Right now, I feel like I’ve been handed a bag of roosters. Or rather, for the past few years, I’ve been collecting roosters, and now my bag is so full I can no longer hold on to it. My job is to categorise the roosters, to tame them, to organise them into something that resembles order, and to keep them physically and mentally healthy, well-fed, and housed in a location where they won’t destroy their surroundings or drive people insane with their pre-dawn cock-a-doodle-doo-ing.

Each rooster has a name, a function, and though I haven’t fully worked it out yet, some roosters may need relocating, i.e., I don’t actually need them. They don’t serve my purpose. That’s where the first step, the categorisation of the roosters, is essential. Once I’ve gone through this step, then I will have less roosters to deal with, and the steps that follow should flow almost intuitively.

The problem is that the roosters don’t keep still. They keep jumping about, changing positions, messing themselves about, and trashing the bag. Some parts of the bag are threadbare. Others have holes. The roosters are picking at the holes, making them bigger. Soon, one or more of the holes will be so big that I won’t be able to stem a max exodus of roosters from what remains of the tattered mess.

To add another level of complexity, the bag of roosters is not the only thing on which I have to focus. While dealing with the roosters, I’m also driving a bus. The bus has several people on it who, understandably, are on the bus because they have somewhere to go. Each of these people will get off the bus at a predetermined time. Some of them will get back on later, though that is not information to which I’m privy, or over which I have any control. So my job is to get the bus to the different stops without falling too far behind schedule. The passengers are relying on me to do that. Despite the challenges brought by regular hold-ups in traffic, the various separate conversations going on behind me, the occasional irate outburst or argument, and the constant bocking and clucking coming from the bag of roosters, my job is to keep the bus on the road, on schedule, and free of incidents.

Everybody is relying on me.

But still, the roosters are almost at fever pitch, in their crowded bag. The bus has to keep to its schedule, but if I don’t make a stop soon, in order to tend to the unruly horde inside the raggedy bag, the birds will break free, trample my passengers, who will then cause such a commotion that it’s highly likely I’ll crash the bus and we will all end up in casualty.

Maybe, at the next stop, while everyone is busy getting on and off, I will quickly carry the bag off the bus, stash it behind some bushes on the side of the road, get back on the bus, and drive away.

Image: Michael Leunig – A Bag of Roosters, viewed at http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9547032-a-bag-of-roosters on 26/8/2015