On balance and bird feeders

maybe I have something to learn from Marty Byrde

I wanted to see the bluebirds every day and I threw off the delicate balance of squirrel to bird ratio.

We’re sitting in front of the windows that face the backyard, drinking coffee. It’s late already. The sun is fully up over the horizon line across the street and is just now illuminating the trees beyond the fence. Our recent snowfall has melted a bit, and enough days have passed so that the bird feeder is surrounded by a moat of dirty ground and brownish snow, and littered with chewed-up sunflower seed shells.

“Get the hell off!” I shout, hammering my bare hand against the glass. I’ve only been out of bed for a mere half hour and already I’m filled with instant rage. I think some of it scares my spouse Janyce who is sitting in the chair beside me with my computer on her lap trying to work on cancelling our most recent Wayfair order. Two furniture purchases are going back. One console table is gassing off a chemical odor in the basement right now. I stand watching at the window with clenched teeth as five gray squirrels scamper about below the feeder. One of them proudly figured out a way to springboard from the ground right past the baffle and now creeps up the pole to acrobatically hang upside down, gnawing ferociously at the new suet feeder I hung for the bluebirds.

“I’m going out there,” I say. “Look at how smug he is.”

“You’re anthropomorphizing,” says Janyce.

“I am not. This is war,” I say.

On my way out to the garage, I step in the plate of food we left on the kitchen rug for our old dog, who is having trouble eating from out of a bowl now, and we’ve taken to a new practice of placing distinct visible chunks of his elder dog food on a plastic plate. He doesn’t eat it up enthusiastically anymore. He eats like a cat, whenever he feels like it, and only if it smells suitable. Most days it doesn’t.

I read something the other day in one of my many newsletters. It said: “Use learned optimism to lessen the sting of a setback.” Basically, it’s a way of hacking your brain. The writer, Shanna Loga, suggests using this technique to radically change the thought you were just having, The damn squirrel thinks he can outsmart me, does he? from the personal to the impersonal. The squirrel doesn’t care about me, it is going after that giant peanut butter orb hanging from the sky.

Then you go a step further with this reframing technique and take your thought away from the permanent, I will never get the squirrel off, and change that to something impermanent. If I remove the peanut butter orb, it will get tired of climbing for no reward.

Finally, the third step is to remove your thought from the pervasive, My idyllic bird feeder scene outside is now a mess and ruined forever. And change that to the specific. I will use the small rake to clean up the birdseed. This is a simple fix.

We’ve been watching an old Netflix series that we missed the first time around. It actually gives me anxiety to watch it, but I’m finding that I can’t really stop now that we’ve started. I texted my son in Nashville the other day. “OMG what am I doing watching OZARK!”

He instantly texted back. “Haha I know. It’s crazy just hang in there. Isn’t it good, though?”

I have to admit, it’s both good and bad. Violent and a bit funny. Mesmerizing and far fetched. I’m both horrified at the downward spiral of this suburban family sucked up into a life of drug cartels and money laundering and one lie after another, and in complete envy of how the dad in the family, Marty Byrde, can think his way out of any situation. I’m in awe of how he has mastered the art of hacking his own brain.

But see, here’s the thing with this show, no matter how good the family is at compartmentalizing, reframing the situation, and moving forward, the overall balance in their life is off. And it’s going badly. I can relate. On the one hand, Janyce and I have to work fast, buying up item after item, without thinking about any of it too much. Our goal is to fill up an entire cottage in a matter of weeks so that we can hit the photography deadline and rent the house this summer. At first this was fun. But now I’m getting a little queasy. Some of the products we have ordered are cheap and made with suspect materials. I should have realized that my winning streak of online shopping in my pajamas by my idyllic bird feeder window was going to end and it would mean I would need to start over.

I got greedy with the bird feeders, too. I wanted to see the bluebirds every day and I threw off the delicate balance of squirrel to bird ratio. The peanut butter suet ball is much too enticing to them.

The weather forecast is calling for snow tomorrow, “a quick-hitting snowfall during the day Sunday, wrapping up during the evening.” Perfect. Just enough to cover everything in a clean wash of white and start again.