Max Riffner

The Parlor

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Owls on the Road

Yesterday, after my brother helped me clean out my disgusting gutters filled with decaying plant matter (we are talking black), I started mowing the lawn. My last tree is dropping its leaves finally, and as I looked up at it, and down at the dead pile of gutter crap on the sidewalk, I was suddenly reminded that one day I would die. All of these smells, sweat, the cold breeze in my face, it would all be gone sometime in the future. It is always sobering to be suddenly reminded of your mortality.

I sat in the garage with the door open last night, sucking down a beer and enjoying a great cigar while reading the HOW Design Business Annual and Friday Night Lights.

This morning, I saw something dead in the road. It was an owl. I had never seen one up close in a non-captivity setting. It was beautiful; it must not have been dead too long because it just looked unconscious. Its talons were curled close, just at its eyes, and his majestic plumage moved with the stiff morning wind on the grey morning. As I turned the corner, I wished that it had left a damn big dent in the driver’s grill, and I thought it was cool that if it had to go, that it left a good looking corpse.

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