First off, I’m a tortoise, you moron: Testudo hermanni. Not a fucking turtle. Get it straight, finally: Greek land tortoise. Protected species. That’s why I have my own freaking passport, and papers proving I was born here in Austria and not, say, Greece and smuggled into the country in someone’s kid’s luggage. If I hear “turtle” one more time, I’m going to take another giant shit in your kitchen and step in it and do another Jackson Pollack all over your white tile floor.

Have you ever had one of those days that start out nice, you know, the sun is shining warm and a human puts you in the flower bed out in front of the house but unfortunately they put big rocks in all the holes by the fence so you can’t book the hell out of there and escape, so you make the most of it by nibbling the lettuce and catching some rays on the sun-warmed slate tiles, and then a little shade under the wilting tulip leaves or the thicket of helianthus growing wild and then you see it: the world’s biggest protein pellet? And you stretch your beak as wide open as it’ll go and take a big bite thinking, man, week’s worth of protein? Only it turns out to be someone’s dessicated turd, a dog or more likely one of those fucking cats that keep waiting for the human to turn his back so they can see what this camoflagued shell on legs is all about, or maybe that rodent-like thing that nibbles the cars’ electrical wiring systems at night? Only by the time you realize this it’s too late, and you have this rock-hard piece of shit stuck in your beak and you can’t spit it out, and you can’t bite it off and swallow it, and you can’t open your beak any wider to get rid of it and you can barely retract your head into the shell while you think about what to do other than choke, and once your head’s retracted you can’t fucking get it back out again so there you are wandering around blind, head stuck in shell, mouth stretched as wide as it’ll go around this huge piece of dried turd, bumping into things until you’re stuck there finally between a rock and a tulip stem with a red cat two paces away, watching? Let me tell you what it’s like: as much as you hate being picked up, when a human finally notices that you’re not just fooling around, but choking, and picks you up and carries you into the kitchen and starts trying to pull the turd back out, and pieces break off instead but he keeps trying and finally the whole damn thing comes out finally, you know what that’s like? It’s a good feeling, let me tell you. And when you can finally stick your head back out, and he tickles you under your throat and puts you back out into the lettuce patch, fucking priceless. The moral of the story is, if a delicious-looking protein pellet is bigger than your head, it’s probably a turd.