I did. She said I was doing the right thing.

I was walking down the aisle at Ledano’s Supermarket, and that’s where I met Clucky. Most people might not have spotted Clucky, but then most people haven’t seen Jeffrey Vallance’s brilliant, slim book, Blinky: The Friendly Hen.

Vallance describes meeting Blinky at the supermarket. He brought her home, then prepared her for a proper burial at a pet cemetery. Many years later, he had Blinky exhumed to determine her cause of death. That’s fowl amore!

Had it not been for Vallance’s insights, I might never have spotted Clucky among the neatly stacked row of chickens. She looked so delicate and so inviting that I decided—without hesitation—to bring her home.

I knew from talking with my late Uncle Russ, who worked as a government meat inspector, that Clucky’s last bath was probably in a foul rinse of fecal broth. And so, I prepared a hot bath for Clucky immediately after returning to my studio. I could feel Clucky’s muscles loosen as I lowered her into the steaming water. As she relaxed, I gently reached into her clammy body cavity to remove her neck, heart, gizzard, and heart. And that’s when I discovered that my intuitive response to Clucky was correct.

Clucky had two hearts. There they were, right in the palm of my hand. Clucky the Plucky Chicken had two hearts!

I decided to become one with Clucky. Of course, both bestiality and necrophilia were out of the question, even in San Francisco. (Except, of course, in certain neighborhoods.) And so I decided to have Clucky as my dinner guest. Or, more accurately, as my dinner.

Clucky, who I’ve renamed Clucky the Plucky Chicken, is now inside of me. She’ll never be cold again.

“Did I wake you up?” he asked.

“No, the phone was ringing before our conversation,” I explained.

“I thought you said you were a morning person,” Randall responded skeptically.

“I am,” I replied. “I’m also a believer in Einstein’s theory of relativity, which teaches us that some mornings begin after noon.”

“Well, I’m relatively thirsty,” Randall said, “so I do believe that it’s time for a tipple.”

No one could argue with that, so I didn’t.

I didn’t think much about the incident until tonight, when my burrito had disturbing petroleum overtones. I wonder if my chicken burrito is really a seagull burrito?

Hay caramba! I suffocated the offensive odors in an ocean of spicy salsa, so I suppose things aren’t that bad after all.

“Sorry, no leads,” Dr. Lyon replied. “I’m volunteering on Thanksgiving to feed children and their families who can’t go home because a child is hospitalized.”

“I should have been more clear,” I explained. “I was looking for a second celebration after I was done cleaning up from the banquet I prepared for homeless quadriplegic orphans.”

“Good luck, Saint David,” was the last thing she said before she turned off her phone.

“David, you know as well as I do that you could do a really cringy cringe reading if you wanted to,” she said.

“Not really,” I replied. “I was telling the truth when I wrote that I destroyed my tawdry teen archives decades ago.”

“You don’t have to be a teenager to cringe,” Rebecca responded. “I’m thinking of your first encounter with Anonymous’s daughter.”

I cringed when she said that; I remembered the horrific incident perfectly. I was visiting Anonymous’s farm, when I saw his wife with an grotesquely obese young woman.

“Looks likes she overdosed on ugly pills,” I observed.

“That’s my daughter,” Anonymous replied matter-of-factly replied.

I looked for a rock big enough to hide under, but there were none. And to make matters worse, my friend was gracious and forgiving.

And so, it turns out that Rebecca was right. And worse, I can come up with even cringier stories now that I think about it.

That explains everything!

Well, not everything as such, but it does shed light on the popularity of (c)rap music: it’s a generational thing. I never saw the preschoolers’ program, and so I was never programmed to appreciate insipid, inane rhymes.

I wrote a (c)rap song to torture my New York City hosts twenty years ago; it’s held up well. It seems as laughably asinine now as it did when I wrote it a couple of decades ago.

HampeRap No. 1

I had a bad assignment
hadda go to New York City,
where the air is bad
and the climate is shitty.

Had to shoot a band
called the Grateful Dead,
They music be so bad
That it hurt my head.

I thought there’s only one way
that the job could be fun,
that’s if I didn’t use my Nikons
and instead I brought a gun.

But it wasn’t very long
that I be feelin’ illin’,
When I figgered I could see some gals
who never be mean or chillin’.

I’m rappin’ ’bout some beauties
named the wild sisters Hamper,
So when I give ’em all a call,
they say “we’d love to have you camp here.”

So I show up with some wine
I also bring along some beer,
but they say “don’t be such a dickhead,
’cause that stuff don’t bring us cheer.”

To make this rappin’ story short
I had a real far out time,
just a fool and three good friends
and some jivin’ crap that rhymes.

So if you gotta go to to New York
and you wanna have successes,
just avoid the Grateful Dead
and check out the gals with wild tresses.

Check it out.
Check it out.
Check it out.
Check it out.
Check it out.

Dang; reading that still makes me wince with embarrassment. Maybe (c)rap music has some perverted flavor of longevity after all?