My neighbor, evidently, thinks he is John Audubon. He put up a bird feeder recently. He’s a very industrious fellow.

I never see him during the day, of course, but sometimes at night I stroll through his garden and admire his handiwork, and occasionally pilfer a fresh tomato or two. The bird feeder is the latest little project in his backyard oasis. So far, no birds have arrived to avail themselves of his largesse. The seed level has not dipped one little bit and there is as yet no detritus from their feeding.

I think this depresses him. He seems to have grown a bit moody of late, petulant. At least it appears that way.

I like to watch him sleep, snoring away next to his sexually repressed and chemically befuddled wife, both in their matching flannel pajamas with their Egyptian cotton sheets pulled up tight around their inviting necks. Don’t worry, gentle readers, I learned many years ago to never feed too close to home, but they really should invest in better locks.

He’s moved the bird feeder several times in the past week, hoping to attract the little feathered darlings. “Discoverability” is a problem for such endeavors. How does one attract birds for peaceful hours of nature watching to a feeder they don’t know about?

It’s a conundrum, and one I actually know a little bit about. I am somewhat of an expert when it comes to attracting desired creatures to locations of your own choosing — though the end goals are certainly different. Replace “peaceful hours of nature watching” with “frenzied minutes of bloodletting” and you start to see my point.

So how do I attract my prey?

Humans love their food. A few thousand years ago, the smell of roasted venison left unattended over a campfire was enough to draw an admirable selection of shaggy necks.

Humans love their water, too. A few centuries ago, all one had to do was stake out (pun fully intended) a well or a spring. People love their clean water. Drop a crude map in the middle of some squalid little city, dig a path through the heather and drop a few clay pot shards around the perimeter and the meals would soon be jostling one another to get close enough to decant.

These days, with a faucet in every home and fast food franchise never more than an air-conditioned car ride away, my kind must be a little more creative. Not much more creative though.

Nothing attracts humans more quickly than alcohol, except the promise of sex. Put them together, and you’ve just built a better mousetrap. And that’s precisely why I’ve been operating a “floating” brothel for centuries.

There’s nothing like booze to lower inhibitions, and nothing like casual sex to have men skulking about with their pants and defenses down, and no pesky ID’s in their trouser pockets. Discoverability is never an issue at a bordello. Sex sells itself, like an invisible hand guiding men into the arms of willing women. And alcohol, of course, has it’s own ambassadors who proselytize among the hopeless and the doomed.

I recently hung out my shingle in Old Town. Jack’s Shack, a strip club where the liquor is cheap and the women cheaper, with a stage for dancers, a few tosser rooms in the back and a VIP lounge for the high rollers. Unlike my neighbor, the little birdies are already flocking in to my “feeder” avail themselves of the stiff pours and the obliging ladies, of which I am one.

I certainly like sex as much as the next insatiable, immortal goddess among horny, blood-heavy mortals. And nothing works up an appetite before meal like vigorous sexual acrobatics.

Something tells me someone is going to get lucky tonight, and then very unlucky. Like that not-so-old joke, he’ll come and then go, and his lifeless, drained body will end up dropped into the acid bath under the VIP room.

I like to keep my bird feeder tidied up from the inevitable litter associated with over-use.продвижение