(no subject)

[wickedflea]

I used to work with a kid named Flanda. Flanda was a pretty good-looking guy, I guess (as guys go), and he was pretty impressed with himself. He'd tell me: "The girls mostly say I look like Big Daddy Kane. But if they don't say I look like Kane, they say I look like Snipes." One night we were working the front register together, and after we'd dealt with a bunch of customers who were generally making asses of themselves, he expressed his disdain for country black people. I said, "What, have you gotten into it with them before?" Flanda replied: "No, I just don't like them, so I stay outta their way. Them country black people can throw cows."

"Exsqueeze me? Baking powder?"

"Throwin' cows. Those folks can throw cows."

"Um . . . whaddya mean?"

"COWS. You'll see 'em out in the pasture THROWIN' COWS."

"What, like little newborn calves or something?!"

"HELL no, COWS! They be THROWIN' COWS!"

The more I stated my disbelief, the angrier Flanda got. Pretty soon, he was yelling in this big, bassy voice, "THEY WAS THROWIN' COWS! No, no, THEY WAS THROWIN' COWS."

So I had no choice but to take him at his word. The idea of throwing cows became a frequent source of humor around the ol' BK. We were talking about it for months. Lots of times, we'd take massive hits of helium off the balloon tank, wail, "THEY WAS THROWIN' COWS!" and collapse in a heap of laughter and lightheadedness.

So one night, another group of rowdies came in, and they were TORE DOWN. They were falling all over each other and making all sorts of noise. When they came around to the counter where customers picked up their food, one of them spilled a whole bunch of small change all over the counter, then went over to an area where we had a lot of stools around this bar kind of thing. (It was a strange BK--it was a log cabin originally built to be a bank. Don't ask.) So as that guy was stumbling over toward the barstools, a little sawed-off sort came to the counter. He said, "Hey, man, what's all these cents for?"

"Ermmm, I dunno," I said. "Maybe you should ask your friend."

The guy at the counter turned a bit and said, "Hey, Napoleon--" Right then, the dude who'd spilled all the change on the counter fell ASS OVER TEAKETTLE off one of the barstools and probably nearly cracked his skull.

"Goddamn!" I said to the sawed-off chap. "You guys look a little tired. What, have y'all been throwin' some cows tonight?

Dude stopped me with a glare. "Cows? No, no, we ain't been throwin' no cows. We ain't been THROWIN' no COWS." Then his voice got all high and whiny as he yelled, "Napoleon, NAPOLEON! They said we was THROWIN' COWS!"

At that point I retreated into the office to let Flanda deal with them.

So yeah, that's the story behind the "throwing cows" in my LJ interests. Throwing cows was also the idea behind my call to the MSU basketball coach's call-in show in which I made shocking accusations about the reasons behind the team's unexpected success that year. Strangely, he and the host seemed as befuddled as I'd been when I first heard about people throwing cows.

disclaimer: I am not embellishing or making up any details to advance any agenda against country black people, the persons who hate them, or throwers of cows. I'm merely telling a true story. THESE ARE FACTS.

Comments

[wickedflea.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the shout-out. :)

Yeah, I think about it quite often, but at this point it's mostly thinking and very little writing. I have started going through LJ entries to find stuff that I could include or flesh out. Mostly I'm hung up on the form--I don't know how good a lengthy narrative I could make, yet I'm not sure how well the stories would work all thrown together as individual pieces. I know that the most important thing is to get them all on paper, and then I can figure out how to arrange and/or merge them. Strangely, though, I tend to write straight through--I start off with some sort of idea, slowly write my way through it, and arrive at a conclusion. I don't do much (read: hardly any) editing. But yeah, the thing is just to do it.

[theimitation.livejournal.com]

You could write it like Umberto Eco's How to Travel With a Salmon & Other Essays (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0151001367/104-8637876-3014324) as a series of short essays.

That is a great story, though. I bet he was referring to tipping. If you tip a cow that is at the top of a hill, it could look like you threw it down the hill.

[wickedflea.livejournal.com]

Thanks! Yeah, I've thought about essays. That way, if I had persistent themes that I wanted to touch on in different stories, I could do it, but I wouldn't have to actually come up with a beginning, middle, and end to tie everything together.

[theimitation.livejournal.com]

Or a foreword and an afterword to illustrate the ties.