Chicken or Egg?

How to hatch ideas

My neighbor’s second cousin died in New Orleans two weeks ago, and she asked us to look after her chickens while she went down for the funeral.

She has twenty of them now, all different exotic breeds. Cochins with feathered feet, buff Orpingtons, a Polish with a feather pompom so big it can’t see sideways, a Frizzle with feathers curling the wrong way. And a Silkie rooster with black skin and five toes.

The rooster attacks me, slamming into my ankles with his fluffy chest. Yesterday JJ came home with two big bruises and a scratch on her shin. He wakes us up every damned morning, and now he’s getting all aggro with us. Bro’s a menace who slipped into the coop undercover. You can’t tell if chicks are chicks or dudes, but one day he shed his yellow baby fluff and started crowing — and not just at dawn.

If you want eggs, you don’t want the rooster around. He’s just a liability. If you want more chickens, you need him, but he does his job in seconds. Then he becomes pure distraction: noisy, aggressive, harassing the hens, and laying zero eggs himself.

I pull out my phone to see how long it takes an egg to hatch. Google gives me the answer; it takes seconds. Then it serves me up a bunch of omelet recipes, takes me to TikTok for funny chicken dance videos, then another, then fifteen minutes have passed in a blur. I gotta get back to work, just one more.

Every afternoon JJ and I go next door, prop open the door to the enclosure, and let the gals hustle out into the yard to forage under the rosemary bushes and aloes. They’re ravenous for crickets and seeds and shreds of Bermuda grass. Back in the coop, they have several feeders full of chicken feed, and they can gorge their fill at leisure, but still they dash out squawking after fallen figs and occasional worms.

While they’re snacking, we get down on all fours, phone flashlights out, and crawl halfway into the nesting box. Each day we pull out at least eight eggs. Some are taupe or white; the Marans’ are freckled chocolate brown, the Ameraucana’s are pale blue, others green or pinkish orange. The color is just a chicken’s style. It doesn’t tell you anything about what’s inside.

Crack them open, and you see what the chicken’s foraging did. Bugs and greens carry carotenoids, and the yolks turn deep orange instead of pale supermarket yellow. All that variety makes things richer, tastier, and better for me. The feed alone would’ve been fine. Complete, balanced, everything a hen needs. But adequate is what you get off the shelf. Color, taste, richness come from the hour in the weeds.

The shelves in my studio are packed with monographs. Many haven’t been cracked in years. Last week I pulled down a book on George Grosz for no reason. Paintings of sailors and whores, cigar-chomping Weimar industrialists; it has nothing to do with what I’m drawing these days. This weekend I’m going to see the Yoko Ono show at the Broad in LA, conceptual craziness, brain-stretching exercises, not a drawing in sight.

Some eggs come out stunted, yolkless, no there there. Wind eggs, or fairy eggs, or historically cock eggs, because people believed a rooster laid them. The folklore held that a cock’s egg hatched a serpent, and the remedy was to throw it over the roof of the house so it broke on the far side without touching the ground. I just toss them in the compost.

Back at my desk, I open my database. I call the drive the Idea Repository. Hundreds, thousands of ideas scribbled down during years of dogwalks and predawn reveries. The folders have dates, vague titles, and I flip through them at random.

Sometimes we find a hen lurking in the gloom at the back of the box, and we’ve been instructed to shoo her out into the light. My neighbor doesn’t want her hens to get broody, a term I’ve always known but never understood. Turns out that, left to her druthers, a hen will stop laying and hunker down over a pile of her eggs. She barely eats, loses weight, gets aggressive and protective if you try to collect the eggs. This goes on for 21 days, and then chicks pop out. Our job is to disrupt her and harvest the eggs. If the hen sees an empty nest, she lays more eggs and doesn’t get around to brooding.

I’ve got something like four hundred files on that hard drive. Two-line notes. Folders with one image and nothing else. A few I’ve had open, on and off, for six years. The folder holding this idea (“Something about chickens and eggs, hatching ideas”) was one of those for a while. It was dated 2021. November.

When we get home, I put my two-thirds of a carton on the counter. My initial instinct had been to wash the straw and flecks of chickenshit off the eggs, but JJ stopped me before I turned on the tap.

The coating on fresh eggs is called the bloom, deposited as the egg is laid, and it seals the pores in the shell. Unwashed eggs keep on the counter for weeks. American chicken factories wash and sanitize the shells, which strips the bloom, so they have to be refrigerated from then on. Most of Europe won’t let you wash a commercial egg at all, which is why they sit out unrefrigerated on the shelf in a London grocery and nobody keels over.

The other thing about a washed, refrigerated egg is that it will never hatch. Cold kills it outright. You can keep it for months, and it will only ever be breakfast.

Happens in my studio a lot. Some idea shows up with straw still on it, and my first move is to clean it up. Fix the typos, straighten the margins, talk about it at a dinner party, but never get broody and sit with it for weeks. I get the pleasure of squeezing it out, but I don’t do the hard work to hatch it. I slide it into a folder and leave it there. Half-assed, half-dead.

Even unwashed, an egg doesn’t keep forever. It leaches moisture through its shell, and the air pocket at the blunt end expands, which is why an old egg floats in water and a fresh one sinks. Fertile, it’s good for about a week. Ten days is pushing it. Two weeks, and it’s snuffed.

You don’t always smell the rot. It just sits in the dark folder and dies. And sometimes it gets reincarnated but somewhere far away. You find out years later when somebody else’s version of it walks by, fully grown. A published book, a TV show, a movie up on the screen. They didn’t hatch a better idea. They just sat with theirs till it was good.

My neighbor gets back Sunday. She’ll take over the bucket and the chickenshit and the crawling, and by Christmas she’ll have around 2,920 eggs to show for it, and there will still be twenty chickens in that yard. And maybe that doggone rooster.

Your pal,

Danny

P.S. Today’s my birthday. What should I wish for when I blow out all those candles?