beegirl, my Royal Jelly, (yup, still doing the Pepe LePew thing) it’s so good of you to return to the hive, as it were. But you might want to fix your screen name. It’s your name for crying out loud. You should have a big “B”. Just to make me happy.
deb2world, my creamy éclair, yeah just bust in here and do your own thing. “Hi Rue, nice lamp, get outta my way, I have things to say to FairyChatMom and LindyHopper.” Not that I’m bitter. Go ahead and lick me to find out. Ha ha, I kid, I jest. You don’t have to lick me. Unless you really want to. No compulsory licking around here.
FairyChatMom, my silly rabbit, you can’t put two whole families in a blender. You’ll mung up the blades and then you won’t be able to make daiquiris, or fruit smoothies. We’ll sell them off, and take our profits to Aruba. I’ll be your cabana boy and you’ll be my sand crab. Oh, the fun times we’ll have!
“Gnatbrain” sigh she does love me. And I love you right back. I love you enough to use your whole name. Did you see how I did that, while some other posters just use a cheap abreviation? Not that I’m naming names. But I think you know what I mean.
Woo Yoo! Virtual panties! Puddin’, my spunky bunny, you should be carefull the way you fling your panties about. They are just virtual panties and all, but flinging the real things could get you into trouble. Not “now we have to get married trouble”, but just “chafing” trouble. I guess as long as you have on genie pants, you’ll be all right. I just worry, wouldn’t want my Puddin’ to chafe.
Looking back, your endearment could be construed as a double entendré. It’s not. For the most part, I don’t do double entendrés. I’m a single entendré kind of guy. I meant “spunky” as “full of youthfull joy and energy”, that’s all. No other connotation of “spunky” applies.
“Rue,” I hear you say, “you sound awfull. That cold must suck.”
You are too kind and very sensitive to pick that up through this written post. But I’m OK. It’s Soda you should be concerned about. Man, is she sick. Get well, Soda, get well. (I was going to tell you how the mucous-burgs that have stuffed my sinuses are starting to break up and run down my throat like a snotty cheese grater, leaving it a raw waste, and giving me a tummy ache. But I won’t. It’s just too gross. Let’s just leave it that I’m feeling OK and should be all better by the weekend.) So, the cold’s going OK, but I will tell you what did suck.
It was the summer of my High School Senior Year. Which is a dumb way to say it. When you graduate, you are either unemployed and on the road to a low-paying dead-end job or an unmatriculated Freshman. And like my guidance counsellor always said, “You have to go to College. How will you make something out of yourself without Higher Education?” So now everytime I see some one with a carreer who didn’t go to college I think, “Now, there’s someone who didn’t listen to their High School guidance counsellor.” I was working that summer as a cowboy.
I wish. Man, do I wish I was a “cowboy”. There’s a job you can be proud of. You can hold you head up high and say “I’m a cowboy!” I wasn’t a cowboy. I was a ground-weasel-boy. That sucked.
“What is a ground-weasel-boy?” you ask? Really you asked “What the bloody ^%*()^ is a &**^%%#@ ground-weasel-boy?” (I expurgated your salty language in case there happen to be children around. You can’t be too carefull.) Well, you know how cowboys drive cows? Guess what a ground-weasel-boy drives.
It was the Great Ground-Weasel Drive of '86. “Crazy” Dave McGill had point. I, Rue “The Iron Diplomat” DeDay, was right swing. Peter “Stinky” Gonazagol was left swing. Amber “Betty” Knobbstone had drag. You know how cowboys had horses? We didn’t. Horses make ground-weasels crazy. Crazier. We had pogo sticks. Like in the song “…and the ground-weasel-boy goes boing, boing, boinging along…”. And brooms. You had to keep the ground-weasels together somehow.
We drove then from Robertson, Wyoming to Upton, Utah. Every Fall, the good people of Upton would hire another bunch of ground-weasel-boys to drive them back. They didn’t want the ground-weasels either.
“Why didn’t you just put them in a truck and drive them that way?” you ask.
Fool! Know ye naught o’ the feared ground-weasel? They get car-sick. Like crazy.
“If no one wanted them, why didn’t you just kill them or something?” you ask some more.
I repeat: Fool! Know ye naught o’ the feared and dreaded ground-weasel? You can’t shoot them. They are too speedy. They dodge bullets. And they backtrack the shots to viciously maul the shooter. You can’t poison them, because they always use a cute and, if they can get one, endangered animal to be their food tasters. Always. People have been trying to poison ground-weasels since poison was invented.
So the only way to deal with an infestation of ground-weasels is the drive them off. Hence, the ground-weasel-boy with his trusty pogo stick and broom. Unless he’s a she like good ol’ “Betty”. Then it’s her trusty pogo stick and broom.
A Ground-Weasel Drive sucks. They’ll turn on you in a heartbeat. So you had to wear a thick sweater to muffle the sound of your heart. In the summer. It was way hot to be wearing a heart-muffling sweater. And all we could eat was Spam, Tang and Angelfood cake. These are the only know foods a ground-weasel will not eat. Say you had a peanutbutter sandwich. No jelly, just peanutbutter. The wiley ground-weasel would swarm you in a feeding frenzy. They’d bury you in a sponge. Ground-weasels were voracious.
It was hot, dusty, jarring work, but nothing beat the sight of bringing the herd in. Not even the sight of “Betty” on her pogo stick. And, man, could that girl pogo. When we got into town, Kentucky Slim and the Jug-eared Cousin Jumpers were putting on a show. He was the singer who immortalized the ground-weasel-boy in song. I had to meet him. I snuck backstage and waited in his dressingroom. When the show was over, and Kentucky Slim came in, I punched him in the mouth. Then I stole all the food off his buffet table. Spam, Tang and Angelfood cake get old fast.
Some people say you can still find ground-weasels around Upton. They say the ground-weasels, or “ugly-assed-snakes-with-legs” if you want to use the Indian name, lured the last band of ground-weasel-boys into a draw, and killed them where they hopped. The story goes, the groung-weasels can still be heard bickering over the last reminants of the ground-weasel-boys’ carcasses.
This is untrue. The ground-weasels were wiped out in '92 by the ground-weasel-pox-that-made-their-heads-fall-off disease. There was great rejoicing.
So now, whenever I hear someone whining how tough they have it, I tell them this story. They usually find some excuse to leave while I’m only halfway through it. So then I don’t have to listen to them whine.
[Louis Armstrong]Ooooooohhhhh yeeeeeaaaaaahhhhh!!!..[/Papa]
-Rue.
