Today marks the fourth anniversary of the day I found a beak. It was lying on the porch of the University of Pittsburgh’s Cathedral of Learning, slightly out of the way, its origins a mystery. There were no signs of a struggle, no indication that someone’s precious Mister Whiskers had been starting shit. The scene of the apparent crime was devoid of feathers and blood; there was only the beak.
My friends have heard this story more times than I care to count, due mostly to the fact that they kept introducing Horatio and me to people who hadn’t heard it yet. If I end up following Horatio and Princess Wolfsbane to New York next year, I’ll find plenty of opportunities to tell it again. As stories go, it’s something of an attention-getter. Disgusting though it may be, finding a beak, sans bird, is just weird enough to make an audience curious.
Weirder than finding a beak, as this audience soon learns, is the fact that no one else found it first. As far as I know, nobody else even noticed it. I admit it was a few yards from most of the foot traffic, but the Cathedral porch was (and remains) a popular spot to stand around and talk with your friends, or at least smoke with them. Still, even with all these potential witnesses, none of them took notice of the beak in their midst.
Once I realized what I was looking at, something– call it madness– compelled me to stake out the area and point out the oddity to whoever I thought would listen. It wasn’t long before I ran into an acquaintance of mine, a bit of a dick really, and one of his friends, and introduced them to the beak. After a few dull minutes of trying to explain to them why this was awesome, I found a more sympathetic audience in the form of Horatio and Captain Fun and told them of my discovery.
They could dig it. We set to work.
We drew a chalk shrine around the site where the beak was discovered and maintained it for several months afterward, even when the janitors washed it away on a near-daily basis. We wrote ridiculous scriptures detailing the mystical history of the beak. We started capitalizing the word “Beak.” We added nearly everyone we knew to our ranks. We devised a Beakly calendar. We clashed with the campus police on several occasions, mostly due to our (washable) vandalism and our attempts to sacrifice a potato to the Beak. It was all very silly, but it certainly felt like we were accomplishing something.
Four years later, on the fifth Day of the Beak, what has become of these young prophets-to-be? Why did we tone down the goofy mysticism? How the hell did we all manage to graduate? How could people who were already so bitter become so bitter? Why didn’t we sell out and live off the T-shirt money? Didn’t we have a band at one point in there? In short, did we fail?
Of course I’ll say we didn’t. We’re all still alive, more or less, and the handful of us who still care about the Beak have tried to lead lives in line with the philosophy we established. That’s very Zen of us and all, but when a movement is as new as ours we should probably focus on increasing our profile. Finding a comfortable worldview is nice, but it does sort of keep you from winning converts with mystical bullshit and garish rituals. Maybe we should re-open our propaganda wing.
There’s been positive stuff too, of course. We’ve been called the heirs of the Discordian movement, for crying out loud! Considering our admiration for the Discordians (and their always-awesome goddess Eris), this is both a tremendous honor and a huge amount of pressure. In forty years, will the lovable freaks of the world pass our books around once they’ve retired the bong for the evening? Does that mean we’ll have to write some books?
Writing a book about this stuff doesn’t seem too terrible, nor does taking modern-day Discordians to task for failing to continue the decidedly cool work of their forebears. Then again, we’ve made promises like that every year (usually in private) and have yet to keep them.
If we absolutely must make a statement, let’s just say we’re at a crossroads. No matter which way we go, we’ll end up somewhere Beakly; the real mystery is how long it will take before we get the actual work done.
And if that isn’t the definition of the Way of the Beak, I don’t know what is.
