Fracturing Words

Today's Wednesday Guest, Slim Randles, brings us another glimpse into the lives of the crew down at the Mule Barn Truck Stop. If you can figure out what some of the crazy words mean, let me know.  

If you are looking for some good e-books to read, check out the featured books at Julie Kenner's website.

For some good tips on writing dialogue head over to The Blood Red Pencil. Good discussion going on over there. But do come back and read this fun piece.

 When Windy walked into the Mule Barn during that cold snap last week, we knew he was getting frantic for an audience. He has a hard time getting us to listen to his version of history, his notions of what was going on now, and his prognostications of the future of mankind.

But it was cold, and sitting out on the bench and ambushing listeners didn’t work too well right now for Windy Wilson, so here he came. We gave each other the wink and dragged out a chair for him.

“What d’you know, Windy? Cold enough for ya?”

“Cold? You think this is cold? Why, one time up on the high line, I was disappropriating firewood for the crew on the railroad, and it come over me, then and there …”

“We weren’t talking about the cold this morning, Windy,” said Doc. “We were discussing the future of microbes.”

“Microbes? Ain’t they like choir robes? Why, this one time I was singing barleytone in the Presbytoolian church, and there was this guy named Mike all right, and …”

“Now Doc,” said Steve, twitching his walrus mustache, “Don’t you remember? We’d finished with the microbes and went sailing on into February. Sorry, Windy, Doc didn’t mean to disrupticate your dissemination of events, but he’d just forgot. It was February.”

“February? You mean like Leap Year kinda February paraphernalium where you only get olden on one day every four years? That kinda February?”

Dud and Herb were trying hard not to laugh.

“No, Alphonse,” Doc said. He sometimes got formal with our friend. “We were discussing whether or not to leave out the first r in February. No one uses it …”

“But just because something isn’t used,” Windy said, waving his empty coffee cup at Mavis, “doesn’t mean we have to completely immolify it, does it? If we occasionally sloop over the top of a letter, that doesn’t braggandize it. That doesn’t codify its lesserness, does it?”

“So you’re saying we should keep the first r in February, is that it?” asked Steve.

“Absotively,” said Windy.

“OK, now,” Doc said, “who will stand up for the h in school?”

Some people think we’re just having coffee each morning there in the truck stop.
------
Brought to you by The Backpocket Guide to Hunting Elk, an e-book. Read a sample at www.slimrandles.com.

Wednesday's Guest - Slim Randles

This week's offering from Slim is a little on the serious side. In his nationally syndicated column, Home Country, he is sometimes serious, often funny, and completely entertaining. His columns have been compiled into a book that is handy to have around. I just love that old truck on the cover. What a story it could tell.

 
We all know that someone will find Jenkins's cabin. Someday. Oh, it's up there in those hills somewhere.

We all know that.

It's become a friendly object of conjecture and speculation. No one living has seen it, as far as we know. Jenkins himself died quietly when he was on one of his infrequent trips to town for supplies. Funny guy, that Jenkins.

He worked in the city for years, mostly as a night watchman in a factory that made diapers. Didn't really enjoy people much, and told us many times how nice it was to just be in the huge factory when it was quiet. Then one day he decided to move to the mountains and make pretty things out of leather. Once in a while he'd have his coffee at the counter at the Mule Barn, but often as not, he'd camp out on the edge of town for the two or three days it took him to sell his crafts and buy supplies. He'd smile and wave from his campsite, then he'd be gone one morning. We wouldn't see him again for months.

Now and then someone would ask him where his cabin was, and he'd just point toward the mountains and say, "Up there."

How far up there? "A ways."

What was his cabin like? "Not too big."

And so we came to regard the little cabin as an intriguing mystery, an object of local legend. After he died, several of the fellows tried to backtrack him to find the place, but Jenkins evidently didn't take the same trail each time, as though he wanted his quiet times protected from even a friendly visit from one of us. During his lifetime, we respected his wishes. In this country, a man has a perfect right to be a little strange. And, truth be known, we hold a certain admiration for those of us who hear different instructions. But there is something in the human spirit, also, that begs to have its mysteries solved.

So now, several times each year, one or two of us will use the mystery of the lost cabin as an excuse to poke our noses into the nuances and seclusions of these hills. We play off our curiosity against our wishes to respect a man's privacy, even when he's gone.

We have yet to discover Jenkins's lost cabin. Maybe we never will. Maybe that wouldn't be such a bad thing, either.
------
Brought to you by Home Country, a book of the best columns from the first five years, at www.slimrandles.com

Catalogs Aren't Just For Buying Things

This week's Wednesday Guest is Slim Randles, cowboy sage and humorist. I am pleased to share his work here. His weekly column, Home Country, is read by over 2 million people. 

The garden catalogs start coming when the snow is too deep to even find dirt. But we don’t care.

This is a catalog time of year, a time for making plans and figuring out how to do something even better than we did last year. There in the fishing catalog is that new fly-tying vise. I know I’ll be able to tie flies faster and better with that, which will give me more time to cruise up and down Lewis Creek with the fly rod. Well … at least that’s the plan.

And the housewares catalog has all kinds of things in it to help us peel potatoes, boil things, slice things, and clean things. A few well-spent dollars on their 800 phone line and before you know it, our lives will be easier and our food tastier.

With the truck catalogs, we can get a little coffee maker that plugs right in to the cigarette lighter. Or we can get a little oven that plugs right in to the cigarette lighter, or a fan that plugs right in to the cigarette lighter. Let’s hope the car makers continue to make cigarette lighters even after cigarettes themselves disappear. We’d miss out on a lot of fun without that plug-in.

The mule needs his catalog, too. I’ll do the reading for him, and the ordering. But I think he’d appreciate one of those nice white fleece cinches. They seem so soft on an old mule’s belly. And a matching saddle pad would be good, too. He’s too old to rope on any more, but a guy can still appreciate comfort in semi-retirement.

The land catalogs are the most fun. In these, there are always lakes with wooded margins, begging for a little cabin. A small place where a guy can hole up and think literary thoughts and type quietly. Well, it’s a thought, anyway. And that’s what catalogs do, stimulate our thinking.

Spring catalogs are the novels of optimistic lives.
-------------
To buy Slim’s books, go to www.slimrandles.com  He's got some good ones, including a new one, Slim Randles' Home Country, that is a compilation of his weekly columns.

Wednesday's Guest - Slim Randles

I always enjoy the cowboy philosophy and humor that Slim Randles shares with us. I hope you do, too. For more of his wit and wisdom, check out his new book A Cowboy's Guide to Growing up Right

Life is kinda like a corrugated, washboard ranch road, I believe. Give anything enough time and experience and warts and scars and grooves will get worn in it. The down times and the up times, and the way they tend to alternate can lead to a corrugation in our dirt roads and our lives.

Any good cowboy knows how to handle a washboard road, though. Taken slowly, a pickup truck hits each little dip and rattles its carburetor until it puts a kink in the distributor clamp. It takes forever to get someplace, and the scenery never seems to change.  It makes for a tedious drive to that line shack or windmill or distant pasture. Of course, it does give a guy time to compose a symphony or a letter to Congress.

Unless there is a huge hole in the washboard road ahead which needs to be avoided, there is only one way to handle a washboard road or a person’s life: gun it.

Oh yeah. You step down on the pedal and kick that monster up to about 52 miles an hour and everything smooths out. Fly, baby, fly. We hit only the high spots on the road and live a bit daringly, challenging the existence of any possible oilpan-killing rock ahead. The country slips by more excitingly and a driver tends to grin a lot.

And in life, we can wallow forever in the slow and low stuff and take ages to get somewhere, or we can floor it, give a yell, and skip along on the high spots.

Somehow, that sounds like more fun.
-----------
Brought to you by Slim’s award-winning books at www.slimrandles.com, and in better bookstores and bunkhouses throughout the free world.

Advice to the Lovelorn

Many thanks to Slim Randles for sharing another story with us. What would I do without my friends who are so generous with their talent and time? Enjoy....

Marvin Pincus, (since his honorary degree, now being called Associate Pincus), turned the lights on his fly-tying bench, coming to focus on the small vice where love issues would be solved.

Dewey Decker, obviously nervous despite sitting in the comfortable green chair, was sipping some coffee.

“Okay, Dewey, I’m ready. What seems to be the trouble?”

“I’m in love, Marvin. Really in love for the first time in my life. I can’t help it. I really can’t!”

“Whoa there!” Marvin said to the valley king of fertilizer products. “You haven’t been backsliding on that thing we discussed last time, have you?”

“You mean the showers? No sir. Been taking them before I ask a girl out. It’s not that, Marvin, it’s just this woman’s so perfect and she doesn’t know I’m alive.”

“In this valley? That’s pretty hard to do. Who is she?”

Dewey fidgeted and then whispered, “Emily Stickles.”

“Emily … Stickles? You mean the same Miz Stickles that tried to get my counseling service stopped?”

Dewey nodded. “I can’t help it, Marvin. Honest.”

“Well,” said the older man, “she is awfully easy on the eyes.”

“And her cheekbones, Marvin. Did you see them? And the kind look in her eyes? And the way she …”

“Got it! Okay now. So why haven’t you asked her out?”

“She’d never go out with me…”

“Faint heart ne’er won fair lady, Mr. Decker. You need to dress your best, go right up to her and introduce yourself, tell her who you are and what you do, and ask her out. Now, I’d do it in daylight. Go for coffee. You know, so she doesn’t think you’re stalking her.”

“You really think so?”

“Absolutely. And, to emphasize the point, I’m going to tie you up an attractant fly on a number two streamer hook. You will look at this every day, reminding yourself to preen and look your best, take showers, and just cowboy up. I think maybe a bivisible with jungle cock eyes.”

In mere minutes the fly was securely in Dewey’s hands and he was headed home.

“I’ll do it,” he said. “I’ll do it!”

He looked. There was no one around. “Maybe next week...”

                                                       ------------------
Brought to you by Slim’s new book “A Cowboy’s Guide to Growing Up Right.” Learn more at http://www.nmsantos.com/Slim/Slim.html.

Guest Post from Slim Randles

Here is another guest post from my friend and fellow writer, Slim Randles.  I do appreciate the fact that he is so generous to share his column "Home Country"  with my readers here.

Dewey Decker silently shoveled cow manure into the back of his pickup, but for the first time, his heart wasn’t in it.

He knew he had it to do, so he did it. Scoop, toss. Scoop toss. Then, when the bed was full, he somberly drove to town and unloaded it onto the many compost piles behind his house.

Then he drew compost from the bottom and put that in the truck. Scoop, toss. Scoop toss.

Then off he went in the pickup with the sign reading Environmental Enrichment Services and delivered the magnificent new garden amendments to one of his customers. Again … scoop, toss and spread. Scoop, toss, spread.

Normally, this would have filled his day with a sense of accomplishment, secure in the knowledge that he was making the world a little richer by his labors. But today it only warranted a sigh.

He quit work at noon, took a shower and went to the Mule Barn truck stop for lunch.

Even that didn’t help.

“Pull up a chair, Dewey,” said Dud, jovially. “We were just talking about the shellacking Ol’ Marve gave the county people.”

Partially through town support, and largely through the efforts of Dewey himself, Marvin Pincus had been allowed to continue counseling the lovelorn and tying appropriate flies for their therapy. It was the talk of the valley.

“Yes,” Dewey nodded. “That was good.”

“You feeling okay, Doo?” asked Doc.

“Sure. I’m fine.”

But he wasn’t. While his outer shell delighted in fertilizing life in the valley, his heart lay fallow. How could they understand what Emily meant to him. Oh yes, he thought of her now as Emily and not as Ms. Stickles, the county love advice coordinator.   

In his mind, she walked with a graceful air, smiling that soft smile that melted his heart and changed his outlook forever.

He picked at his burger and fries and then paid his bill and left. Mindlessly he drove the fertilizer pick-up around town, eventually noticing that he kept passing Marvin Pincus’s house.

Of course. This was a problem for the Fly Tying Love Center.

He pulled up and stopped.

                                                            ------------------
Home Country is a syndicated column that appears in  several hundred newspapers across the country. This installment is brought to you by Slim’s new book “A Cowboy’s Guide to Growing Up Right.” Learn more at http://www.nmsantos.com/Slim/Slim.html.