A micro story read in-the-style-of Sam Elliott.
I reckon that’s whiskey you’re drinking there, partner. Me, too. Nothing beats the stuff. Seems to go down smoother each time you drink it. Me, I’ve been drinking the stuff longer than I can recall. Longer than I bet your momma ever been with your pops! Yep, I’ve been around a while. Long enough to see a few things in my time. Things that change a man. I reckon there’s less out there that makes a man a man than the life he already lives. And what’s a life without learning a few lessons along the way, huh? Lessons that I can pass down? That’s right, I’m going to tell you a story…
It’s a story about a shave tail I knew once, a man, couldn’t have been any older than yourself. And judging by that whiskey you’ve got there I can tell you’ve come a cropper. Maybe the world has dragged you down a heap, but whiskey never lies. You admit your sins to it every time you sip. Some say that’s what makes it so smooth. Because the more you drink, the more you get to bury the things you aren’t proud of. Men are proud beasts by-nature. But when we aren’t, we drink. The young man I knew was a drinker, too. Come to think of it, we must have been sitting in the same seats we are now. No foolin. And we got to talkin, much like we’re talking now, and he told me what made him so repentant and like a good ear does I listened. He didn’t like where he lived; he didn’t trust his friends; he didn’t know where he was going, a real croaker. And I told him then as I’ll tell you now, none of us has the answers. I’m in the winter of my life and I’m still trying to figure things out over a glass of whiskey in a bar. I told him that he needs to pick something he’s good at and, by golly just, stop beatin the devil around the stump! When I was a young rooster, I didn’t know what I wanted to do, but I knew I could drive my dad’s truck around the ranch to the manner born. So I signed up at trucking school and that’s how I made my fortune. Paid for my kids’ education. Yeah, I got kids. You want to see some pictures? That’s Artemis, he’s my eldest. And that’s Will Riker, he’s my second-eldest, and that’s his wife Doreen and their seven kids. And that’s my daughter Emily. She’s my youngest, says she’s going to school for some sort of science? I never understood that “science” stuff myself, she must have gotten her brains from her grass widow of a mother. She wouldn’t have nowhere to put that big brain of hers’ if I didn’t pay for her to go to college. And I wouldn’t have none of that money if I didn’t pick up my britches and make a decision. Was I happy being a trucker? I couldn’t tell ya. I did it for me. Because I had to. Being happy was never part of it. I was happy when my children were happy, and the look on my daughter’s face when she got her acceptance letter can’t hold a candle to any summer job raising steers on any ranch anywhere on this here planet, and that’s according to Hoyle. And when I told the young man this he shook my hand, limpest handshake I ever had myself, and he left.
And I didn’t think I would see him again, until a year later, in this same bar. And I was sitting here at my regular chair drinking my regular glass of bottom-shelf and who should come and sit next to me but the same guy as before, swear to God, like he hadn’t aged a day. Looked even younger, in fact, like he could cut a swell. And I asked him what he was up to and he told me that he had taken my advice: picked something he was good at, chased his dream, and now he was building his own house in the country while his new wife was expecting their first kid. Well bully for him! And I asked him, if he would be so kind, as to tell me what he decided to do with himself? For a career? And he told me that he had a twelve-incher and that all the girls would always ask if they could look at it, and he was too self-conscious to ever show them. A twelve-inch pecker! Can you imagine that? Take your foot right there and imagine your foot in your pants, all the time! And that’s what he said, that he thought it was too big and he ain’t never gon find anyone who could take it. So he answered an ad in the paper lookin for actors for a movie and that’s how he met his wife. You just never know what life is going to throw at you. You just got to be ready to do some learning. Or else you’re going to be drinking lots of whiskey.
//jf 8.12.2020
theory of a daskeman 