability (i.e weirdness) puts food on your table or maybe even a Porsche 911 in your heated garage.

Our giggling, laughing at other’s is a form of judgement. But, let me use an old trite phrase “who are we to judge”?