Week 26

Birds, birds and more birds.

Hi Friends,

So, in a disheartening turn of events, for the last two weeks this email has been going to the Promotions tab in my Gmail. There’s something humiliating in the fact that Gmail doesn’t think I’ll enjoy seeing my own thoughts, but I figure if this is happening to me with my own newsletter, then it’s probably happening to others as well.

I’ve tried to figure out why it’s happening but nobody knows why Google makes the decisions they do, the best I could find is some steps you can try to take. So if this is happening to you and you would like to try something, the internet suggests dragging the email over to your Primary inbox and also responding to this email or interacting with it somehow. Clicking on the pictures might do it. I’ll put some polls in here also, sprinkled throughout. You might have to do it for a couple of weeks in a row or something. The absolute best thing you could do is to add this email address to your Google Contacts. You can do that here and just add stacygougoulis@substack.com in there. See how you go.

Okay, sorry about that. I usually like to put the comic right up top so you don’t have to scroll past disgusting words.

Earlier this week, my friend Keir burst through the door, desperate to tell us about a disturbing interaction he’d had with a bird. A white pigeon with distinctive grey stripes had followed him for an hour as he walked his dog around the park near his home in Reservoir. He didn’t think much of it until he was driving to the city and as he was passing through Brunswick a white pigeon with distinctive grey markings landed on the bonnet of his car (!!) Spooky, right?

It sparked a lot of discussion. We covered all angles like:

Had anyone close to him died recently and was now trying to send him a message? — No.

Could it have been a homing pigeon that simply thought Keir looked like “home”? — Maybe.

Was it possible that someone he knew had Animorphed into a pigeon, forgotten to change back within the one-hour limit, and was now permanently trapped in pigeon form — and had chosen Keir as the person most likely to connect the dots and help them? — Hopefully not, as they would have been extremely disappointed.

Then Keir said, “I don’t really believe in supernatural things, but it is strange that the only two experiences I’ve had that brush up against that have been with birds. Don’t you remember the owl at Jes and Alex’s wedding?”

And of course we did, we remembered the owl that swooped down and perched on the fence of the tennis court while Alex was giving his speech about how much he missed his late mother and wished she could have been there.

Talking about all this left us in a sombre, thoughtful mood until someone pretended to hear a bird tap-tap-tapping at the window and the spell was broken and we could begin playing Playstation.

And I might have forgotten about that but for the events of the comic above, which happened just a couple of days later.

Now I keep wondering whether that pigeon—the white one with the distinctive grey markings—was trying to send a message of its own. Maybe it wanted to be caught and have someone unwind a strangling hair from its foot. Maybe it simply wanted to be held. Keir could have become a guy who carries a pigeon on his shoulder, but he turned away from the call. It really makes you wonder how many opportunities we let pass us by in life.

This Week I Learned…

Sticking with the bird theme: macaws can blush. I learned this actually a couple of weeks ago at a friend’s 40th during her speech. I think she was using it as an example of a strange thing she remembers when so much else fades away. Still, it’s a pretty good thing to remember.