No hard feelings, sports fans and turkeys, ok?

October 30, 2005 - 7:36 p.m.

I didn’t know that the White Sox won the World Series. I didn’t even know that the World Series had occurred. I thought that an event that big would surely take place on the weekend, not a Wednesday night. I was caught off guard.

I started to suspect that something was wrong with my city when I found myself sharing the El platform Friday morning with 100 people whose faces were painted black. I thought maybe it was because Rosa Parks had died and they were honoring her memory, especially because everyone was rushing and crowding to get into the first car of the train. I thought that was an awful neat gesture, the whole first train car full of black faces.

Then I noticed that they were all wearing White Sox jerseys.

Every train stop more and more people shoved their way onto the train until we were bursting at the seams. Thank god no one was drunk yet or it would have been really ugly. And smelly.

I got off the train in the Loop and ascended the stairs to street level. To my horror, I stepped into a crowd of what appeared to be close to one million people, people carpeting the streets, sidewalks and alley ways of the entire downtown.

I’m a little bit slow (mentally) so I didn’t quite catch on and began walking to work. I came to a stop at a wall of humans and it finally occurred to me that there was going to be a parade for the White Sox. Not that anyone cares at all, but the Sox haven’t gone to the World Series since 1917 and they’re always regarded as the Cubs’ scrawny, dirty little brother so the amount of Chicago Pride was simply bursting in the air, like a heavy rain cloud letting go a torrential downpour of adrenaline and testosterone. It was a place I never wanted to be.

LaSalle Street, which runs north and south and cuts right through the middle of downtown, was completely blocked off with metal fences and police holding the crowd back. I thought I could maneuver through the crowd and speak to a police person and be able to cross the street, since the parade hadn’t even begun yet. Yeah right, idiot. Me and every other asshole.

The crowd was going apeshit, they were pushing into each other until I was literally trapped, people pressing on all sides of me and I foresaw multiple tragedies occurring, the first of which would be me getting trampled to death in a frenzied crowd. I was deeply saddened to discover that I am not even of average height, because everyone around me was towering over me and I couldn’t see anything but their torsos. I began pogo bouncing, up and down, trying to see what fucking street I was even on as the crowd carried me out to sea like a high tide.

Thanks to living in a city full of selfish assholes for 8 years, I’ve developed the survival skill of ME ME ME ME ME and I take no shit when it comes to crowds, elderly and children be damned. I pulled out the big guns, raised my elbows to eye level and began thrashing those muthafuggas like they were a field of wheat. IT’S HARVEST TIME, BITCHES and you’re all going down, three at a time with my John Deere elbows to your throat, chest or kneecaps, it’s up to you.

I plowed over Asian ladies smaller than myself. Tall men, big bellies, mothers - I looked each one in the eye and then promptly SHOVED. There was an old man in front of me, completely gray, clearly someone’s beloved grandfather who drove in from the suburbs and had a soft lunch box/cooler thing strapped to his back. I gave him about 20 seconds to get out of my way and then I started barking MOVE IT MOVE IT LET’S GO right into his ear. I firmly pushed into his back and the look of surprise on his face was priceless. He looked back at me with his mouth ajar and then began hustling like the devil himself was nipping at his heels.

I was thinking how much easier it would have been if I had only brought my switchblade with me, shanking each person in the liver as I passed silently through the crowd, people falling to the ground and disappearing under the hooves of all mankind.

It took me twenty minutes to walk twenty feet and escape the crowd. I asked a city worker how in the hell I was supposed to cross LaSalle and they said I needed to find the beginning or the end of the parade. No shit, nuts for face. I trekked south to Van Buren, to the beginning of the parade and was able to break free and cross and run to work. I walked about a mile out of my way and was twenty minutes late to work, but then the whole office was *crickets* because everyone had gone down to watch the parade!

I sat at my desk and cracked open the yellow pages, searching for something along the lines of 1-800-JIHAD-ME.

Dear Terrorists,

Now’s your chance.

There are one million of the most annoying people you can find in Illinois, and they are all packed tightly in a bunch in the middle of the Loop. You could probably just shoot one of them and they’d all fall over like dominoes. Hop to it. I will be watching from the safety of my skyscraper down the street.

Love, Shawna Mohammed Al Ja Zeera

P.S. – don’t fuck with anything West of Wells Street, cuz that’s my ‘hood.

P.P.S. – No airplanes.

Yeah.

So maybe holy war is a bit harsh for those sports fans, but I can’t help it. Large crowds of people gathered to stare at a single person/event/entity just makes my skin crawl. I don’t know why. Masses remind me of cows, and cows are quite dumb. Do not feel bad for eating a cow. And turkeys too. Very dumb. My dad always says that turkeys are so stupid that they can only do two things: eat and breed. And they’re so dumb they’ve been known to drown themselves just by looking up at the sky with their mouth open while it’s raining. This only applies to domesticated turkeys and not wild turkeys who are quite smart. Domestic turkeys only survive because of man, and they would starve if they had to find food for themselves.

There were a lot of wild turkeys in the woods where I lived my whole life. Every day and night I’d hear them, hootin’ it up with their gobbles. You would think there was an Irish pub in the midst of the forest, full of turkeys laughing and falling off bar stools. I knew they were very fast because I would hear their Gawwwwwws as they streaked down the creek bed. I’d sit in the middle of the woods and hear gobble-gobbles all around me, and twigs snapping and bushes rustling. In 20 years, I never once saw a turkey with my own eyes. Sly, fast creatures, they are. And smarter then me, apparently.

And pigs, pigs are a different story. Pigs are very intelligent and feel emotion and so on. So you should definitely feel bad for eating bacon. This Thanksgiving, choose turkey over ham. So after dinner, when you slip into your tryptophan induced coma, you can rest peacefully knowing that you did not murder an animal who had a best friend and who could recite the multiplication tables up to 8. Instead, you just ate some idiot who met his demise by staring at the clouds and saying, “Oooohhhhh…argh garb gack gack *choke* guh *dead*.”

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