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October 17, 2022

Recently, someone of low testosterone and, it would seem, low I.Q., opined after reading one of my political screeds that I was one “weird, sick, old duck!”

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And in a blinding instant, like when marauding FBI goons throw flashbangs into the foyer of some septuagenarian pro-lifer they’re abusing for the edification of others, I realized that that low-T lowlife was right!

Not because I’ve always been an outlier to the human race, or the fact that my lungs and pancreas are currently in a race to do me in, or that I’m currently enjoying my seventieth orbit around the sun.  No, what I realized when confronted by a whiny lib half my age whom I could break in half on a bad day, is this: I am a duck!

A mallard, to be precise.

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My new name is Donald Duckworth, and my pronouns are l’orange and confit.

Why I fought my lifelong feeling that I’d been mis-specied, I can’t tell you.  Suffice it to say that when I first viewed Donald Duck cartoons as a young child, I remember feeling that a vast chasm existed between me and my primate-centric family.  When Donald would speak in his barely intelligible duck accent, I would silently quack back, ashamed that those hairy apes I lived with might judge me.  This was no doubt responsible for my lifelong speech impediment.

And when Daisy Duck appeared on screen, I felt a stirring in my pre-pubescent loins.  She was typically featured wearing high heels, a solid-colored top, a hairbow, a bangle and…no pants!  You wanna talk about the deleterious effects of pornography on young children?

Later in life, I would dream of flying high above the earth and looking down on all those grunting, chest-thumping, knuckle-dragging primates known as humans.  When I told my therapist this, she said dreams of flying were really rather common, to which I replied, “Yeah, but does everyone else periodically quack and worry that he’s gradually losing his tail feathers?”

“Um, no, they don’t,” she said, making a mallard-phobic face and snacking on some fruit, which probably explains my lifelong aversion to bananas.

As a teen, now hiding the National Geographic issue on duck migration (featuring totally nude ducks!) under my mattress, I began to grow feathers.