Idle Concerns

I worry sometimes about seagulls - I wonder if that's even an appropraite name for them anymore, watching their teeming hordes prancing stiltedly across parking lots miles and sometimes entire states away from anything even vaguely resembling a sea. Even if their bodies have managed to adapt to such a lifestyle, it can't be psychologically healthy for them to be trapped so far from their namesake.

Do mother seagulls whisper to their nestlings of a time so long ago that it has slowly become birdy myth, when the grey speckles on their wings were echoed in churning white-capped waves beneath them? Can their tiny brains encompass a collective unconscious that holds images of endlessly churning water, and the taste of salt and fish? And if so, do they long for a return to that core state, endlessly promising future generations that they will be the ones to reclaim their birthright, spurning this unnaturally solid and motionless world for one that rocks them gently and sings them to sleep with the sound of water on stone that nurtures a sea-creature's soul in ways that dry land never can?

Or, perhaps, do they see themselves as conquerors of a new world, abandoning watery uncertainty for a life of ease and luxury? Have they willingly traded white caps on black oceans for white dividers on an asphalt parking-lot sea, and, surveying their domain from telephone poles and rooves, think the change dear but worthwhile as they feast on human detritus and think us the fools for abandoning it to them?

Or am I just far too bent on taking an incredibly dim bird and turning it into an excuse to abuse a metaphor well past the point of sanity?