I’m watching birds at all hours now. I can see thirty, fifty birds a week, sometimes even more if I don’t put it all in my journal. All the animals come out in the morning: blue jays, warblers, northern cardinals, hawks, sparrows, ruddy ducks. Someday, a real rain will come down and refract the sun into a rainbow backdrop for idyllic wildlife photography.

I go all over. I watch birds in Central Park, Lookout Hill, the Vale of Cashmere, the Swan Boat Pond, the Ramble. Some people don’t count pigeons in their birding journals, but it don’t make no difference to me, don’t make no difference to me.

This park here is like an open sewer. You know, it’s full of filth and scum. Whoever becomes the Audubon Society president should just really clean it up, you know what I mean? I get headaches. My eyes start to burn from the muted colors of ground-bound animals. Raccoons, rats, possums, police horses. It’s like I think that the Audubon Society president should clean up this whole mess here. He should flush it down the fuckin’ toilet.

I took my girlfriend Betsy to the Van Cortlandt Lake to see aquatic birds. She couldn’t stand the mallards. She said that a person ought not to look at things like that all day. I didn’t know she’d feel this way about wild ducks. If I’d known that’s how she felt, I wouldn’t have taken her to see all those birds. I asked if she’d maybe like to go to Pelham Bay and look for hawks and ospreys? Or maybe just see saw-whet owls in Central Park?

Loneliness has followed me my whole life. Everywhere, there’s no escape. I’m God’s bird-watching-est man. The days go on with regularity over and over. One cardinal bleeds into the next. Then suddenly, there is a change.

I gotta get in shape. See more birds. Too much sitting in meadows has ruined my body. Too much abuse has gone on for too long. From now on, there will be fifty birds every morning, fifty trees of note. There will be no more pills, no more bad food. No more destroyers of my body. From now on, it will be total organization. Every bird must be accounted for.

Twelve hours of bird-watching, and I still can’t sleep. The chirps don’t end. All my life needed was a sense of someplace to go. I don’t believe that one should dedicate their life to morbid self-attention. We have much to learn from observing the daily habits of the local avian population.

Sometimes I stand in front of the mirror, and I watch myself. See what the birds see. Who watches the bird watchers? “Are you cheep-cheep-cheeping at me? There’s nobody else here. You must be cheep-cheep-cheeping at me.”

Now I see this clearly. My whole life has been pointed in one direction. There has never been a choice for me. A mute swan, a hooded merganser, my name up in lights on the New York County Rare Bird Alert Registrar. I’m gonna make a name for myself.