Mock Catalog: 8 Signs You Might be a Peacock Person

1)      You are sitting outside with some friends, having some alcoholic beverages on your patio, which someone else put in, because who the hell does things for themselves? And it occurs to you that the only thing that would turn this party from good to awesome, in the way that beer does in amazing beer commercials is a peacock, and you start telling everyone around you about how pretty they look when their tails are all fluffed up. And at first, people are uncomfortable and try to turn the conversation to Newcastle or some local distillery, but you keep steering the conversation back to peacocks, to just how grand they are, until people start trickling away from the party leaving their imported beers behind and you with the capacious feeling of being alone.

2)      You’re at the zoo looking at some amazing animals, a lemur, or a snow leopard, or snow mist mountain cat, or river fishing cat with a hat, or a cat from the Andes who can ride a bike and whistle and catches its prey with fables and you are trying to pretend to be as interested as everyone else in watching this animal sleep away the afternoon. But suddenly, you can’t control yourself anymore. You track down the nearest zoo employee and say, “Where are the peacocks?” And then you bend their ear for twenty minutes talking about the various uses of peacocks in the courts of Egyptian Pharaohs.

3)       When your significant other is leaving the house you constantly suggest that they wear the peacock earrings that you bought them, and if they refuse, you ask if they’d at least wear the necklace. And if they refuse that you ask why they don’t love you anymore, and then ignore their response because animal planet is running a five minute special on peacocks.

4)      You find yourself reading the umpteenth article about achieving happiness, or not achieving happiness, or achieving happiness through a means that was previously unknown to this person, or redefining what happiness is, or defining what happiness is, or making balloon animals in order to find happiness, or what cloud shapes make people the happiest, and suddenly, it occurs to you that what would make you happy is a peacock.

5)      Any time you find yourself standing on, or looking at a large space of lawn, you immediately find yourself thinking about croquet and how awesome croquet is, and wouldn’t life be better if you just had a set of wickets? But why send someone? Why do that to someone else who is playing a nice game of croquet? Why does croquet have to be so cruel and like life? And then suddenly you realize that a giant peacock would probably soothe everyone playing a game of croquet with all of its beauty, and you’d all spend your time talking about how beautiful it was and forget to send each other’s croquet ball flying across the park, because who could hold on to any rancor in the face of such beauty?

6)      You find yourself watching NBC, which is terrible.

7)      Sometimes you lay awake at night and wonder if the peacock that you’re yearning for is a real peacock, or whether it’s something else, a symbol for something missing. You wonder if you ever really wanted a peacock, or whether you just wanted things to change, and whether that peacock was less a flesh and blood animal and more an emblem of change, a symbol of the sort of life that you might have lived. You try and remember if you’ve ever seen a real peacock. You know that you have but the image is now gone to you. You think of the women that you have loved, hair, eyes, etc., and you realize that even they are gone to you, who once seemed so essential. You think to yourself that if the peacock is anything, it is death, because that is the only thing that is not a symbol, a mirage, an eyelash, a brushing of lips under a canopy of trees in early spring, but a certainty. But you are sleepy, and these are the sort of thoughts that leave you near the edge of dreams.

8)      In your dreams you are walking a peacock on a leash as though it were a dog, if dogs were aesthetic marvels. The grass near the sidewalk is a burning emerald only achievable through the use of heavy, environmentally unfriendly, fertilizers. The sun overhead is not an abstraction. It is piece of heavy machinery building the architecture of your day. Everyone you walk past, regardless of race or age or political view is stunned by the perfected beauty of your peacock, which is, it is clear, a microcosm of the epic grandeur of God made manifest in the rest of the universe, but made real here, now, walking along at the edge of a short leash, splaying its tail feathers wide and shitting voluminously on the sidewalk. This evening, as the sun sets in the west, some golden ball dropping into the infinity of space, you will not wonder at the strangeness of the cosmos, the molecules that must come together to make Hydrogen, Oxygen, and you. Instead, you will slip deeper and deeper into the moment, holding a thin leash between your index and middle fingers, until you are submerged in it, everything around you, silent, present, and it will remind you of childhood, that moment when you dipped your whole head into the warm water and felt gloriously alone.