Bird, bird, bird
Can you imagine what kind of personality you’d have if you could run away almost magically, as soon as you felt like it, no matter the situation?
You’ve just imagined what it’s like to be a bird.1 No sense of propriety, decorum, proportion. Don’t like something? Date going poorly, perhaps? Take to the heavens! Find somewhere new! Erratic little shits.
What an apt slur. For oh, how they shit.
The white stuff is uric acid. That’s how they get rid of extra nitrogen: as an opaque solid.2 The donation goes unappreciated; the Earth already has lots of nitrogen for the taking. The atmosphere is mostly nitrogen! And despite a bird’s relative lack of chill, it does enjoy atmosphere. Though, its poop’s paleness isn’t proximally from the proceeds of the troposphere; it’s the product of protein passing through the cursed gut of the thing, starting inward from the clickety little beak on its freaky little face.
You (yes, you) also have extra nitrogen to be rid of. Haven’t you noticed? You discard it as urea though, not as uric acid. Urea likes to be wet, so you can leak it out.
Some skin creams have urea in them. And because urea likes to be wet, it pulls water into your skin, which makes it feel softer.
I guess it might go without saying, but do not urinate on yourself in place of conventional skincare.3
The martlet is a bird without feet. It isn’t real, though. A mythical ornithical. According to Wikipedia, it “never roosts from the moment of its drop-birth until its death fall; martlets are proposed to be constantly on the wing. This condition is an allegory for continuous effort”.
Relatable.
A martlet is a sort of beacon of virtue. I especially respect that it never insinuates its unorthodox body into terrestrial affairs.
Can you tell that I’m trying to find my authorial voice? Leeleeleeleelee!
Unfortunately, I’ll never tweet as well as a bird. My ancestors grew a larynx, which is basically a flute made of a couple of muscle-tensioned sheets of meat. Revolutionary, at the time. A bird, on the other hand, has a syrinx. This means it has two flutes instead of one, with meat that jiggles even faster than ours can.
I’m not jealous. The Earth already has lots of meat for the taking. Now, if only I weren’t terminally confused about whether I should be a vegan...
Birds have better lungs than us. Is there no end to the humiliation?4
Our lungs are made of many little bags that fill and unfill with air. The air in the middle of the bag isn’t absorbed very well on account of being in buttfuck nowhere, alveolarly speaking.
Birds, in an act of utterly smugly insufferable evolution, developed the following solution: they pull the air into bigger bags, which absorb nothing, then push it out of the bags and through a series of tubes. Blood vessels run across the tubes. Something something physics, something something higher ceiling on the amount of oxygen absorbed.
This setup is really helpful to birds because of how much time they spend in flight, away from everything and everyone, at unconscionably hypoxic altitudes.5
For a similar reason, birds also have stronger hearts than us.
Ugh. It’s enough to turn you into a conflict theorist.
Time to smash some sparrows, perhaps?
Most birds, anyway.
Uric acid doesn’t dissolve well in water, but that’s to be expected. Wells usually don’t dissolve in water, or they wouldn’t be very good wells. Good wells? I repeat myself.
Unless your urine happens to be hand lotion. Who am I to judge?
It almost makes me feel okay about the massive human experiments into chicken concentration camps.
It also has the unsettling implication that a bird, if it had voluntary control over its breathing muscles, might be able to take in a breath well before it decides to push it through the tubes and extract oxygen from it.