Tall Tales

The whiskey holler was out the other night, or was it daytime?…i suppose that’s relative…from our perspective, i guess it was right in the middle of day and night – twilight, as it were, and we’d been walking for a while, just kinda talkin’ and lookin’ and sippin’ on a nice little bit of brown likkor out of a tin can with a spout, when we found a bridge, but it was one of those bridges not made for cars or bikes or any wheeled vehicles, considering there were staircases on either side, preventing any standard movement for, let’s say a scooter to make approaching the…footbridge, tha’s it, and anyways, we were right at the foot of this staircase that led to the footbridge, which went akross some train-tracks, cause usually a bridge is a way over something that needs to continue with what it’s doing without interruption: bridge over troubled water, for instance : and we’re hearing a train a’coming, coming ’round the bend, and we scoot all our behinds up that staircase and get into that caged entrapment of a bridge right as the train is coming, and at this point, it’s right underneath, coulda jumped into the passing cars, but instead threw some pennies, so ole’ Abe Lincoln could get a vacation outta our pockets, and he landed each time with a nice little…”dink” “d-dink-dink” “clink” jumping all mad-like around in those empty coal-carts, which we liked doing a whole awful lot, not too sure why, it wasn’t a free game, though not too considerable of a cost, and we were all smiling and laughing and sipping some more outta that tin can, when we ran outta copper and figured thom jefferson and his silver stallions were too valuable to waste on some locomotive who was too busy to even whistle at us – just the mockingbirds were whistling and that kinda teasing ain’t so fun, so we gathered ourselves and went back down the steps, watched as the train came a-rollin, down on to san antone…musta been the longest train we’d seen we decided, and when it finally stopped comin round the bend, it was next week, but we stayed there, talkin and lookin and sippin – that ole tin cup never did give up either – till there wasn’t nothin left but track, so we did what you do when you see train tracks, and that’s walk…walk…walk…walk…and we walked till we smelled something awful, so awful all eight individual eyes, four pairs on four folk, were all squinched up and we buried our noses into our elbows and the sides of our mouths bent down on either side like we were four cowboys looking at something real terrible, cause we were.

 

there was a white-tailed deer laying ever-so still on the track, well sort of.  he was laying on the track, but now, half a him was on one side, the other on the other, cut right down the damn middle.  we all got a little closer, inspecting and such, and passed the tin cup around, but she was empty from crying away all her whiskey, so we just stood there perplexed.  how did that sucker end up so torn like that?  we decided that the train had to keep doing what it was doing and there wasn’t no stopping.  that kinda drive forward is a powerful thing, something that can end up killing, at least in this instance.  we were smart enough to use that bridge, to not get in the way of something more powerful than we were.  so there’s gonna be those times, when somebody or something is gonna be barrelin on down towards you and you gotta decide, am i gonna let this mother go? or am i gonna stand in its way?  now, we’re not saying don’t stand up fer yerself, and we’re also not saying keep a blind drive forward.  we’re just saying, don’t bring a knife to a gun fight and don’t forget to keep yer eyes open all the time.