Recently, someone of low testosterone and, it would seem, low I.Q., opined after reading one of my political screeds that I was one "weird, sick, old duck!"

And in a blinding instant, like when marauding FBI goons throw flashbangs into the foyer of some septuagenarian pro-lifer they're abusing for the edification of others, I realized that that low-T lowlife was right!

Not because I've always been an outlier to the human race, or the fact that my lungs and pancreas are currently in a race to do me in, or that I'm currently enjoying my seventieth orbit around the sun.  No, what I realized when confronted by a whiny lib half my age whom I could break in half on a bad day, is this: I am a duck!

A mallard, to be precise.

My new name is Donald Duckworth, and my pronouns are l'orange and confit.

Why I fought my lifelong feeling that I'd been mis-specied, I can't tell you.  Suffice it to say that when I first viewed Donald Duck cartoons as a young child, I remember feeling that a vast chasm existed between me and my primate-centric family.  When Donald would speak in his barely intelligible duck accent, I would silently quack back, ashamed that those hairy apes I lived with might judge me.  This was no doubt responsible for my lifelong speech impediment.

And when Daisy Duck appeared on screen, I felt a stirring in my pre-pubescent loins.  She was typically featured wearing high heels, a solid-colored top, a hairbow, a bangle and...no pants!  You wanna talk about the deleterious effects of pornography on young children?

Later in life, I would dream of flying high above the earth and looking down on all those grunting, chest-thumping, knuckle-dragging primates known as humans.  When I told my therapist this, she said dreams of flying were really rather common, to which I replied, "Yeah, but does everyone else periodically quack and worry that he's gradually losing his tail feathers?"

"Um, no, they don't," she said, making a mallard-phobic face and snacking on some fruit, which probably explains my lifelong aversion to bananas.

As a teen, now hiding the National Geographic issue on duck migration (featuring totally nude ducks!) under my mattress, I began to grow feathers.

OK, I didn't grow them.  I simply stuck on various feathers I'd collected from roadkill or the dumpsters behind French restaurants.  My worried, apish parents tried to mollify me, feeding me mainly seeds, berries, bugs, and small fish while I was in high school.

I remember going through quite a few cis-specied therapists back then, especially when I began dropping deuces in their waiting rooms.  "C'mon, man!" I'd say, as they frantically called either my parents, the police, or both.  "Birds never worry about where they poop.  Why should I?"

But, sadly, those where the bad old days, where men were men and women were women.  There was no place for a young mallard simply expressing his inner duckness.  The world was simply not ready for a young healthy fella having a threesome with twin Welsh Harlequins in the pond behind my high school.  And so, thanks to some cellphone footage, I became just another sad victim of the pond-to-prison pipeline.

Alone in my cell, thinking suicidal thoughts while grooming my tail-feathers — inserted against my will by my roommate Adolph — I felt as though I would surely and eventually quack...er, crack up.

But then two amazing things combined to save me: COVID-19 and crazy liberals.

When the coronavirus, no doubt engineered in a Chinese lab financed with U.S. taxpayer dollars, hit, I was suddenly let out of jail, along with various rapists, murderers, and misanthropes, to once again do my thing.  And to my great surprise, looney liberals had now removed any and all blocks to insane and irrational thinking.

Men could now be women; women could now be men; and a corrupt, senile hair-sniffer could now occupy the Oval Office!  It was a time of "anything goes," an era where paleface senators could pretend to be Indians, vice presidents could pretend to speak English, and Joy Behar could pretend to be sentient.

My Anseriformes heart leapt with joy that America was now a place where not only could I pretend to be a duck, but social services also existed that would help me surgically transition into one.  Thanks to my no-cost Obamacare plan, I had wings and feathers implanted, my nether regions transformed into a cloaca, and a beak made out of human skulls attached.  I must admit, it's kinda tough to communicate with a beak — it's definitely not all it's quacked up to be — but if John Fetterman can communicate his way into the Senate using artificial devices, why can't I?

I'm finally living up to my full duck potential, and living quite nicely on the multi-million-dollar settlement I received after that Republican mayor deadnamed me as "a sad and insane man."  I've got a regular gig on CNN, a spacious roost in the Big Apple, and more American Wigeons coming on to me than you could shake a shotgun at.

I'm as happy as a mallard could possibly be, except for the dreams where I'm some hairy Neanderthal hitting a home run to win the World Series.  These dreams really get my feathers in a bunch, since most ducks generally see packed baseball stadiums merely as target practice.

I really must get a new therapist, despite the sad fact that 99% of therapists only treat Homo sapiens.  Oh, the humanity!

Image: Kip Lee via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.