A Night With Mr. Owl

It was one night a couple of weeks ago, that I was climbing a tree in my neighborhood to visit my old friend...I was making my way up his tree when he started me by saying “HOOOO are you?...Hoo-Hoo, Hoo-Hoo”...I felt like I was trapped in a Who song and one I don’t particularly like, but I identified myself and he was like “Cool man, come on up to my humble abode brother.”...we exchanged greetings and opened up the bottle of Hennessey that I had brought along, you know in case we got thirsty...lit some incense and we talked about the old times, the bad times, the good times, the better times and all those times that seemed to fall in between...I didn’t ask him how many licks it took to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop...or he might have thrown me out of his tree...he had been reading some book or something by Burroughs and had just finished ‘The Philosophy of the Beat Generation’ by John Clellon Holmes...he peered at me over the top of his black rimmed glasses and asked me what I’d been reading lately...I said I’d been reading a lot on Twitter and Facebook, and he rolled his eyes and said “can’t you do better than that?...weren’t you reading Proust the last time we talked?”...I had started that literary adventure but it got a little too deep for me early on in chapter one and I gave up on that quest, so I changed the subject...he went and got a couple of glasses and we opened the bottle and began talking about a variety of subjects...inevitably, it got around to politics since this was his favorite subject but certainly not mine...he was an unabashed tree-hugging liberal as one might expect an owl to be...he wasn’t encouraged by the climate accord reached in Paris...he liked politics but distrusted most politicians...and he certainly wasn’t happy with the last guy that got elected…the last time he voted was for Bobby Kennedy in a state primary years ago and I don’t know how the hell he did that…we talked about what might have been, what should have been, and what could be and then he downed a handful of bugs he’d been saving...he offered me some but I po-litely declined...I’d already filled up on some beef jerky and barbecue potato chips I picked up at the liquor store...I told him I only like worms, preferably out of a tequila bottle or the gummy variety...we were both nocturnal so I knew it was going to be a late night…we finished the wine pretty quickly but fortunately he had some cold beer in his refrigerator that we started downing and if necessary, there was the beloved liquor store not far from his tree...there we were just kicking back, all nice and mellow when some thick smoke infiltrated our lungs...I didn’t see where it was coming from, but he did that creepy owl neck rotation thing...he said there were some “stupid humans, you know, some of your kind” that had built a fire nearby...I profusely apologized for the inconvenience of my ilk and said we could go back to my place if he wanted, but he said he was hungry for a good steak sandwich with some onions and asked if I knew any places that would be open this late...I didn’t, so we would up at a convenience store and grabbed a couple of rat taquitos which we ate outside sitting on the curb of the dirty parking lot full of dirty people with dirty lives...after washing them down with some cheap beer (the Hennessey was already gone), and a couple of cigars (White Owl of course), we parted ways and he flashed a peace sign as he flew away into the starry starry night.