Downey's "Classics" Presents: Veni Vidi BuKAW

Apparently, the best way for a writer to make a name for himself today is to do various writing jobs that doubles as an advertisement for his blog until he is ready to write a novel, which pays more than a job writing for a magazine. Sure, the writer could just skip a step and write the novel right away, but that shit is difficult, and without something resembling a cultivated audience, it would arrive in bookstores to general apathy. And that's even if it makes it into stores.

So, the writer of this now frequently updated blog is trying to stay in the swing of blogging. This requires putting up a post a day. Rather than write something off the top of his head, though, he is burning "back catalogue", or material he wrote for classes that would get underappreciated, because he is tired on this day. Below is unpublished work that he tried to get published. Enjoy.

"Veni Vidi BuKAW"
by John Downey

One day in late August of 2002, I was woken up by something that wasn’t my alarm clock. My alarm has a very distinct, piercing cut, strategically placed right next to my ear so that it is sure to do its job. Something beat the mechanism to its task, though.

It was a series of sounds. First, there was a long “eeeyaw”, as though someone was doing a bad impersonation of a donkey. Then, a string of 8 “yoinks”, straight from “The Three Stooges”. These 9 sounds were all stringed together in one seamless sequence, with a 2-second respite.

The sound was coming from the street, so I rushed to my window to find a large beast roaming the street. Its head was unspectacular, but its body was massive, though stocky. It walked on reptilian legs and wasn’t afraid to survey its surroundings, though its body language indicated confusion as to how it got there.

I summoned my stepfather. “Kevin,” I asked, “what in the world is that?”

It took him only a moment. “John, that is a turkey.”

Having a turkey walking around my block was strange for many reasons, though there were 2 that stood out to me. First of all, I was 16 at the time, and I was supposed to be well versed in what most animals look like (indeed, in what most of every basic life form looked like). That I hadn’t been readily been able to figure out what a turkey looked like was disconcerting to me. The 2nd reason that this was strange was because I was living in Andover, Massachusetts, where the demographics lean towards middle-upper class folk. Middle-upper class folk don’t associate with turkeys. I was told that the turkeys that had suddenly populated the area had been attracted by the recent construction done in Andover. I don’t understand it, either.

The reaction to the turkeys was typical by Andover standards. At first, they were ignored. Then they were acknowledged in passing. Then, when turkeys began attacking children at bus stops, the environmentalists went on the offensive, exaggerating the birds’ worth. How they were dealt with is beyond me—I know that one of them was killed, but the fate of the rest of them was never mentioned again.

They came, they saw, they were annoying as hell.