The Ghost And Mr. Chicken

So I don’t know what it is with me and chickens. Maybe I find them comical in some way; the way they chortle and cluck and make little garbled noises while they hobble around aimlessly. I don’t like to eat them necessarily (not a huge fan unless it’s fried,) and I’m not one of those chicken decorators. You know those people that put roosters all over their kitchens via cock shaped cookie jars, wall placards, wall paper borders, oven mitts, etc. Now when Easter or springtime hits however I love seeing pictures of these around:

AWWWWW *melt*

For awhile though I got all obsessed with bawking like a chicken. It was back in the day when Beavis and Butthead were cool, so amidst my stand up comic routine I used to put on for all of my friends that included B & B quotes and phrases (ok really it was just spazzed up outbursts I’d have in the back seat of the school bus or in the middle of a conversation during lunch) I started throwing in loud chicken bawkings. I was always able to get my friends on board too so I’m sure the old school staff has memories of us class of ‘97ers bawking and weed whacking (analogy of the noise Beavis used to make when he’d start spazzing out) our way through the halls to and fro. 

Then there was this one time………..looking back on how sheltered I was, I have no idea how this even happened. Something possessed my mother to let me go on a road trip with my best friend and her dad to Colorado (we were both raised by single parents in our teenage years.) The drive from TX to CO is around 12 hours and to this day I also don’t know what possessed her father to even entertain the thought of taking along his teenage daughter’s weirdest friend. I highly doubt it was because he thought he would get any peace and quiet stuck in a car with two teenage girls for a painfully long time. Let me also say, that her dad was and still is a pretty high strung individual. He CONSTANTLY wanted us out of his hair. For example, I got my driver’s license first, so he would hand me the keys to the extra car they had so that she and I could go gallivanting. As long as we weren’t causing trouble, AKA he had to come bail us out and we figured out a meal on our own in some way - the keys were handed over without hesitation. Before either of us could drive, we would get kicked outside to wander the neighborhood where we would go in and out of various school mates’ houses, roaming around until well past 10PM easy……ah those were the days.

So on the way to CO after driving for hours we were running out of things to do or talk about and started to get pretty antsy. And that was just a perfect formula for our Beavis and Butthead infused brains to take over. I gave her a look and crouched down and “hid” between the front and back seats. There was dead silence in the car, just the hum of the tires rolling over the 100’s of miles of TX panhandle highway pavement and the A/C blowing. I saw the glint of fear and mischief in her eyes. My evil brain told me to do it – to bawk like a chicken louder than I’d ever bawked before and so I did, and something like this ensued:

Her white knuckled dad, (usually very tan but now pale as a ghost) turned around and stared in disbelief and screamed “Don’t you EVER do that again!!” We broke out into tittered nervous laughter. Luckily we didn’t get a beating and the trip continued on. And hey, speaking of cocks – when I managed apartments I used to get notes like these in my work order mailbox all the time:

It’s CAULK people, not cock.