Stories like this make me recall the time I was mugged by a seagull. Now I’ve had food stolen from me before, but that’s usually been something sitting on a table. Not this time.
It was a few years ago in San Francisco. We had just moved away from the East Bay the prior summer, but I was tagging along with my wife who was on a work trip and I decided to be a tourist for the day. I ended up around Fisherman’s Wharf at lunchtime and decided to get a hotdog from a street cart. I had bought my dog, put relish and ketchup on it, and was taking a bite as I crossed the street.
All of the sudden I hear a squawk a lot louder and a lot closer than any of the other birds. This seagull swoops down from behind me and body-slams into me. I drop my hotdog, the seagull drops straight down like it was some kind of helicopter, it grabs the hotdog and the bun and takes off again. This all happens in approximately one and a half seconds.
I’m standing there in the middle of the street, stunned. I look around and see a city bus letting off passengers about thirty feet away. Nobody else is reacting to what happened, like this is a typical sight down by the docks.
To this day I wonder if the cameras on the bus recorded my being mugged by a seagull, and if I ended up on some kind of municipal transit blooper reel
