Monday, June 10, 2019

Old west

There is a lighthearted discussion coming in on the radio. The sheriff is being invited to come into town and taste the tomatoes.

This was a practice at the time. A quaint collective superstition. If the tomatoes tasted delicious to the sheriff then all that was happening from then on through the next year would all be of natural order. But if the tomatoes taste terrible to the sheriff, or wanting in some aspect, then the setbacks that befall them will be most likely manmade.

No-one really believed it. Yet everyone practiced the custom.

It's the way of the west.

Accordingly, the townspeople had set up the hoop of tomatoes. The call was about evoking the sheriff's participation.

Fine. He'll do it. He's on his way.

When the sheriff got to the hoop of tomatoes he bit into one of the tomatoes and ate it. The townspeople anxiously waited his determination. 

But they were anxious about something they don't actually believe. It's just that they always want the tomatoes to taste great no matter what.

The sheriff pushed over the hoop to the ground splattering the tomatoes. A terrible waste of perfectly good tomatoes right there. Apart from them each having a hole punched through them. You just don't do that in the old west. 

"Why did you do that?" They cried.

The whole town was totally perplexed by this strange antisocial behavior.

"Because this tomato practice is bullshit. And everyone knows it. It's time to grow the f up. Whatever happens in this town happens for a reason. Natural or otherwise. It's our task as mature community to confront each incident with eyes wide open to all possible causes. 

And so the practice was dropped.


And now we're sitting horseback on the side of a ridge looking down into the valley below. The little town is down there way in the distance. I and my horseback companion are gazing upon it. The hoop of tomatoes is pushed over and a building is burning in the back. 

The sheriff will investigate the fire as arson and not just accept it as accident or an act of God. 

We look at this town pitilessly.  Well, good. It's time they grow the f up, and stop wasting all those tomatoes. Fun while it lasted, I suppose.

And so the west matured incrementally.

This was just one of the turning points in which superstition and old community practices fell away.

It's just one of the things that disappeared with the old west.

I woke up bringing all that with me as actual fact. Clear as a picture. No doubt about it. Something I read before falling asleep.

No wait.

Goddamnit that was a dream. Not a memory.

But it was memory. Perfect memory. I remembered that happened.

In the dream!

The memory of the real thing that happened is different. 

Happened to somebody else.

They're on a rollercoaster, a classical type, wooden frame, and they're taken to the top, right before they are dropped they notice a fire in the distance. But not that far. Right there on the fairground! They're starting their ride with no way to stop it just as a blaze flairs up in the compound. 

They're going to be rolling into a fire.

Their own tracks could be burning!

That's the thing that actually happened. Not the tomato hoop groundhog day-like thing. 

Good Lord, Man, get your memories and dreams sorted.

The scene of the new brightly lit roadway along the new southern border wall is conflated with the scene of the rollercoaster and fire.

Two fires, then. A political fire in which our west grows up by manmade catastrophe, and fire gone off at a fairground in which childlike thrill is threatened by either natural hazard or possible arson either way they need to get off the ride before the fire advances.





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