No, not the Genesis tune.  (You know, the one that made Steve Hackett want to quit the band… or at least that’s what my pal Justin and I figure, after they made him play the same chord the entire tune).

Just pigeons.  And lots of them.

Flying around my head.  There must have been fifty of them, or fifty-seven, flying in a circle, describing an arc about two hundred, or three hundred and fifty-seven feet wide.  They took off from a tree across the street, the whole lot of them, swooped overhead and kept on flying, around and around and around, crazy birds.  White birds, with black specks.  I figured them for pigeons, but they might have been doves.  Not woodpeckers.  Bigger than swallows.  Smaller than crows. 

I stood there and watched them for about ten minutes.  Circle after circle, flying directly overhead, around and around for no reason that I could fathom, unless maybe to amuse themselves, or maybe it was some kind of bird joke, “hey I know, let’s fly over this guy’s head for awhile in perfect formation, freak ‘im out, make him think there’s some unfathomable mystery to our behaviour, or the universe, when actually we’re just a bunch of drunken fratbirds given to the same pointless behaviour he was twenty years ago.”

Some women walked past me on the sidewalk, never even looked up, just looked at me looking up like I was crazy.  Behind me a homeowner closed their garage doors just in case.  Just in case what?  The man standing in his driveway was nuts… or a bunch of birds flew in and ransacked the place like a scene in one of Hitchcock’s better lessons in the correct application of suspense. 

Once a lone bird got separated when the flock swooped too close to a tree.  He strove to catch up (she?) but did not struggle, didn’t even flap his wings (hers?), just swooped along as if propelled by some invisible propellant, like a little bird-jet.  And the flock didn’t slow down either, but soon enough they flew as one, following a single leader, who was probably getting off on having fifty-six other birds follow him (her?) in pointless circles around and around again and again like some, oh I dunno, movie star channelling the efforts of a cast and crew.

The flew silently, except when directly above, and I could hear the soft beating of their wings.

They changed direction once, completing one final circle in the opposite direction, then disappeared behind a roof and I never saw them again.

Silly birds.