Sunday, July 11, 2010

Chicken Bar-B-Que

When a library finds itself holding the short end of the budget stick, it does what any other institution does in dire need: It whips out the sardonic animals who have decided that anything would be better than one more day in this stinking sewer called Life.

In this example, the dialogue of a pair of chickens is so bleak and wintry, so baldly Beckettian, that we hardly wonder at the impatience to be done with this tiresome business of existence:
"Brrrrr brrrrr."

"Things are going to warm up for us!"
Life's extremes—from bone-chilling blasts to fiery agonies—inspire in them only a futile irony. We might expect to see them arrayed in garbage cans like Endgame's Nagg and Nell, instead of festive caps and scarves.

And there's this final taunt: "Your head is shaped like an egg!" Who speaks this hurtful wisdom? Is it God himself, condemning them to their desired deaths even as he mocks the anatomy with which he cursed them?

No matter who utters the line, the last act is already written: the birds will be split down the middle and served with hot cocoa (mix).

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