Dear diary,
We had such an enchanting time, my cows and I, sailing the seven seas in our Jumbo Cloudmobile, that we relaxed, mid-cruise, into a mesmeric trance and almost forgot to come home for supper. Our boat’s living figurehead Athena, played by Jeanette MacDonald circa 1929, had to snap her fingers and say “Yoo-hoo!” more than twice, to wake us up.
I would tell you of all the wild mayhem that we thought we were dreaming but which was truly happening when we went off-course and the Cloudmobile sped blindly over the land, but I’m embarrassed that we were so irresponsible, and I don’t want any other chauffeurs to hear about our escapades and think that it’s a good idea to abandon the control panel of a moving vehicle. For we ruined a lot of property and real estate.
But it worked out fine, after all, because, instead of wrongly jumping to the conclusion that this caped madman and his pontoon of cattle were intentionally and maliciously onslaughting their domiciles, the ill-starred victims of our victimless crimes simply and innocently presumed that their God was inflicting a judgment upon them — albeit an odd one — so they did not even raise an official complaint with the community’s police force. They just stood there and stoically suffered the sight of our giant gray thundercloud crashing straight thru their castles and moats, while all the gators infesting each abode voiced salutations to our barge in perfect French. (As most people around this part of the earth are castle owners, this was the average scene of disarray caused by our jaunt.)
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Now, after dining with all my cattle (I treat them to an exquisitely prepared, multi-course meal of grass at a restaurant called Grazers), we pontoon back to our milking parlor by the pond. I herd the cows into their waterbeds and gently close the glass double-doors of their barn; then I retire to my hay bale for some shuteye.
The reason that I never remove my cowboy boots when I slumber is that I’m afraid I’ll be attacked at knifepoint by an intruder — say, one of the LORD’s angels — and I’ll need a stiff heel to effectively kick with. For, you probably don’t know this, but my own natural heel is my Achilles’ heel — here, let me explain:
You see, when I was just an Infant Cynic, Mother Nature wheeled me in my tub over to the famous River Cheddar, which was rumored to offer powers of invulnerability, and she submerged me entirely and held me under way too long… However, because she was pinching me by my heel, that particular organ alone remained untouched by the holy water.
Then, as I was still dripping with ambrosia from my water-baptism, Mother Nature tried to reinforce and make doubly sure that I would grow up to be invincible, by holding me over the eternal flame of her husband Jehovah’s ever-blazing bush, so as to burn away whatever remained of my mortality. The only problem was that, during this extra fire-baptism, she held me within the flames by that same exact heel. (Mother Nature is not the brightest bulb; that’s the moral of this myth.) — Thus, eventually, despite all these precautions, I ended up dying anyway from a wound to this very part of my body. The fatal injury resulted from an arrow shot by one of the good angels, named Paris. And this explains why the gators in the moat during the driveby-cloud scene above were greeting us in French.
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So I sleep in the hay with my boots on and a straw between my lips, as is my wont. I wake only four times in the night, to knife attacks from the Good Christ’s angels. Each time happens to interrupt a separate prophetic dream where I am engaging in romantic behavior with a foreign princess. I receive four stab-wounds, but, in every instance, I am able to kick my aggressor away; and I remain uninjured, because none of the blades come close to my ankle. The first enters my heart; the second severs my jugular vein; the third gets me right in the shoulder; and the fourth goes in one ear and out the other. Yet all these heal, because of Mother Nature’s prepwork. There’s significant blood-loss, but I cure that by simply drinking a lot of wine.
Then, as mentioned above, the angel Paris comes and shoots my ankle with an arrow, and I die. Now I’m a phantom cowboy.
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