Nature's Little Schizophrenic

I lived in Southern California for almost a decade and when people ask me what the worst part of living out there was they almost always assume that I'll snap back with the obligatory response of earthquakes, fires, mudslides and traffic. It almost always comes as a shock when I look them straight in the eyes and tell them it was the mockingbirds; those little under achieving language learners of the sky whose retarded stream of consciousness drive men to eat the business end of shotguns.
I lived in Del Mar. It is one of the most affluent and stunningly beautiful communities on the face of the planet. Snuggled tight against the ocean to its tits and dry ritzy hills to its ass, it is a place where the surf bum and the filthy rich rub sunscreen and Armani-covered shoulders. I happened to luck out by finding a dirt-cheap house to rent amidst the million dollar shacks. The reason it was so cheap was because the landlady, a demented little woman, chose to leave the 50’s era, military style apartment house “as is”. She considered it charming. Well, “charming” was one way to put it. However, I found that fighting mice for a place on the couch and dancing around frogs that would pop out of the detached bathtub drain fell a little bit outside the realm of charm. But considering I lived to surf and its location directly across the street from the beach I bought into the whole “charm” thing and bit my tongue.
The little fucker came in the spring. At first I thought it novel to be awakened every morning at sunrise by the sounds of various birds chirping right outside my window. It gave a sense of closeness to nature that would otherwise have been vacant being so close to the seagull infested shore. Within a few days, however, I began to wonder why these birds seemed to wait until the other had finished its calls before the next one began. Never were they in harmony. It was like an open-mic night with a constant turnstile of variety. One morning I hastily opened the window because it sounded like someone was sodomizing the neighbor’s cat only to find a single shitty, gray brown bird sitting on the arm of a low-slung juniper tree creating the god-awful racket. Being only five feet away I scared it off with the wave of a hand. But it returned…every day…at sunrise. At first I began by tossing a handful of pennies from a jar a kept near the window but eventually resorted to throwing object with more substance; a water glass, books and even a stale burrito. Nothing worked. No hint was taken. It simply returned the next morning. The little bastard was driving me insane and my neighbor was getting rich off discarded projectiles tossed into his yard from my window.
One morning, after a month of this I decided to cut down the tree and you know what? It worked. I lived happily in that house for the next year. When I finally moved a mile up the coast (the frogs finally won out) I ended up in a posh house surrounded by dozens of huge junipers and the very first morning I was there I was awakened by dozens of mockingbirds chattering outside my window. To this day I still hate Gregory Peck.