Estimated reading time: 7 minutes
I spent the weekend moving between two very different worlds, and both of them conducted a thorough audit of my expectations.
That’s not a complaint. That’s just what happened.
Act One: New York City, Where Everyone Has a Schtick
Sunday evening, the Upper West Side of Manhattan. My daughter and I had just finished dinner at Café Fiorello, which is the kind of place that will put arugula and burrata on a pizza and then wait calmly while you decide if you have a problem with that. We had half of a pie left over. My daughter ducked into a Duane Reade to grab something, and I spotted a man on the sidewalk who looked like he could use a meal more than I could.
I offered him the leftover pizza.
He looked at it. He looked at me. A beat passed of the particular length that suggests a formal review is underway.
“What’s wrong with it?”
“Nothing’s wrong with it.”
“Then why are you giving it away?”
“Because I’m full and you might be hungry and it seemed like the next logical step.”
He looked at the box again. “What’s on it?”
“Arugula. And burrata.”
“…That’ll be fine.”
He took the box. He opened the box and looked into it for a moment, the way a man looks into a box when he is reconsidering his choices. Then he closed it.
“Hey,” he said. “Can you give me two bucks?”
“I don’t carry cash.”
“You could go in the drugstore there, buy something small, and bring me back the change.”
I looked at him. He looked at me.
“I just gave you a pizza,” I said.
He pointed at me. “Right, right. I forgot about that. That’s right, you did.”
“I did.”
“Okay.” He nodded slowly, as though filing this information in the appropriate folder. “Okay. We’re good.”
We were good. I went into the Duane Reade.
I had barely cleared the entrance when I became aware of a figure to my left, approaching with the unhurried authority of someone who has somewhere to be and considers that your problem. He was wearing a blanket as a cape. His shoes were plastic bags, secured in a manner that suggested both engineering and philosophy. On his head sat a Burger King crown, slightly askew, in the way that crowns are worn by people who have earned them rather than inherited them.
He stopped directly in front of me. He looked me up and down. He raised one hand.
“The king,” he said, with extraordinary deliberateness, “is leaving now.”
He let that land.
“You,” he continued, leaning slightly forward, “are late.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I was giving away pizza.”
“That is not my concern.”
“No, I suppose it isn’t.”
“The king does not wait.” He pulled the blanket tighter around his shoulders. “The king has things to do.”
“Of course.”
“You would know this,” he said, a note of genuine disappointment entering his voice, “if you had been on time.”
There was a pause in which I considered my options. I said: “Well. Life doesn’t have any meaning.”
He studied me for a long moment. Then he gave a single, slow nod, the kind a professor gives when a student has said something technically incorrect but spiritually in the right neighborhood.
“See that it doesn’t happen again,” he said.
And then he left. Cape trailing. Bags rustling. Crown undefeated.
I have no further information.
Act Two: The Farm, Where Nature Has No Interest in Your Feelings
I got home Monday to find that a deer had gotten his hoof caught in the upper rail of the fence and was hanging there. Karie had assessed the situation and called me in the way she calls me when something needs to happen immediately and my qualifications are “present” and “theoretically willing.”
“I think those are wire cutters in the shed,” she said.
“I think you’re right,” I said.
They were, in fact, wire cutters. I want to acknowledge this before the rest of the story unfolds. It is a small victory and I take them when I get one
I clipped the gnarled fence wire and got him down, and that’s when we saw the damage. The skin was torn away in patches. You could see bone. This was not a deer who had come through a minor inconvenience. We knelt with him for a while. Gave him water. Treated what we could treat.
Karie, who approaches biology with the calm efficiency of someone who recently completed a PhD and still has the research mentality, conducted a brief but thorough assessment.
“He’s a buck,” she said.
“How do you know?”
She looked at me.
“Right,” I said. “The antler nubs.”
She continued looking at me.
“And the other thing,” I added.
“I checked for his nuts,” she said.
“How can you think about sex at a time like this?”
She stared at me for a moment with the expression she reserves for comments that don’t merit a full response but will absolutely be remembered.
My father-in-law, who also lives in part of the farm (often referred to as “The Compound”) called around. No wildlife rehabilitators available at that hour. So we moved him to a more protected area and let him rest. I returned to the house with the particular kind of hope that presents itself as comforted but is mostly just buying time.
Inside, I reported the situation to my stepdaughter by text.
Stepdaughter: Well, I suggest you go place a radio or a light near him.
Me: I sent your mom out with her ukulele and a bad case of the farts.
Stepdaughter: Oh, good.
Me: Oh. And a headlamp. She is wearing a headlamp. Like some confused Doctor of Coal Mining.
Stepdaughter: Are you serious though or are you joking?
Me: What do you think? (Although the headlamp is fairly plausible.)
There was a pause on her end that I interpreted as the specific silence of someone who has known me long enough to genuinely not be sure.
The Morning After, Which Was Worse Than the Evening
I got up early. Walked out. Found a turkey vulture sitting on him like he had a confirmed reservation.
The deer was still breathing, just barely. I shooed the buzzard away. He relocated to a nearby fence post and waited with the practiced patience of something that has never once been wrong about how a situation ends. The deer passed not long after. We covered him up properly. The county, when called, confirmed they would not be coming. The deer wasn’t within X number of yards of a road.
The vultures are now handling it. The cycle of nature goes on, though it goes on in a way that makes it very hard to enjoy a sandwich.
Back inside, Queso, my eleven‑pound chihuahua, took one look at me, began to tremble, and had a seizure directly in and onto my lap.
He drooled on me at some length.
He’s fine. He does this. The vet knows. It is managed. I mention it only because it felt like a formal closing statement on the weekend.
The Comparison No One Asked For
New York asks things of you constantly, your money, your attention, your explanation for the burrata, but the transactions are fundamentally theatrical. Nobody gets really hurt. The man got pizza and a partial refund negotiation. The King issued his proclamation and his disappointment and moved on with the dignity of someone who keeps to a schedule. I gave a vague answer about the meaninglessness of existence and everyone dispersed. The city is exhausting in the way that improv comedy is exhausting. It’s chaos with an audience, and the audience is also performing.
The farm doesn’t have an audience. The farm has outcomes. You grab the wire cutters or you don’t. You sit with the animal and it makes it or it doesn’t. There’s no stranger to deliver a non‑sequitur that reframes the whole thing as a bit. The buzzard shows up and he’s not doing a character. He just knows something you’re not ready to admit yet.
I love both places. I belong on the farm, I think on most days. But I will say this: at least in New York, when things go badly, someone asks you for two dollars. Out here, they send a vulture. Same energy, really. One of them is just wearing a crown.
The king was right. I was late. I’ll try to do better.
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His first manuscript was composed entirely of punctuation marks and confused sketches. He's since published "Not Bukowski" (poems that don't rhyme) and "Slop and Swell from a Festering Mind" (essays so concerning that bookstores check on his wellbeing). He once spent three hours photographing a rare bird that turned out to be a plastic bag, and he's the only person banned from church bake sales for "weaponized brownies." Inheriting absurdism from Vonnegut and Adams, sprawling narratives from Irving, and weaponized failure from Moore, he writes about conflicted everymen struggling through supernatural chaos.
He has two new, offbeat novels waiting foran agent or a publisher: "Truth Tastes Like Pennies" and "Elliot Nessie."
He remains unconvinced that birds aren't surveillance drones.
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