Tag: Confident

By All Accounts

As a younger man–though old enough to know better–I once navigated a rather cryptic epoch during which I chose (wholeheartedly or pigheadedly) to stick with my plague-rich mentality of promotional ice cream lotteries, confident in my god-given ability to strike it rich. With my trusty two and a quarter inch nail at my disposal, I scribed the five luckiest numbers ever known to man and beast in my favorite subterranean cave, positively declaring an end to the ceaseless turmoil of fumbling around in the cosmic muck for a few measly digits that–at one of my lower points–I thought would elude me as long as I were to inhabit this particular body. I then hastily chucked good ol’ Rusty (that’s what I called my long-suffering galvanized friend, knowing that his kind doesn’t rust for decades–a joke we shared on countless occasions) into the nearest ravine, a flourish that would–by all accounts (payable or otherwise)–bring this self-imposed trudge to a meaningful conclusion.

Boy, what a boneheaded mistake. No sooner than I’d comforted myself with that symbolic nail toss, a magpie hopped on by and casually reminded me that the most lucrative lottery drawings typically have six numbers. I wept, knowing that I’d severed the most rewarding relationship of a lifetime under the false pretense of a free scoop of rocky road at a participating Neddy’s® Frozen Custard.

I shaved and went back to my old CPA job.

“Wild West”

Slammin’ the fit-o-deena–ground lengthwise across a bawdy expanse of thneeds
(which everybody needs)–we took our serenades elsewhere, confident in our knowledge of the occult (i.e. the back-stabbery and latent overall treachery that sorts itself out over the course of dozens of generations) and its ability to stall disbelief as one would when faced with a Mel Brooks-esque (or, to a lesser extent, Mel Blanc-ish) dilemma involving the safety of an entire town, where the hapless protagonist even agonizes over the insignificant-yet-unique blood splotch patterns on each and every last hitching post (with the hopes of creating a permanent photographical installment at the Getty and cementing his status as one of the pioneers of pre-modernized main street massacre legacy documentation that would span the seldom-understood and often-demonized “Wild West” (that is, if he has anything to say about it)).