“I will try to be a correct animal though, and if you throw me a bone with enough meat on it I may even lick your hand.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald, from “The Crack Up.”
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“The great achievement is to lose one’s reason for no reason, and to let my lady know that if I can do this without cause, what should I not do if there were cause?” – Don Quixote (my favorite touchstone book of all time).
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Like I was saying. Or was I just thinking it? Whatever.
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Please. Please. Please, can we just all agree that the piss-ant-conservative-clown-fucks are off-the-charts crazy over their daycare-like complaints that Obama shook the hand of Hugo Chavez? If this is all they’ve got, pity the poor fools.
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I didn’t mean to keep secrets. Really. I wanted to be nothing but truthful with you. Nothing. But I failed. Miserably. And now all I can do is write short, stupid sentences that are really nothing but a distraction from the reality between us. Ouch.
Which is to say: I feel your pain.
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I should know. I’m a recovering liberal. I once went door-to-door for Jimmy Carter in the rural suburbs of Iowa. I really, really wanted to believe in it. Oh my, I was being such a 13-year-old.
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So I moved this cow this afternoon.
On one end I met a couple of Old Timers (aka: the sellers of the cow) who gave me the once over and almost immediately sniffed me out as a bona fide flatlander (Proof? See above.). Maybe it was my bicycle hat? Or maybe it was my crooked smile and my Johnny Carson-like “hello” I gave them as I climbed out of the truck? Or maybe it was the Yellow Lab in the cab? Or maybe I’m just paranoid? Nah. It was the Lab.
And on the other end was a family (aka: the buyers of the cow) who were nothing short of ecstatic about the arrival of their new farm animal. But they apparently don’t believe in fencing. Because when I asked where she was going, they said, “just let her out there.” And out she went…and down she went, too….straight down the road…and surprisingly fast for a pregnant cow.
“Oh no,” said the nice woman who had just given me the okay to do the not-okay. “Get her!”
Get her? What the fuck?
We were in a land of nothing but thick woods and one road out – yeah, the road the cow was running down. And did I mention that the “nice woman” was also holding an equally nice 18-month old baby? She was.
She grabbed me a bucket of grain as we watched the cow move out of sight in what could only be described as a cow canter. She was free! Free! Free! Until her very real inner-(and over)-domesticated self stopped in a dense section of woods about a quarter of a mile down the road. The sound of grain-in-a-bucket gets the domesticated kind every time [insert wife joke here].
Up the road we went, me with the grain, the cow with the appetite, and the woman with the child. And I thought: Go with it. And bill accordingly.
Mission: Accomplished. For real.
Hugo Chavez helps me buy oil, I try to always buy Citgo gas to thank him.