Little Bird (photos and words by Rene)

Little bird,

I see you,

I promise I will not harm,

won’t get any closer.

Please go about your business.

Photo by Rene

 Yes,

Peck at the grass,

What wonders you must find,

But please do not fear me.

Photo by Rene

 Oh,

don’t turn away,

I will not harm,

will not approach.

Photo by Rene

 Oh!

You turned only to get a friend.

A sweet little female perhaps.

I will not get closer,

will not harm.

Photo by Rene

 

I will only watch,

enjoy a sweet sight of Nature,

seldom seen,

seldom enjoyed,

seldom left alone.

 

Beware the Meat!

Miss Anne Marie so graciously invited me, and so many other great writers, to guest post on her site this month, and for this I am so honored.

I don’t do much writing anymore, as many of the drugs I am on and my pain keeps me from writing as well as I would like. After writing for a short time, I find I start making more and more spelling mistakes, and language errors. It takes so much time to go back and make corrections, the whole thought process is lost.

Below is a short story which came to me last night, and for once, stayed around long enough for me to get it all down. There is no political message intended, just a story. I won’t tell you how long it took me to write this intro, as it would seriously make you laugh. Enjoy, and thanks to my friend Anne Marie.

People are looking for me now, and this is all my parent’s doing. I didn’t change like the other kids, or rather, I changed and they didn’t. Yeah, that is what happened, I changed and they didn’t. Now I think back on it, all those school lunches, times we ditched school to eat at In-n-Out, and especially the family holiday meals were actually a blessing.

It is becoming harder to fit in, to fake it. Looking like a drone just isn’t as easy as it sounded at first. So far, I have only found one other like myself; although we agree there have to be more. It was pure accident I found Keith; we literally bumped into each other. Dumbing down out behavior was getting harder each day, till one day at the voting polls we just walked into each other. We were looking at our sample ballots we received in the mail. Although we are both freshman in the local college, we are 18 since we started school earlier than most of our peers. I think we were the youngest voters in the room, and I know we were the only ones with our sample ballots. I hadn’t really realized what was going on at this time, but somehow I knew meeting Keith was important.

Now I get it, well as far as my mind can wrap around what happened. It appears since Keith and I were raised vegetarian, we were missing all the chemicals and growth hormones being pumped into all the food. When I think back to all the times I gave my mom a hard time about not eating meat, I seriously wonder if she and Dad knew something more than what they revealed. Keith and I have researched why everyone else seemed, well…so stupid, and why they seemed to be getting dumber each day. We did this research prior to meeting each other; now we wouldn’t dare fire up a computer and start researching any of this. They would hone in on our URL so damn fast for just looking at a ‘conspiracy theory’ site, much less a government site.
From what Keith and I have pieced together, this is what was happening, and I guess, is continuing to happen now.
For the past 20 years, as far as we can refer to with our combined research, steroids, growth hormones, and other chemicals have been added to most farm animals. This goes from chickens all the way to the Angus steer. Any product, be it a simple egg to a steak, contains some mix of these additives. All these additives have been, for loss of a better term, monkeying around with the brain’s growth. People are not getting any smarter, are not able to retain information much past the basic teachings of 6th grade. After the 6th grade, all of what is taught is purely repetition of the first 6 years of schooling. There is no additional information, more specific teaching, and definitely no honors classes. So, for the majority of the population who has no alternative but to attend public schools, they are never encouraged nor allowed to learn anything more than what was taught in the 6th grade.
Now, from what Keith uncovered in some of his research, it is assumed children, who were able to attend Charter Schools or Private Schools (this does not include Religious private schools) fare better as to opportunities in education. In fact, all of the students we go to college with are from private schools; we are the only two from public school. We have kept this a secret, and have even changed all our records to reflect us attending better schools. Keith changed his records in his junior year, whereas I didn’t figure this out until after my senior year. We both traveled across country to attend college, so we wouldn’t run across people we knew from high school.

Daily life isn’t really very hard for us, as we spend most of the time at the college. We fit in well with the other students in class, and just hanging out on the campus. Our parents had been wise and were able to save money for our college tuitions, and some for living money. We both work though, on weeknights and weekends, to supplement our income for other needed things. There is no financial aid in the way of grants or loans like my parents have referred. There are other students who work, so this isn’t hard to get around, and we don’t have to go to extremes to cover up our working. What we do have to deal with though is dealing with others when we are at work. We basically have to act like we are school kids, as far as behavior and intellect. It can be dangerous, literally, if we appear to know more than the boss, or a customer. So, all of us who have to work and can go to college have to be picky in where we work. Most students have their parent’s connections to offer them employment. Keith and I don’t, so he works as a mechanic in a foreign sports car dealership, and I work as a cook at a premier restaurant. Keith has an awesome mechanical mind; he could probably take down one of those fancy cars and rebuild the whole thing without any diagrams. I can cook just about anything put in front of me, and I often get requests to come up with a new way of preparing a dish. I do okay if I have to meet a diner, or when working with the chef alone, but I have to really watch myself around the rest of the staff. Keith has said he does great when talking with customers, but he has to really hold his tongue with the boss and other crew members.
Going grocery shopping is an adventure sometimes. Most of the other students have groceries delivered. We cannot afford this service. We have to go do our own shopping. Other students do some of their own shopping as well, but they go only to the best stores. Keith and I have been shopping at cheaper stores on the other side of town, never noticing each other. Luckily the days of plastic grocery bags have long since been lost, so all our groceries were in our own personal bags. I have never bought store brands for fear someone would find the product in my house, then they would know I shopped for my own groceries.

Keith and I have had to watch what we do, what we say, and even our facial expressions all the time. We make a great pair though: Keith is a devil in the details with logic things, like the hacking to change our high schools, and other records. I seem to be more about how to function without being caught in daily activities. Keith told me before he moved from Oregon to Virginia, where we go to school; he got into a fight at the garage he was working at. I guess he felt the shop manager put him down, blamed him for something gone wrong on a car, and Keith knew he wasn’t the one who did anything wrong. Now he will tell me what is going on at work, even call me or text me, so I can help him handle it better. He thinks he has this anger problem because his real dad had the family eating a lot of beef. Once his mom and dad divorced, she put the family on a vegetarian diet, and she married a vegetarian, so he didn’t have meat after the divorce. I tend to be pretty calm most of the time, but I was on a vegetarian, almost vegan, diet from day one. He is probably correct about this assumption. He is not half as bad as most of the people though. When we go grocery shopping, I really have to watch him, as there are so many really mean, rude, and downright stupid people at the store.

Keith and I have been wondering and discussing between us recently the GMOs put on vegetables and fruits. I wonder what effect they may be having on us. We still don’t eat meat: for me, I just don’t like the smell; for Keith it is more he can’t afford it. Meat and dairy is available to the college students, and to the wealthy, but it is expensive since it is ‘free range’ meat, and non-additive dairy.

Hopefully since Keith and I found each other, we can now be on the look out together for others like us. We are talking about taking the summer off from school and going up to Connecticut, Maine, Rhode Island, as we have heard stories of others like us there. They are old stories, from the Internet, when we used to research on why we were different from the other high school kids. We will see.