For those that were just little pylon thumper's when this was posted, and
for
those that still get a chuckle while reading it, perfect for the Winter
Doldrums,
I present another reair of:
A Sheepherder's Fable
At 01:22 AM 5/10/96 -0400, Smokerbros@aol.com wrote:
>Byron Short writes:
>
>> Mama didn't raise no fools. ;-)
>
>Okay, I give. So who DID raise you?
Oh Brother CHuck. I can never tell when you're kidding, and when you're
just having another one of your unfortunate flashbacks. Okay, last time:
Abandoned at birth and left on a doorstep of a sheepherder's house in Ohio.
I was raised by a kindly old woman named Mother Johnson, who lived with her
son Roger all alone. Funny, but I never once saw Mother and Roger together
at the same time. But oh the memories I have of that farm house, those
peaceful nights with the wind blowing through the screen porch, and the
muffled sound of sheep baying in Mother's room. Mother said that sometimes
the sheep were sick and she would keep them there upstairs in her room at
night to comfort them. She was such a kindly woman. She would also take in
young girls on occasion, offering them food, shelter, and her own cough
syrup she whipped up out of distilled corn mash before whisking them off to
her room for the evening where she could comfort them back to health.
It was sheer bliss until one day, in my early teens I happened into the
parlor and noticed the hallway watercloset door partly open. There inside
was Mother, standing over the toilet, making quite a splash. I suppose she
was emptying one of the chewing tabacco cans from the front room, but then I
never did see the spittoon. Most odd was that I had never before noticed
that Mother wore a wig, but there it was on the sink, and with her quilted
dress pulled up over her buttocks that way I noticed that she had really let
herself go. And she was badly in need of having her legs shaved. Anyway,
Mother saw me and exploded in a rage, yelling and screaming, making even
more racket than that time she had a little too much cough syrup and wound
up trying to comfort an ewe and the neighbor's daughter at the same time.
So Mother banned me from the house that day and at the tender young age of
14 I found myself hitchhiking westward.
And of course, Brother CHuck, you remember most of the rest, although since
you were often in a flashback-infested psychedelic world, I'll recount the
high points for you. I was taken in by a couple young high school
sweethearts named Bob and Patty who lived on a commune during the day,
returning to their parent's homes at night so they'd be none the wiser, and
how I learned that the four basic food groups were corn tortillas, flour
tortillas, Jose Cuervo and Triple Sec.
That Bob and Patty, what an epic love story. They became sweethearts at the
age of 4, and rented their first apartment together at age 6. Every chance
they'd get, they'd tell their parents they were off to Bible study class,
and then make a beeline for their private love nest. Anyway, by the time
they were 21 they'd been living together for 15 years, and when CHuck and I
entered the picture, a misguided runaway and a burned out druggie from
Haight Ashbury, Bob and Patty seemed like the closest thing to stability we
had ever seen.
Those were happy times for most of us, although CHuck had a tough coupla
years as the mescaline, pcp, and lysergic-somethin-or-other continued to
filter through his system. He'd come to the breakfast table in the morning,
his hair up like Don King, eyes like Chuck Manson (this is why we call him
CHuck to this day), murmering something about seeing flying saucers, light
trails, and sounds of wailing and torture coming from the room next door.
Then the two love birds, Bob with his ears twisted in incredible shapes, and
Patty, often still wearing her favorite leather evening wear, the chains
jingling serenely against her fishnets as she made the morning tortillas.
She was the big sister I never had. Well, she would have been if she wore
more wool.
Anyway one morning the blender fritzed before we could even add the Triple
Sec, and Patty went off in a rage yelling obscenities at Bob. The kind of
obscenities that the FCC won't let me type here, but it rhymes with Huck &
CHuck. Anyway, CHuck and I felt that the time had come for us to strike out
on our own; only later did we find out that this had been a good thing that
we had witnessed, that the elevated shouting of such things was termed by
Patty as "oral sex" and we had in fact missed out on our very first orgy.
And so Patty and Bob were left in their love nest, while Brother CHuck and I
were left to make do with our own wits. We nearly starved.
CHuck was a wreck for those first few weeks on the street. We lived in an
old burned out RX3 behind a Mazda repair shop. Perhaps it was the incessant
sound of unmuffled rotaries, perhaps it was just more flashbacks, but CHuck
was worse than ever. I actually had my first hallucenogenic experience in
that RX3, brought on, I believe by the constant exposure to CHuck's body
odor.
At any rate, while most would have called us "bums" or "street people", we
actually found the RX3 to be a fertile environment for creativity. It was
there that CHuck discovered the chemical compound unobtainium. Although we
thought it was utterly worthless, a novelty, we somehow sold licenses for
it's use to Porsche, Lotus, and Yokohama for use in the A032. Of course,
none of these contracts proved lucrative enough for us to move out of the
RX3, and we began searching for a more substantial market to use our
discovery.
It was while researching Camaro differentials that I made a chance discovery
which would change our lives. CHuck had gotten into the differential
project because he heard they were somehow a source of lsd, but I suspected
a better market for unobtainium given the sheer size of the market. But
what I happened upon was something far more exciting. I discovered that the
Chevy rear ends didn't actually wear out, the clutches just went away. I
mean, really, they *went away*. Best I could tell, they moved, roughly 1/4"
into an alternate parallel universe. In this position they proved utterly
worthless to the differential. However, in my creative mind, I knew this
property could be valuable if it could be harnessed.
I imagined a world where negative displacement engine drops could make a 383
Chevy measure as a 350, where negative displacement rulebooks could actually
get *smaller* every year and yet say *more*, where negative displacement ego
drops could be sold over the counter to any Porsche or BMW driver with a
prescription, and where negative displacement sheep creme could offer Mother
Johnson benefits that I just can't describe here. This eventually led to
the invention of the 1/4" negative displacement wheel spacer which has been
the staple of Huck & CHuck Enterprises ever since.
Anyway, enough for now, CHuck. I need time to arrange another shipment of
"creativity" to you, and it takes so long to vaccuum wrap everything and put
my old socks in there to throw the dogs off. Besides, the SEB meeting runs
all weekend, and I just might need a little "creativity" myself.
Your Brother,
Huck
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