More Storytellin'

I was going to let you all stew for a little while longer. Yeah... I'm that guy. But I'm heading up on the mountain tomorrow for at least a weeks worth of poking cows, and I won't be here until we're done. If I think about it, I'll try to snap some pics of the week's activities so I can shatter your fantasies. Yeah... I'm that guy too. :P

Oh yeah... the story.

Fred continued to walk obliviously around his car checking the tires and Morgie pulled up on the lever jamming a new cartridge into the receiver. The Lord works in myterious ways, and the operative word in that last sentence is jamming. In his haste, the bullet jammed and the action wouldn't close, so Morgie was left in the precarious position of having to try and eject the now jammed cartridge before he could wipe out the deaf demon. Morgie pried and pushed and pulled and pried again on the lever.

Meanwhile, a puzzled Fred finished his walkaround without seeing anything out of the ordinary, so he got back into the car and drove off. About this same time, Morgie finally got the jammed cartridge to eject and a new one to take it's place. He immediately swung the rifle to his shoulder and sighted down the barrel... at nothing. Fred was already gone.

A high school kid named LLoyd witnessed some of the shooting and drove straight home to avoid the crossfire. Once he got home, he told his dad that someone was shooting up the town. His dad (Ernie), being of sound mind and body, and a good father, listened intently to his son's bizarre tale, and reacted accordingly. Yup. He didn't believe a word that he'd heard, so he jumped into his pickup and drove downtown to see it for himself.

He rounded the corner and headed down toward the park, with his head on a swivel, intently looking to the left and the right, knowing all the while that Lloyd was full of shit. He'd gone a couple blocks, and had just about confirmed his diagnosis, when Morgie shot the back window out of his pickup. At this point, Ernie reassessed the situation and stomped on the gas and preceeded to get the heck out of Dodge.

After Ernie, traffic on main street pretty well dried up for Morgie, so he got into his own pickup and headed out toward the dam and then south out of town.

When he got to the fork in the road, the devil took on a new persona, that of two teenage boys out hunting rabbits. Morgie slid to a halt and jumped out of the pickup with his rifle. The two boys looked up to see what the commotion was just in time to see Morgie sighting in on them.

BAM! BAM! This time Morgie wasn't to be denied. One bullet went through the belly of one kid, the other hit the second. Morgie cycled the lever again and pulled the trigger. The rifle failed to fire. Morgie was out of shells. He tossed the rifle into the front of the pickup, and reached back into the bed to get something.

The boy that was shot through the belly, didn't wait around to see what Morgie came up with. He took off running as fast as his legs would carry him, and some years later he told my dad that the further he ran, the more he could feel the blood sloshing around in his belly. Finally he just couldn't take it any more and laid down in a wash to try and hide.

The other boy wasn't able to run due to his injury, and he got to see right up close and personal what Morgie had snatched from the pickup. His axe. Morgie took after the poor kid with the axe, and by all accounts it was a miracle that the kid survived the attack. The same people will tell you however, that he was never quite the same after the attack.

Morgie walked back to his pickup, headed South for another 10 miles or so, and then pulled into a friends house. The friend could tell that something was wrong, so he let Morgie into the house and let him set in a chair almost silently for a few hours until the County Sheriff showed up to get him.

The Sheriff walked into the house, with his hat in his hand and said, "Morgie, I've got to take you in." So Morgie stood up, nodded, and walked out the front door with the Sheriff. I never heard whether he ever cuffed him or not.

Well... Fred played Mr. Magoo and came out unscathed. As did Ernie, and everyone else in town. The two rabbit hunters both survived the incident, one still lives here. The other boy, the one who got the axe, moved a long time ago, and I've never met him.

Morgie was declared insane, and sent to a sanitarium. While he was in the county jail, my grandfather passed away, and in a curious happenstance, my dad bumped into Morgie shortly afterward in the county courthouse. Morgie walked over to my dad, while his guards watched him, and told him how sorry he was that my grandpa had passed. He allowed as to how he really liked my grandpa, and was terribly sad. He then told my dad that they were sending him up to Blackfoot, and he was really hopeful that they could help him up there. As far as I know, that's where he died.

************

Today's Mystery Lyric:

The world seems so clear
like a wonderful diamond.
Can't imagine there's meanness
can't imagine there's wrong.

Storytellin'...

Now we delve once again into the realm of classic tales of interesting characters from my area. Today's subject is a fellow named Morgan, or as everyone called him... Morgie.

I never knew Morgie, but that doesn't mean that I didn't hear the stories.

Morgie, if he were alive today, would probably be diagnosed as schizophrenic. He heard voices all the time, and being a religious man, he knew that it was the good lord speaking to him.

One day out of the blue, he hired a bulldozer to blade him a road to the top of mountain so that he could dig out the gold that was under the rimrock. Now bulldozers aren't cheap, and gold isn't just laying there, so Morgie was really stretching himself out. My cousin, Ray, drove up the new road and went up to Morgie to see what was up. Morgie told him that he was building a road so that he could get the gold that he knew was up there. My cousin was quite amazed.

"Wow Morgie... you're spending a lot of money. Shouldn't you hire a geologist or something to see if there's really gold up there?"
"Oh... I've got the best geologist there is."
"Really?!? Who?"

Morgie smacked his lips, looked at my cousin, and with his hand raised next to his ear, pointed up to the heavens.

It was at this point when Ray was telling me the story that he looked at me and said with a smile, "Now how do you argue with something like that."

Not long after that, Morgie got another message over the wire...

The cast of characters for this tale include an older fellow who was extremely hard of hearing. His name was Fred. He was a cantankerous old fellow, and he could hear the phone ring, but he couldn't hear anyone talking on it. So when he was home alone and the phone would ring, he'd pick it up and yell into the receiver, "Nobody's home." and hang the phone up. The rest of the cast, I'll have to introduce in turn.

Morgie's new message was something along the lines of a direction to kill the evil one, so he took his Winchester lever action .30-30 downtown and attempted to carry out his calling.

He was standing on a lawn shooting at the devil when Fred drove by. Morgie jacked a shell into the chamber and squoze off a round into Fred's car. In his haste to slay this dragon however, he didn't lead the car. So the bullet struck the rear window, blowing it to smithereens. Fred heard this explosion and thought that he'd blown a tire, so he stopped immediately and got out of the car to look at the tire. Of course this placed him directly in Morgie's crosshairs at a distance of 50 yards or so.

As Fred walked around the car looking at the tires, Morgie pushed the lever down ejecting the spent casing, and pulled the lever back up to jack another shell into the chamber for the coup de grace...

I probably should just quit right here, this post is getting a bit too long, and I really need to get to bed...

************

Today's Mystery Lyric:

Fine wine and champagne
are just kickin' it with Jim Beam.
It's all good
it goes down the same to me...

Playin' In The S***

Yes... you'll never guess what I had to do on Saturday. Thanks to some helpful soul, who left a gate open, or dropped it intentionally, I had to go out with the crew and make a quick roundup of some cattle. There weren't very many, and they weren't that far away from our allotment, so we all grabbed our 4-wheelers and headed up to the high country.

It was cold and rainy here all day Friday, and the forecast didn't look too shiny for Saturday morn, so I called one of the crew and asked if the plans had changed any, and he hadn't heard of any changes, so I went to sleep with visions of sugarplums dancing in my head. Ok... maybe not sugarplums... but there might have been dancing. :lech:

When I awoke bright and early the next day, there was a definate chill in the air. The temp outside was a balmy 34 and inside it was a blissful 50. Needless to say, it didn't take me long to get dressed and out the door.

I loaded up the bike and then went down to pick up another guy and his, all the while waiting for the pickup heater to warm up. It was lightly sprinkling when we loaded his outfit, and he was kind enough to give me a refill on my coffee mug right before we headed out.

So we slipped up the road, met up with the rest of the crew, and then made our way up to the cattle.

As we were driving, it started to become clear that it might be a bit "airish" outside. I'm no weather man, but when you see the little sagebrush whipping back and forth in the breeze, I can take the hint.

As our elevation increased, so did the wind, but the rain quit altogether. Yep... we were almost touching the clouds and there was no rain in sight. All there was was snow.

That's right. Honest to goodness white stuff. All over the ground, and falling from the sky.

When we finally unloaded, we all asked who's bright idea this was, but nobody wanted to fess up to it, and after all... we were already there and there was no sense in making the 60 mile drive again, so we headed out to get the cattle.

Now when you're up above the snow line, on a four-wheeler, with a modest 20mph breeze, plus the speed of the bike... it get's a bit chilly. Fortunately, I'd planned ahead and was fairly well prepared for it, but I'd made one crucial error. I wore a cowboy hat instead of my Elmer Fudd cap. I thought my logic was sound, but it turns out, it was flawed. I thought that if we got rained on, the cowboy hat would shed much more water while Elmer would just soak it up. I forgot however, that where we were going would be above the snow line, and rain wouldn't be a problem. So I wound up with cold ears. Meh... a kid's gotta learn.

We got around the cattle and headed them back to where they belonged and then the blizzard hit. It was a pretty good one actually, but fortunately for us, it was at our backs by then.

To make a short story long, one guy took the cow herd and the other 5 of us messed around with two obnoxious bulls until finally they decided they weren't going anywhere, and started to take after us. At which point we decided that they weren't ours to begin with, and they weren't worth anyone getting hurt over, so we skeedaddled on out of there, loaded up and thawed out.

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Today's Mystery Lyric:

The moral of this story
never judge by what they wear.
Underneath some ragged clothes
could be a millionaire.

Well You May Run Like Mays, But You Hit Like...

Just the other day, I was flipping through the channels and there it was... on Spike. One of the greatest sports films of all time. Major League.

It's one show I can't pass up. I just can't. But then I got to thinking...

Now regular readers of this blog know that when I get to thinking... it's never a good sign. This is no exception. I started to try to remember how many times I've seen Major League and I couldn't put a number on it. I've probably seen it over 100 times all told. Easy.

They say you can always remember your first, and I do. I saw it for the first time in 1989. I think we rewinded the tape and watched it again. I'm fairly sure of that actually...

A couple years later, one of my buddy's girlfriends revealed that she had never seen it, and she was on the college tennis team. So we had to whip it out and show her. When it got to the penultimate sequence and they started playing "Wild Thing"... she looked back at me and said, "Oh man... you would be SO pumped!". It was great...

Then I got roped into a softball team, and we'd watch it after every game. Three years running. At least 25 or 30 times.

I never get tired of it. It's one of the few films that can hold up to such viewing and still be great.

I'm sure there are those of you that might not have seen it, but I seriously doubt it. It's too big of an icon. However, if you haven't... it's probably the first sports comedy and it defined the genre. A crazy bunch of misfits, set up for failure, who end up coming together. There can never be another quite like it, because they're all mere copies of the best.

You know the strangest part? I don't even own a copy...

So tell me... what show can't you get enough of?

************

Today's Mystery Lyric:

I don't mind, the sun at times
the images it shows.
I can taste you on my lips,
and smell you on my clothes...

A Question For the Ladies...

A friend of mine just went out on a date recently. As she was telling me about it (because I asked), she mentioned that he was a bit older than she was, but he did some of the little things that she found very erm... lovely. He opened her door, got the chair at dinner... you know, the little mannerly things that men used to do all the time.

So I did a little self analysis, and was surprised with what I realized. I too tend to do those things, but only with older ladies. With girls my age or younger, I can't say that I do. This still leaves me a bit perplexed, yet I kind'a know the reason...

Women my age are "liberated". All my life I've been taught to respect my elders and show them the common courtesies one can, but at the same time I've been told NOT to do those things to my age group because it's demeaning.

This certainly puts fellows like me in quite a quandry. Do you go ahead and extend these courtesies and be thought a chauvenist pig? That you look down upon the "weaker sex"? That you don't consider women as equals? Or...

Do you not extend these courtesies and be thought a cad? A man of low character? One who shows no respect or consideration for others? Someone who's selfishly concerned only with himself?

So tell me ladies...

Is it better to have a guy treat you like a lady? Or an equal...

************

Today's Mystery Lyric:

We fought him hard,
We fought him well.
Out on the plains,
We gave him hell...

I Feel Sh*tty, Oh So Sh*tty...

Yeah... the first of the week was just lost due to a brain mush, and I was just starting to get back in the blogging mood when...

WHAM!!!

I'm catching a cold. My bro came down last weekend with his girls, and he was sicker than he should'a been. In fact he was flat miserable. So what do you do when you've got a cold? Give it away of course, and he did. To my mom. Then she wasn't happy with it, so she passed it on to me today.

It's one of those good ones where your sinuses are all dry, yet plugged up at the same time. Causing that dry soreness in the back of your throat that makes you swallow 1000 times a minute. Yep. It's gonna be a good one.

I did get to sleep all afternoon though, which is a semi-good thing, but the bad thing about sick naps is you really can't enjoy them like you can regular naps. *sigh* Oh well...

I made me a little garlic tea earlier, and so hopefully that will scare off the evil spirits and I'll be better tomorrow. Well... one can always hope. :P

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Today's Mystery Lyric:

Now all those simple things
are simply too complicated
for my life.

Nope... Nothin' Yet...

So while we wait for some LL brainwave activity that isn't subjugated to work like things, I'll at least put up a new lyric.

**************

Today's Mystery Lyric:

Give your ID card to the border guard
Now your alias says you're Captain Jean Luc Picard
Of the United Federation of Planets
'Cause he won't speak English anyway...