Category Archives: Humor

I Yelled at a Bird

Creative non-fiction, Humor, Ink Spatterings, Life and Other Existential Problems, Writing, Writing process

On Writing While Having Ears

Simple graphic with a cartoon woodpecker on the left, facing right. To the right of the bird, the title reads ‘I Yelled at a Bird’ in large black letters. Below it, the subtitle says ‘On Writing While Having Ears.’ At the bottom left, in smaller gray text, it says ‘by Jackie Pick.’ The background is white and uncluttered

The other morning, I yelled at a bird. He was pecking at the side of my house right outside my office like he was trying to Morse-code Infinite Jest into the drywall.

In his defense, that’s his job. He’s a woodpecker. Nominative determinism at its most bloggable.

In my defense, I was attempting to write. That’s (allegedly) my job. Writing requires concentration, intention, structure, and little-to-no bird drama.

Inspired by Maya Angelou, I woke early to try to be one of those Excellent Writers™ who catch the Be-Brilliant-Doing-The-Writing-Thing motes that supposedly float through the dawn.

Well, I woke up early. The “Be-Brilliant-Doing-The-Writing-Thing” is more Dr. Angelou’s domain.

Early morning, it turns out, is when my brain picks at itself then presents a show called Every Mistake I’ve Ever Made and Also Let’s Workshop Future Ones! There are musical numbers and everything.

An imperfect start to the day, but at least it’s terrible.

I do not write first thing, although I get organized. Coffee focuses me enough to craft a to-do list. Then I’m organized and stressed. This counts as multitasking.

These last few weeks, the woodpecker has been clocking in by 7:00 a.m. I call him The Contractor. I should call him Sir Aneurysm Incoming.

As a writer (allegedly), I’m supposed to observe the delicate, shimmering miracle of existence. And I want to. I try to. It’s hard to notice anything other than the bird face-hammering my office wall into dust.

The household wakes.

There is one rule to getting teenagers out the door: engage only when summoned. It’s best not to care out loud. But I do. Catastrophically. Usually by saying “good morning.”

You can count the syllables in their sighs.

There are daily logistics to coordinate with my husband: forms, appointments, who is attending to which child where, who is giving the dishwasher emotional support, and …wait, we’re out of ketchup?

Before my workday starts, I’ve absorbed everyone’s emotions because my empathy is an open-concept floor plan. Add to that the simmering impatience of the man in the Subaru behind us who believes my insufficient acceleration jeopardizes the spirit of American progress. I fear he will tailgate one or both of us directly into another dimension.

Sir, I am driving a practical mid-size SUV, and I am doing my best.

I do not want to ruin his day until he honks.

Finally, I sit to write. Whither my Muse?

My Muse is draped across the couch, wearing my robe and eating pastries. “You’ve got this,” she says, waving strudel in my general direction.

This is unhelpful.

At its core, writing is solving one small problem only to discover it was guarding a nest of larger, slipperier ones tangled in a Gordian knot of plot and character and the ability to put words in some kind of order.

It is noble, irritating labor.

I can do noble, irritating labor. Muse-less, even.

Tap. Tap. Taptaptaptap.

Just as I consider offering the woodpecker a co-writing credit if he’d please shut up, my neighbor steps into his backyard to practice trumpet. Backyard trumpet. Right by my office.

Then someone revs a car engine like they’re summoning the ghost of Vin Diesel (who, it should be noted, is not dead).

This does not deter the woodpecker. He is a professional. He should take up writing.

I’ve read the Internet. It says that if I were truly committed to my craft, I would simply not hear all the noise.

Yes. Thank you. I hadn’t considered the bold strategy of not having ears.

Look, distraction is not always avoidance. Sometimes attention goes to the loud thing because the thing is loud.

The world is committed to being loud. I am committed to being a Good Enough Writer™ who li — aaaand now leafblowers are forming some sort of demented quartet with the backyard trumpet-noodling neighbor.

Taptaptaptap.

I opened the window.

“Bird! Stop!”

Quiet.

It felt good. I added “Deal with woodpecker” to my to-do list, then crossed it off.

Except…

I yelled at a bird.

This doesn’t make me feel observant of the delicate, shimmering miracle of existence.

It makes me feel like an asshole. The sort of asshole whose command of language evaporates under pressure, leaving me with nothing but “Bird! Stop!”

I wandered over to the couch for reassurance from my Muse. She shook an empty bag of kettle chips at me, wanting a refill.

Tap. Tap. Taptaptaptap.

That bird’s Muse is clearly better than mine.

Wrestling with Mary Oliver on My Birthday

Creative non-fiction, Humor, Life and Other Existential Problems, Under 750, Year in Review

Warning: This piece contains an unreasonable number of cheese references.

A close-up of a sprinkle-covered slice of birthday cake with the candle letters "Ha" on top, sitting on a crumb-covered plate.

Permit me a wildly self-indulgent post. It is my birthday, and if a woman can’t spelunk into the gooey cavern of her own feelings on the anniversary of her arrival, then when can she?

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

I started this day as I do most days, forcing myself to wrestle with Mary Oliver.

For a while now, I’ve worked on carving out little havens for myself. Small sanctuaries filled with beautiful sounds and words and things to gaze upon and hold dear. I’ve tried to fill them with people, too. People who smile and cry, as needed. People who are an honor to stand with, or curl up next to, or double over in laughter with in the great messy queue of existence. And people who will, crucially, refrain from being grammar assholes over this entire paragraph.

And then I’ve worked on showing up in those havens, which is harder than you’d think. You’d think once you’ve carved out a space, you’d want to be in it, like a cat claiming a cardboard box. BUT NO. My instinct is to show up everywhere else first.

Those everywhere else spaces need people like me — people who are loud and unsoft in public. The spaces where people like me are asked to stand at the front and project their voices like a malfunctioning foghorn. The spaces where I need to show up (and shut up) so no one else has to be brave alone.

Those spaces can take your skin. Those spaces can be harsh and loud and brisk. I like none of those things.

Being unsoft in public isn’t easy. None of us is unsoft at all times. Even under-bridge trolls need an occasional snuggle and a nap. And I refuse to grow callouses. Callouses are for people who enjoy hiking or receiving constructive criticism, neither of which interests me.

But I go to the places I choose, and dwell among people I choose. Still, my unsoft places sometimes grow raw around the edges. Like a cheese that has been handled too enthusiastically at a village fête.

I want to be brave in this one wild and precious life, the kind of brave that requires ferocity and a willingness to occasionally be the cheese that stands alone. Sometimes I am the kind of brave that is also vulnerable. Different cheese, same position. But lots of people like cheese, I’ve learned. Somewhere out there are the people who love the exact cheese that is me.

I digress. I am also hungry for cheese.

Birthdays involve audits. Spiritual, emotional, sometimes literal, if you also store your things in creative locations and now want to use them to get your special birthday cookie at Crumbl. I use this day to ask myself: Am I who I want to be? Am I surrounded by marvelous, strong, brilliant, delightful people? Is the work mighty? Brave? Honest? (Is it occasionally funny, because bonus points for that.)

This past year has been…well, let’s say it has tested us all in ways that rattle our molars and make us long to burrow under blankets and just stay there for a good chunk of this wild and precious life.

But this is a new year. Every day can be a new year. This is why I wrestle with Mary Oliver and her profoundly, annoyingly inspirational poem.

I’m grateful for my people and our co-carved spaces, and the fact that I have the energy to carve them, and also for the baffling email from my insurance agency wishing me a happy birthday as if we’ve been through something together.

And I’m grateful for the privilege of being invited into some of your spaces.

Because at the end of the day, I hope to ease into another part of that poem: “Tell me, what else should I have done?” and know the answer is

“Nothing more.”

Thank goodness.

Thank goodness.

Gross and Fallible (Me). Brilliant and Difficult (Books).

Books, Humor, Reading, The Folio, Under 750

What I Read October 2025

I spent much of October being ill in the manner of a faintly tragic Victorian governess. Nothing grave, just an assortment of mortal inconveniences that showed my body is not so much a temple as it is a structurally unsound system of tubes and liquids, gross and fallible.

It should be noted that there is no angle from which this type of Camille-on-the-chaise illness is alluring. You cannot smoulder while blowing your nose.

By end of month, I expected some turn-of-the-century doctor with a pince-nez to prescribe a restorative stay by the sea. I would have gone. Gladly. I’d have even covered my pasty ankles for decency’s sake.

Still, between the tissues and the intermittent Byronic languor, I managed to read four books by people who are very good at doing the writing thing. (Also, SPOILER: Between illnesses, I GOT TO SEE COLSON WHITEHEAD LIVE! I’ll save that for another post when I have regained the ability to write about it in complete sentences that are more than “!!!!!!!!!!!”)

I haven’t written the individual reviews; those will eventually arrive (crosses fingers, appeals to the mercy of time gods). So for now, some thoughts on the books as a group. This is, by the way, not me asking the books to do group work. Group work is a scourge. I’m noticing what they did when they sat in the same room in my brain.

The books:

  • The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
  • Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut
  • A Stroke of the Pen by Terry Pratchett
  • Missing a Beat by Seymour Krim

Wildly different in form and structure, but all perform the same literary judo: they force a reader to look at history, absurdity, brutality, and ego-masquerading-as-culture. Three of them probe indelicately at the grand American myth that everything is fine and glorious, which is to say, the bootstrapped bald eagle stories America tells about itself in order to sleep.

By far the most…important, I think I want to say…of these books (and the best, I definitely want to say) was The Underground Railroad. Whitehead refuses to euphemize our history and natures. Vonnegut satirizes. Pratchett pokes at our soft spots, and Krim interrogates his disappointments in some sort of New Journalism version of an Individual and Society 101 course.

All four share an obsession with the ideas of story-as-power and language never being neutral. Who gets to define things? Whose suffering counts? Who gets to say what happened? Whose foolishness becomes legend? Whose story gets believed?

Moreover, what do we gain and lose by accepting these myths?

Pratchett regards myth as something humans compulsively produce to keep us comforted in our belief that we’re terribly wise or terribly tragic or, at the very least, the Main Character. A sort of psychological bubble wrap. The other three books, though, scrutinize the rather large and rickety myth called America, one shaped by power, violence, and selective memory. Race is a central pressure point in those three books, and the authors address it with varying degrees of authority, clarity, and moral handholds.

Whitehead writes starkly about the historical and ongoing realities of systemic racism, refusing euphemism or safe distance. His work is both expansive and claustrophobic. Violence often arrives without warning, as it does in life. It is brutal and brilliant and essential reading.

Vonnegut has characters use racial slurs to expose and criticize racist American thinking, and it lands sharply. It was unpleasant. Intentionally so. Yet that intention does not make the experience easy. Also intentional. There is a lot to unwrap in this book about racism, free will, and people-as-machines.

In several essays in this collection, Krim writes about Black culture from the outside, with a mix of admiration, projection, and longing that reveal (and sometimes perhaps widen) the gaps in his understanding and the limits of his perspective.

So, yeah, if I’m slow on getting the reviews out, it’s because I don’t want to just toss off some half-baked take while my skull is hosting a demolition derby. These books deserve deep analysis. I want to show up for that like a person who still has a functioning cortex.

Both my health and this blog are back on track. *Looks at calendar, sees what’s advancing over the horizon at an impolite jog* Well. Right. Onward, then. Let’s just agree to continue to do our best with as much dignity as we can reasonably fake.