Hammered

The history of drinking in America is about as old as the first pilgrim fart on New England soil, so it’s no surprise this one dates back to the 1830s when just about everybody and their mother’s uncle was taking hard liquor on a daily basis. In fact, many Americans back then took pride in being seasoned, calisthenic drinkers. There just wasn’t anything else to do. Even reading was out of the question because most people were poor and illiterate, and books, if you had ‘em, were most often used for kindling. Indeed, it was a strange point in American history where folks had been around for a while, put in hard work, built homes, had families, trained animals to poop in designated areas, yet technology and medicine hadn’t yet advanced and the entertainment industry–things like traveling circuses and freak museums–was yet to burst onto the scene. It was plumb boring, and life, for the most part, sucked.

After a horribly strenuous day of manual labour, nothing worked better to ease the mind and body than the kindly bottle.

What was in these bottles? Mainly home-brewed bathtub liqours such as whiskey, ginger beer, and sweat wine¹. Most run-of-the-mill taverns had no distilling capabilities, and thus, the liquor they bottled was more akin in alcohol content to an aggressively strong wine. So it’s no surprise that some people were downing 2 or 3 bottles a night and not dying of alcohol poisoning or internal drowning. Rather, they entered the highest stage of drunkenness preceding full-on coma, which was a kind of pathetic reversion to infanthood or, farther back still, to a primordial glob of shit.

They had many names for this state. They called it: seeing the beauty of the rainbow, going black, sleep-walking, cribbing, chewing the tongue, seeing your dinner twice, becoming fearless, and getting randy. In this state, the drinker was liable to inflict untold mayhem especially upon the quiet, peaceful homes to which he returned.  Needless to say, wives were pissed.

As a backlash to the rampant binge-drinking of the 1830s, the first prohibition and temperance movement emerged, led mainly by Protestants fed up with smelly, bedraggled men that stunk up the seats³ and aisles during mass, and wives who had to bear the wrathful night terrors of drunken overworked husbands. In Boston, a group called the Teetotalers Initiative for Temperance Sisterhood (TITS) began hammering delinquency notices to the house-doors of known drunkards. Since no one could read, the notices portrayed a black-and-white image of a prickly-faced bottle-tipping clown burning in a pit of hellfire.

As a backlash to this backlash, a corrupted Amish buggy-driver named Crusty Rogers hatched a plan to capitalize. He was already a well-known mobile liquor vendor who, for months, had been posting up outside of work farms and trading posts peddling a particularly strong country-brewed silo whiskey. His plan was simple: he would use the delinquency notices like discount coupons. One notice got you half price on any bottle.

After only a week, it caught on like wildfire. Even back then, Americans were crazy for liquor deals. Any given drunk would wake up one day with a notice on his door, which he would use that evening to buy a half-price bottle from Crusty. After downing that bottle, the man would be drunk enough to buy one or two full-priced bottles, then stumble back and get into some drunken home-wrecking, which in turn, would start the process over again with yet another deliquency notice hammered to the door, and Crusty Rogers reeping all the benefits.

Pretty soon most drunks were raving about the thrifty joys of getting “hammered” with a deliquency notice. Bands of men formed gambling pools and began betting on who could get the most hammered in one week.

It didn’t take long before TITS caught on to Crusty’s rogue coupon scheme.

One Monday night, armed with hammers and flaming torches, the wives stormed the vending carriage, intent on destruction and reckoning by hellfire. Surrounding the carriage were 80 or so drunken men who, upon seeing the light from the torch-flames, began screaming “HOOOOOORAAAAAAA” and bumping their chests together. At that moment, the women seized upon the drunken men, beating them in the face with hammers, then swarmed the carriage like rabid fireflies,  torching the wooden frame and canvas coverling, and in a matter of seconds, the carriage exploded, glass and flaming embers shooting out in all directions.

The next day, the men couldn’t remember what had happened the night before. Most of them, upon arising, did the usual: inspected their front doors for deliquency notices. But it was all in vain, for not a single notice had been hammered to any door that morning.

The men went to work, and in the evening, met in the usual spot where Crusty parked his wagon. But Crusty’s wagon wasn’t there. In fact, nothing was there, except a large blackened hollow in the ground. After a while, the men lumbered off to a nearby tavern. Only one man tarried. Something in the blackened hollow had caught his eye. He picked it up. It was a delinquency notice.

“Hey guys, look!” he yelled excitedly and turned around. No one was there. He looked at the image on the sheet of paper. A drunken clown burning in a pit of hellfire.

“Where the hell is Crusty?” he thought.

 

¹not to be confused with sweet wine, sweat wine was a gnarly concoction of fermented mushrooms and cow-grazed grass. It had a curious effect of magnifying the body’s already foul odor and of keeping even the best of friends² at a distance of 10 feet.

²Those who loved you enough to endure the stench henceforth became known as “close friends.”

³This is how the bench seats in modern churches became knows as “pews”.

Up Shit Creek

This one takes us back to the pre-Gold Rush years of the 1840s when, even before gold fever struck, many settlers from the midwest sought a better life on the West coast. They’d heard tell of huge unclaimed plots of land, of rock mines filled with gold and minerals, and even of sparkling bubble water that popped out of the ground and when imbibed could cure the bodily terrors* of an all pheasant-and-goatmilk diet.

In 1846, a party of about 40 settlers arrived in Westerville, Oregon. They’d come from Wyoming, and primarily consisted of cousins and inbreds from a once-thriving ranch in Duneskin County that had been increasingly pestered by drought and Mexican horse robbers. After weeks of travel, they arrived horribly weathered, many stricken with typhoid and dysentery, else completely broken in spirit lamenting the loss of two children who’d been carried off in the night by a pack of wild foxes.

When they heard that Stephen Meek, a local guide and fur trapper, had blazed a shortcut to the coast that bypassed the treacherous Blue Mountains, they wasted no time seeking him out and gathering provisions for the final leg of the journey. Despite having heard tales about the high death toll on Meek’s previous expedition, the elder men decided to put their faith in Meek who, they figured, after making the journey before (plus he had a really savage beard) was the most seasoned and expert guide they could hope to find. They kept the horror stories to themselves.

Stephen Meek had a mentally disabled younger brother named Daniel. It was rumored among the townspeople, many of whom resented Meek’s fame and the amount of dirty unwashed settlers it lured, that Daniel was Meek’s retarded twin, and that at birth, whereas Stephen Meek had been bestowed with the vigor and intelligence and beard of a keen Mountain Man, Daniel Meek had been deprived of facial hair and nearly all mental capacities save the ability to make damn good pancakes. To all, he was known as Daniel the Pancake Man.

You probably already guessed that on the morning of departure it was Daniel the Pancake Man, not Stephen Meek, who led the 40 Duneskin settlers west. Not a single one questioned the sudden lack of a beard. In fact, they seem to be flattered and took it as a gesture of good will. That morning, the real Meek accidentally slept in.

About 3 weeks on the trail, after having just forded a shallow, relatively stagnant creek where everyone including the horses dropped horribly foul, strangled poops, one of the elder men finally asked their guide a question,

“When are we gunna see mountains?”

to which he replied, screaming,

“I am Daniel the Pancake Man! I am Daniel the Pancake Man!!!” and began violently whipping himself in the face with his belt as if repeatedly flipping invisible pancakes.

“I am Daniel the Pancake Man!!!”

Suddenly, several of the women began wheezing heavily, apparently having panic attacks, while others grabbed their children, now sobbing, and held them tightly to their breast, covering the children’s ears and shielding them from the horrible cries of “I am Daniel the Pancake Man!!!” and his bleeding face.

Two strong men quickly tackled the disgruntled guide and pinned him to the ground, while a third ripped off his clothes– buckskin jacket with Indian fringe, crusted canvas pants, woolen underlings. As he lay there twitching naked, the men were appalled at what they saw. On the inside of each article of clothing was a carefully stitched name:

Daniel the Pancake Man Meek.

New, never-before-heard expletives were uttered by the three men, who now had the unenviable job of breaking the news to the entire party, that for 3 weeks they’d been led astray by an impostor invalid pancake maniac.

For such a devastating blow, the people seemed calm and resigned, for what else could they do but turn around and go back the way they had come. But the truth was they were stupefied. After such a traumatic experience, no one could quite process what was going on.

Until they were crossing the creek again. Then it hit them where they were.

 

 

*especially esophagus-lodged shotgun pellets

Idioms, idiot!

If you’ve been reading these (you’re the only one) then you’ve undoubtedly noticed that I don’t give a hoot for explaining the usage of these idioms. Why? Because that’s obvious. I’m not concerned with the obvious here. Everyone knows when and how to use these phrases. But how many of us can say why we use them? I argue that it has everything to do with their origins, with the people, the ideals, the times, the American milieu of their birth. Interestingly, most of the people involved with these births have been complete idiots–miscreants, deviates, two-timers, scared and ugly people– it ain’t a wonder none of this ever made it into the history books. I’m still trying to connect the dots myself. Won’t you join me!

Happy Camper

After the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in the early 1960s, middle-class Americans underwent a soft-core bout of shame for treating the Natural Landscape of America with such an apathetic disregard for its health and beauty. (Some people had called this attitude toward Nature “not giving a fuck.”) As with any emotional period in American history, advertisers quickly pounced.

In January of ’63, hoping to cash in on people’s Nature guilt, GM released a novelty outdoors vacation calendar that showcased a young, happy American family doing rugged activities together in various National Parks and camping destinations: Building a fire at dusk beneath the shadowy granite monoliths of Yosemite Valley, hiking along the edge of a massive waterfall in Yellowstone, holding their hats as Old Faithful erupts to the heavens. In each photograph, the family of four (The Weiners from California) were smiling and laughing, with eyes and mouths open so wide that their heads seemed to be on the verge of exploding. In the background of each picture, like a loyal family pet, stood their sparkling blue GM station wagon with a grey polyester car-top carrier, the first of its kind. The message was clear:  Holy shit! Buy a GM car and go camping and have the best vacation ever!

The ad campaign caught on, and before long the family from the calendar (Mr. and Mrs. Bill Weiner) enjoyed the status of celebrity in their small California town. Many households revered the ”Happy Campers” and decided that they, too, wanted to get back to nature, to show their children a peaceful environment away from the industrial polluted hubbub of the cities. Plus, it was dirt cheap and one deer-sighting might shut the kids up for an entire day.

But it all changed in the summer of ’63 when hundreds of families actually decided to go camping.

The campgrounds back then weren’t like we know them today. There were no bathrooms save a couple holes in the ground the diameter of a CD, mosquitoes festered in droves, and many places were overrun with raccoons who boldly ravaged human food at all hours and bears who would obliterate car doors and defecate on polyester car-top carriers. The few lucky families who’d been having borderline pleasant experiences– cozy campfire stories, little boxes of cereal in the morning, low-level rodent penetration– soon succumbed to the hellish misfortunes of houseless life: Little Tina came back from the creek and thinking it was her apple juice she’d left on the rock, drank a cup of Billy’s urine. Dad suffered a mild heart attack after fending off a black bear with a thin plastic folding chair. Billy who’d lost his trusty pocket knife in a stump was taking his anger out by kicking pinecones at Mom, who’d been stoically enduring menstrual cramps and a horrible case of mudbutt*.

Worst of all, upon returning from their cursed vacations, the parents would suffer the inevitable comment from the smug neighbor as he witnessed Billy and Tina, covered in pink calamine lotion, bawling hysterically in the back seat of the car.

“They don’t look like very happy campers!”

After the summer of ’63, people’s rampant disillusionment with outdoor vacations backfired not so much on GM sales or public image but on the Happy Campers themselves. In many households, the calendar became a dartboard, oftentimes with intricate point-scoring rules for nailing specific body parts. Also, “weiner” was now a dirty word.

That Fall, the Weiner family received hundreds of letters containing grotesque and disturbing pictures from random families’ camping trips. Interestingly, and perhaps by accident, many senders included pre-departure pictures of the family holding all their newly purchased camping gear and doing poses in the backyard. They looked truly happy. At least the children.

*see “Bite the Bullet”

Batshit Crazy

This one originated in the latter half of the 19th century when American consumer culture was running high off its own bullshit. For consumer products, this was the time of cure-alls, magical brassieres, and medicines claiming the power to dispel demons and calm the psychological tremors of insanity while at the same time curing constipation and boils. For entertainment this was the era of side-shows and freak museums, of Barnum’s Tom Thumb and the Feejee Mermaid, of hoaxes and gags all in the name of show business. Basically, it was the simultaneous birth of entertainment as industry and the American belief that happiness, or more importantly the illusion of happiness, can be bottled and bought.

A New York businessman and inventor named Kip Billington owned a successful company that sold face cream and body lotion. He’d been selling these cosmetics for years, in fact he’d already made a small fortune, however, recently the market had become inundated with new brands that touted their pompous advertising with unprecedented vigor and muscularity. It was clear that he needed something fresh, a new scheme, a new form of advertising.

Billington devised a Barnumesque stunt in which, under the pseudonym of a fake public health organization*– False Advertising of Cosmetics Initiative Against Lying (FACIAL) — he would reveal to the press that his skin cream contained large amounts of bat shit, obtained dirt cheap from the underside of a bridge in Texas, and that for 20 years he’d been falsely advertising this product, concealing its main ingredient, and that his valued customers had indeed, for years, been liberally massaging bat poop into their skin pores.

The next day, people would read the news or else hear it from a friend or colleague (bad news always spreads like wildfire), and it would cause an immediate uproar. All of middle-class New York would be outraged. Some would hastily throw away all the Kip Billington products in the house, some would sniff them and vomit, others might simply pass them on to the hired help. However, one thing was for sure, everyone would know that name, Kip Billington, the man who bottled bat shit and sold it as face cream. He’d be the talk of the town, famous. Even better, he’d be infamous.

Then, at the opportune moment, at the height of scandal, when the very presses that printed the bold typefaced letters of his name were burning with scorn, he would reveal the hoax, that he himself had fabricated FACIAL, had slandered himself and damaged his own public image for the express purpose of igniting the crucible of public opinion against the entire skin cream industry, thus purifying it of all lies and falsities of advertising. He did it in the name of Truth and Honesty. (Of course the real truth was that he did it for the hype, which in the end would bring him more business, more money.)

Did his plan work out?

Of course not. But why? Simple: He’d gotten the wrong idea of what a hoax was and did actually put bat poo into his cream.

When the time came to pull back the curtain on the whole operation and reveal the hoax, it didn’t matter. Most regular customers, and even brand new ones, could already see the truth. The Kip Billington Cream bottles had always been of clear glass, and thus it was blatantly obvious that the cream had darkened and its consistency now resembled the charred blackened refuse of grandpa’s hash pipe.

The public deemed Billington an idiot, a monster, and everyone agreed that he should “die in burning hell” for what he did. Everyone except Fawny Tootskin a schizophrenic acne-ridden woman who used the cream religiously and swore by its power (it worked once) to clear unsightly flare-ups caused by menstruation. I bet you can guess what everyone called her.

*Footnote:    Such FDA-like organizations did not yet exist. It is interesting, however,  to notice that the first occurrences of anything resembling such oversight organizations were created as hype-ploys and hoaxes by the very businesses that such organizations purported to monitor. Tragically, this irony pervades the American economic-political system even today.

Bite the Bullet

The year was 1848. The place was California. The only cure for hemorrhoids was a hot fork-tipped branding iron.

This was the first of the Gold Rush years and already the towns inland of San Francisco were getting increasingly inundated by grubby, disgusting men who arrived smelly and unshaven after weeks, sometimes months, having suffered the wears of the road, which, for some messed up reason, afflicted mainly the arse– saddle sores, chafing, cactus ass (rough, prickly developments due to wiping with strange materials), and mud butt (random fluctuations between constipation and diarrhea). True, these ailments were horrible and pestering but they were nothing that couldn’t be salved by a couple days binging on whiskey and whores at the Jackass Inn in Placerville, and dreaming sweet gilded dreams of filling up bag after bag with egg-sized nuggets of gold and returning back home to your fam—  moving to San Francisco.

Not hemorroids though. No sir. All the gold and whores in the world wouldn’t ease the pain of a nasty travel-inflamed heemer. Doc Martin (no relation to the shoe or to being a doctor) could spot one from a mile away. Well, actually, to re-phrase that, he was the bartender at the Jackass Inn, purveyor of fine bathtub whisk, and whenever a new group of men came in, by some strange talent akin to being a horse-whisperer, he could pick out the afflicted ones, could read it on their woebegone faces, expressions that seemed to spell it out: Heemers.

The Doc had made a small fortune of gold already, not by panning or dry digging, but by burning off heemers with a special fork-tipped branding iron, a simple procedure of which before, the afflicted man was made to drink a hearty amount of highest-proof whiskey and to sign a debt agreement that ensured Doc Martin a hefty share of the afflicted man’s future profits in gold.

Interesting brief sidenote: Because of the practice of afflicted men “leaning” over while Doc Martin made his appraisal, this type of debt-of-property agreement henceforth became known as a “lien.”

Billy Peterson, 23 year-old man, 23 week-old heemer, had been in town not more than an hour and hearing the drunken raves of grizzled locals, had already succumbed to the alluring promise of a cure.

He met Doc Martin, underwent an appraisal, and drank an entire glass of whiskey, which, one would think, might calm his nerves, however, just before the procedure, as he was bending over the horse trough out back of the Jackass Inn, a crazy retarded man lunged at him screaming “Bodda blah bluh!” and tried to shove a metal object into Billy’s mouth. Billy was startled and a bit scared, but when the retarded man opened his own mouth to speak again, Billy became instantly petrified with fear. The man was tongueless.

“Bodda blah bluh!” said the tongueless man, drooling, the metal object shaking in his outstretched hand.

“Ready?” asked the Doc who’d been heating his poker over the fire.

“No no stop!” cried Billy.

“Listen son,” said Doc Martin in a fatherly tone, “Just bite the bullet.”

Billy, tears running down his cheek, grabbed the bullet from the tongueless man’s hand, put it between his molars and crunched down hard.

Billy’s screams were drowned out by the hell-raising cries of the small crowd that had gathered in solidarity and reminiscence of their own procedures (or else they just wanted to see some cool shit while they were drunk). They hollered and cheered wildly, everyone except for the 7 or 8 tongueless men who cackled and drooled on themselves. They were slightly bitter.

Raining Cats and Dogs

If you’ve noticed a common thread in the unraveling of the previous three idioms, you’re not retarded, there is one: The tone of all is vulgar and violent, evoking images of death, shit, and cruelty to (or exploiting the feces of) animals. But why? It’s simple. These turns of phrase appeared in the language at a time when the milieu of the American experience embodied exactly that tone of violence and vulgarity. Remember, we killed an entire race of people (and buffalo) so we could live here. It’s not that we forget this fact (we do), and I’m not trying to get sentimental, and also I’m not going to pussyfoot around and call them indigenous people, or natives, or even indians (To me they are the Ones Who Came Before [1'sWCB4]), it’s that we fail to recognize their influence on American language and culture. 1′sWCB4, this one’s for you.

Hundreds of years before we arrived on the continent, most 1′sWCB4 lived in matriarchal societies. Only one man in a given society had any power at all: the Rainmaker. For the most part, he lived a removed life in nature. It was thought that he could speak to the moon and hear the secret whispers of the cosmos, which he would translate to the people, telling them exactly when to sew the crops, when to wait, when to harvest. Basically, he was a glorified weatherman getting some pretty big props when times were good, rain aflowing, food aplenty, but conversely, taking a lot of flack in the drier seasons and during a drought, sheesh, the whole village would circle around him and take turns bludgeoning him until he died, a human sacrifice to appease nature.

Many early settlers in the New England area were scared shitless by this legend:

In a Northeastern forest there lived a mysterious half-naked dark man that would enter the town of Clearfield on rainy nights. It was said that he was once a rainmaker whose tribe had suffered extreme drought and rather than give his life as sacrifice, he fled. He lived like an animal in the forest and anguished in a constant state of shame for abandoning his people and disrupting the flow of all things. He believed his tribe had put a curse on him, and consequently he suffered a violent paranoia of the moon and rodents.

It was said that every time it rained, a heavy pouring rain, the man was plagued by a torrential shower of rodents as if each drop of rain was a rat or raccoon or slimy possum with an unborn head. On rainy nights in Clearfield, children would shake their parents awake terrified that they had heard the rainmaker screaming in agony. In these moments, parents did their best to ensure the children that the rainmaker did not exist. But the children knew. Everybody knew.

One night there was a full moon. Inside the houses of Clearfield everything was calm and still. Families slept peacefully next to their dwindling fires, and children dreamed happy fantasies. Not a thing was moving.

Then, all of the sudden, rain started pouring down in thick sheets and thunder shook the roofs of houses. Still, everybody slept. Except the cats and dogs. They had awaken instantly and, as if by instinct or a kind of magical stimulant, bolted wildly from their homes shrieking and moaning aggressively as if each was tearing apart a dirty rat with its teeth. They trampled across rooftops and scurried manicly towards the center of town where before the threshold of the church doors, they pounced on the dark, half-naked body of the rainmaker, who stood perfectly still with eyes closed as the cats and dogs ripped his flesh off. Hundreds of cats and dogs poured like demented roaches onto the Rainmaker’s body. He began to scream violently and with such force as though it were the deathly screams of his entire tribe.

The children woke up  and started crying. Some hid under the blankets shivering, others were hugged by their parents.

“What’s happening?” asked the children.

“It’s raining cats and dogs out there.” said the parents, holding their children tightly. “Raining cats and dogs.”

But the children knew. Everybody knew.

 

Killing Time

This one emerged during that period of early American history where religious tensions were running high–   women were burned alive as witches, black people that sang songs were shot on the spot, children had to go to bed before sundown–   for a People obsessed with salvation and God’s light, this was a very bleak time.

As a backlash to the rigid Biblical literalism upheld by most New England Protestants, there emerged a religious cult known as the Cult of the Literal Interpretation of Time (CLIT). Their ethos was based on the belief that time had a literal, physical, tangible body and that he was older or roughly the same age as God the Almighty, and actually, they had been good friends until God decided to build the Garden of Eden as an escape from hanging out with Time who, it’s true, had been getting a little needy and smothering.

When Time found out about this magical Garden where he wasn’t allowed to enter, he vowed revenge. After some hard detective work and many caffeine-addled sleepless nights, he discovered a small fissure in the edge of the Garden and devised a plan. He would transform his body into a long thin slippery limbless creature, sneak into the Garden unnoticed, and seduce the woman Eve making her fall in love with him, which wouldn’t be hard because his new body would make him look exactly like Adam’s penis. Then, God would have to let Time stay in the Garden or else the humans, God’s own creations, would turn against Him. Plus, even if God kicked Time’s ass and threw him out of the Garden for good, the humans would still have known about Time, and how could they go on living in Paradise supposedly having everything and yet knowing that out there, beyond it all, was some strange unknown penislike being completely separate from their world. They would be forever unhappy. (Even in Paradise humans were whiny ill-content bastards.)

Everything went according to Time’s plan; it was all so easy. He snuck in, found the humans, and immediately hit it off with Eve by telling some snappy jokes about pheasants and tossing some fruit around. When God found out about the friendship, he wasn’t so much pissed as he was flabbergasted. He couldn’t believe that the humans would rather live with Time. He even explained what this meant–    they’d grow up, lose their imaginations and youthful energy and hair, they’d get pimples, hangnails, heartburn, they’d suffer daily, get old and wrinkly, grow hemorrhoids, eventually have to poop from their bellybuttons, and worst of all, they would feel a constant numbness to life, as if it was a long waiting period, a slow death–    but still, they did not reject Time.

CLIT believed that they were the direct, first generation descendants of Adam and Eve, and by some rent in the universe or fallibility of Time, they had been born thousands of years later with the sole responsibility of killing Time. They strongly rejected the idea that earthly life was just a period of suffering before death, and thus, they revered every physical pain, every hardship, every boring mundane routine moment of the day with a sense of orgasmic wonder.

One Tuesday before dawn, in a single file line outside of the post office, they all died (hearts exploded) just minutes before the post office opened its doors. Apparently, they’d been waiting all night, killing Time.

The Protestants immediately destroyed all evidence of the CLIT, and from then on made sure to keep themselves busy and always have something mindless to do while waiting for shit to happen.

Screwed the Pooch

This one takes us back to late 18th century Appalachia where lived a community of mountain people whose name has long been forgotten probably due to this very incident which would forever obliterate, and yet, paradoxically, solidify their mark on the language of American cultural failures.

Brief side note:   By this time in American history, the word screw had been long since rife with sexual connotations. We owed that much to the British whose dirty double entendre surfaced just weeks after Alfred Twistdick’s 1654 invention of the threaded nail known as “the screw.” However, bestiality had yet to make its big debut in America. Until…

Two village idiots, Timis and Tomathy, went on a hunting trip one spring. Each carried a long hunting rifle and a burlap sack full of ammunition. Both were under the impression that the other had packed the food bag. Accompanying them was Timis’ nameless dog (It was a sin in many Appalachian societies to name animals. It was considered “indian witchedry” and could be punishable by spermicide [killing of one's entire sperm stock]).

All of what we know beyond this comes from the following scant excerpts of Tomathy’s diary found 2 years later in an abandoned mine shaft just 40 yards outside of the village:

Day 1 :      Solid poop this morn. Bodes well for the hunt.

Day 2:      Fuck!

The next several pages are filled with jagged, incoherent scribbles and a single game of tic-tac-toe (cat’s game). Then, in an almost indecipherable hand, this:

Day 17:    We screwed the pooch.

Shooting the Shit

Like most idioms, we have the early Americans to thank for this shartwarming figure of speech. Remember, similar to today, Americans back then were ugly, vulgar, and totally obsessed with poop, shit, and guns. So, this idiom is a great lens for which to observe the American at what he is best: a hearty bastard.

The scene is the great plains. The year is whatever the year that the buffalo count reached 80.

Every Friday afternoon the cowboys from a given piece of land would gather at a fork in the road, waiting for the rest of their cowboys friends from the neighboring lands. The plan was to ride into town together and get drunk on bathtub whiskey. Kinda like the Hell’s Angels of yesteryear.

While they were waiting for the tardier cowboy friends, who were running a little late because that had to round up a stray calf or two or maybe run some stinkin’ indians back to the creek, they needed something to do.

So, you guessed it, they took turns shooting their guns at nearby pieces of shit on the ground. Who’s shit? Probably cow shit, since that would be the most reasonable target given its size, but also buffalo shit, from a farther distance of course because let’s face it, buffalo shit is huge and from up close it’s about at easy to shoot as a watermelon is to hit with a baseball bat.

However, the strangest case of shooting the shit occurred when members of the Pooskin Ranch took turns shooting at turds that came straight outta their own asses. They were already drunk by that time, needless to say, so when they finally got to the town watering hole, they looked like hell and stank like poo and someone asked them,”What the hell happened to you?”

One of them said, “Nothing, we were just shootin’ the shit.”

They busted up laughing and that was that.