Fluffy, my parakeet, isn't very good at containing his feelings. Something had him perturbed the other morning. But since he seems fond of being perturbed, and does it so well, I was reluctant to try lifting his spirits.

He groaned through the morning news and actually harrumphed a couple of times at the editorial page from his reading perch which doubles as the nose bridge on my reading glasses. He likes to read along with me from up there, a habit to which he continues to subscribe despite my protests. Over time, however, I have trained myself not to look up at the bobbing underside of his beak and make myself cross-eyed.

The practice is fraught with other personal risk. I seldom escape a reading of Sunday's paper without sustaining some form of minor facial laceration. There is nothing downy about razor sharp tail feathers, especially when being wielded by their frenzied owner as he reads what he perceives to be an anti-aviary editorial by a "conspicuously un-wing-ed" press. Fluffy always makes "unwinged" an accusatory, three syllable word. I'm thinking of buying a hockey mask.

My eyebrows never did grow back in properly after a story about pigeon eradication appeared in a 1997 edition of the New York Times. Fluffy refers to such views as blatantly "pro-statuary".

But I knew he was baiting me this time. I told myself that no matter how petulant he grew there was no way I was going to ask him what was wrong because that is exactly what he wanted me to do. On that point I stood resolute and unyielding as the Rock of Gibraltar.

"So what's wrong, Fluffy?" I asked.
"It isn't fair."
"What isn't?"
"You guys being in charge."
"Us guys?" I asked.
"Humans. You're ill equipped."

I knew he was leading me somewhere I didn't want to go but I was on a bobsled ride to Parakeetville. There was no turning back.

"Ill equipeed for what?" I asked.
"For anything." He said.

We sat in silence for a time. Fluffy furrowed his brow. A distant look came to his eye.

"I don't understand why God lets humans be in charge." Fluffy said as he fluttered over to the globe I keep on my desk. He landed near the north pole and examnined the earth from there, longitudinally.

"Just look at the world around you. I think you came from another planet. You just don't fit in with the other life forms here."
"We don't?"
"Nope." Fluffy said. "Look at this. Three-fifths of the globe is water. Right?"
"I guess."
"So in most of the world the fishes are better off than you."
"Well..."

Fluffy flapped his wings triple time in his best imitation of a hummingbird. He knows I hate it when he does that. I'm picking up pin feathers for a week afterwards. Still he did his best to hover around the globe while stabbing at various topographical features with his beak.

"Half of the remainder is comprised of polar ice cap, hostile mountain range or scorching desert. Humans are pretty much helpless in all of these."
"That's true."
"Twelve hours of every twenty-four, you are plunged into total darkness and are blind as bats without your flashlights. True?"
"I'm afraid it is." I admitted.
"On the tiny portion of habitable real estate left, you must compete for food and shelter during daylight hours with a host of superior animals who can see in the dark, out-run, out-sting, and out-bite you."

Fluffy was on a roll.

"You pathetically try to redeem yourselves by insisting that you are their intellectual superior yet none of them feel compelled to push weeds into their mouths, set the other end on fire, inhale deeply and declare the result pleasurable."
"Yeah but..." I didn't have anything to say. I was just trying to break his momentum. Fat chance.

"Even if you do manage to outmaneuver those rivals you must fend off onslaughts of lightning, tornadoes, volcanoes and earthquakes, all of which Mother Nature casts in your path lest you relax and start to feel welcome here. Then, if all that wasn't enough, each twenty years or so, you decide to have a war and start kiling each other in new and creative ways. Are you beginning to see my point?"

Fluffy fluttered back and landed, perched on the top edge of the paper I had been reading, facing me nose-to-beak.

"I think so." I reluctantly admitted.
"I believe God is trying to tell you something."
"And that would be?"
"Go back to Pluto and leave the parakeets in charge." Fluffy suggested.
"I don't guess they could do much worse with it than we have." I admitted.
"Ever hear of a Parakeet Jihad?" Fluffy asked.
"There is no such thing as a Parakeet Jihad." I told him.
"That's all I'm sayin'." Fluffy said.