Floridian Roadkill

I can recall complaining about the weird way that Florida's magnificent wildlife can get mucked up by the state's corny and ignorant population explosion. It resulted in things like seeing some tropical bird ambling down the median of a major thoroughfare, as some 16-wheeler whizzes by, exhaust and all.

Those type of sights were always simeautaneously annoying and sad. I mean, what's really what?

Nothing prepared me for what I saw the other day, though…

A swan lying as a crumpled heap in the middle of a dark subdivision street: call it Floridian Roadkill.

I saw it, got out the car, inspected the lifeless mass and really wanted to hurt something – and I’m the furthest thing from an animal rights activist. Don’t get me wrong, I treat God’s creation with respect. I’m a huge proponent of that. But I’m not too good to poor a packet of salt on a slug.

But to see a swan or flamingo or – whatever it was – dropped like Roy Jones Jr. in the middle of the street was one of the most unsettling and enraging sights, yet. ESPECIALLY because I called it. I had predicted it just a few moments earlier. I turned off Spring Hill Drive onto Waterfalls Dr. and had to stop my car for close to 20 seconds and let this molasses-moving swan high-step across the street. And I barely saw this bish. Goodness knows that some blind senior wasn’t gonna catch a glimpse of this tropical beauty until their luxury car’s front bumper had knocked the heartbeat out of it.

Two wack things about where I live are that no neighborhood has sidewalks and no neighborhoods ever have sufficient streetlights. It’s annoying. What this brings about are terribly narrow streets (you actually can’t park on streets in suburban Florida, you need to find unowned swaths of brown grass and park their, which usually involves you scraping your car under some thorny-branch tree, stepping out into knee-high weeds and some tropical bugs crawling up your shin, then leg, then nesting between your scrotes for the evening).

Aside from the terribly narrow streets, everything is pitch black. I’m just not used to that. I guess, in a city, if things were that dark, crime would spike to levels more depressing than they already are. I remember in Buff, I’d be walking back from the Boys Club or my niggas’ crib on Donaldson and if even ONE street lamp would be out, the neighborhood would seem like something out of scene in a movie where a crime was about to happen.

Here in Fla, though, no street lamps (or just really short and sparse street lamps, I guess, would be more accurate) just means that you have to drive slower.

But, some lead-foot geezer that couldn’t differentiate Michael Duncan Clark and Andy Dick in the broad daylight – so street lamps for them means that something or, Jah forbid, someone is getting that can tapped.

Anyways, when I passed the swan I remembered cursing the narrow streets and street-lamp scarcity, then driving by and saying out loud, “Watch that bird be knocked out when I come back.”

So I rolled on, made my little night visit to my landlord Mary (her health is on and on, in case you were wondering, but she’s doing OK. I’ll miss her when I move in a few months). I stayed at Mary’s for about 15 minutes as she called other seniors “old women” and chatted about her upcoming night out with the girls, at a fish-fry in some trailer park way out in the middle of nowhere two counties north of us (which I, of course, already consider the middle of nowhere).

Anyways, Mary had her cash, we had caught up, I gave her a hug and rolled out. Right out the driveway, left onto Waterfalls. About 45 seconds later, I’m coming up on the busy intersection of Spring Hill and Waterfalls, the point where u leave the neighborhood of identical houses with no sidewalks and turn onto the busy street with a bunch of shopping centers. But about 20 yards before I get to the stop light, I have to swerve out of the way of a pile of angel-white feathers.

I KNEW IT!!!! Curse the ridiculous state and its irresponsible residential planning!

I mean, wtf kind of roadkill is a gd swan?!!!! I know I said I was gonna quit with the euphemisms, but ish!!

Look, roadkill is not a foreign concept to anyone, let alone me. You see all type of rodents strewn all over the road when you make trips for Buff to Rochester or Syracuse or NYC on I-90.

In Buff, we have nice size rats, not NYC rates, but some serious jokers that gnaw thru our garbage cans and can be brazen at times, like “walking”, not scampering, across the street at night.

I kinda took pleasure when I’d see them laid out. Sometimes u might even catch some mangy dog on the side of Bailey Ave, with blood seeping from his guts. It happens.

But a swan?

It’d bound to get worse, because one of these days a human is gonna get hit. The youngsters in my hood have the habit of skateboarding or merely wandering the streets at night. They don’t always wear bright clothes.

The day is coming.