So I had an allergy attack this afternoon (as usual), and had to take a long nap. When I woke up, I heard a faint “bock,” — and this is what I saw. My wife Julie and her co-conspirator friend Ashley Fox-Smith put a rooster in the bedroom. Me being a modern person, I grabbed my iPhone off the bedside table. That would be my mattress in the lower left corner.

A rooster! Who does that to they poor chronically fatigued husband?

UPDATE: So Julie loaded the rooster in his crate into the SUV so I could return it to Ronnie Morgan in Starhill. A couple minutes later, I got into the truck … and there was the rooster, out of his crate, poking around in the back. 

We crated him again, and I drove out to Starhill and left him on Ronnie’s back doorstep. I went to my mom and dad’s across the road and called Ronnie.

“You probably don’t realize this,” I told him, “but somebody has done a terrible thing to you and me. While I was sleeping, someone put a rooster in a crate in my bedroom. It was one of yours, no doubt stolen from your chicken yard. Go look out your back door. I’ve brought your son back to you. You’re welcome.”

“Hawww, this ain’t right,” Ronnie said. “Julie said she wanted a chicken for dinner. I brought her one.”

“You didn’t say it was going to be alive!” I said.

“I was trying to help y’all understand where chicken comes from,” he said. “You don’t want to learn how to live in the country? You refuse my generosity? This is a terrible, terrible thing. A terrible thing.”

By then I could hardly stop laughing.

“Oh, it’s on now,” he said.

“Is that a threat?” I said.

“It ain’t no threat. It’s a fact!”

We said our goodbyes, and I looked across the living room where my dad was chortling.

“You better get ready now,” he said. “No telling what’s liable to happen to you now that you got Ronnie started. He’s got 12 cockerels over there to get rid of.”

Remember, Ronnie was the guy I blogged about last year who put a dress on a blow-up sex doll and stuck her on a pole in his garden as a scarecrow. He’ll do anything. If you saw the BBC video (click on the photo at the top of this piece), you’ve met Ronnie.

I might wake up in the morning with five cockerels crowing in my backyard.