Playing Chicken

I hate chickens.  

Don't get me wrong, I love eating them...  
In fact, I think my hatred of them as an animal just makes my love for eating them all the sweeter.  

And you know what?  
They started it.  

Actually, I have no idea how it started.  I just know that as a child, I didn't like seeing chickens unless they were fully cooked.  Their eyes creeped me out.  

To add to this, my fear of enormous animals led to a chicken... maybe a rooster, actually, mocking me.  

Let me explain that one.

Because I was afraid to ride the horse, the owners of said horse placed the fowl on said large animal to show me that I was more chicken than the chicken.  

Screw that chicken.

Mind you, my mom has fond memories of a rooster named Elvis.  He started as one of those dangerously dyed pretty colored chicks for Easter (which we don't celebrate) and grew up instead of dying from the poison or just a general failure of the average child to take care of a chicken.  

But this was not my personal experience.  

Chickens creep me out.  

I'm a big fan of Ripley's Believe it Or Not, and generally we're all good... 

And then there was this: 

Instead of dying like it was supposed to, this guy stayed alive without a head for years.  He was fed through the neck hole. 

A. Why would you ever do this to a living creature?  Just kill the fucking thing.

B. I cannot respect anything that can keep on walking around while missing that much of it's head, and all of it's basic thinking brain parts.  

Also, there was the "Big, Scary Chicken" incident...

I wrote about that already a bit here. 

Eventually, my well meaning friends started calling me by making chicken noises.  
This was actually unrelated to my hatred of chickens, oddly enough, and just that my legal name sounded like a chicken when said in the most obnoxious way possible to utter a sound.

This was made even worse when I left for the other side of the country and lived next to a bunch of chickens.  

I'd wake up thinking they were calling me.  

Guh.

You know, I actually have a lot of chicken stories...  

But I'll leave it at this one last part... 

My first real meeting of Rob's mother was a thing.  

Lovely lady.  I like her a lot.  

One of the first things we talked about was how she wanted a pet-

And I responded with, 

*Note:  Eyebrows thickened for emphasis* 

I actually said the word "veto" at a woman I was just meeting and trying to impress.  

I immediately regretted it, thinking I'd be thrown out, stoned, and/or burned alive, but she just chuckled and asked why...  

...and I went on to tell her all about the crap on this very post.