Fear and Loafing at the Woodward County Fairgrounds

As Cousin Fred and I stood in line waiting to get checked in at the Fall-A-Days Festival at the Woodward County Fairground yesterday…

BY THE WAY…loyal fans (I’ve given up trying to figure out who’s a fan and who isn’t – people come and people go – they send hate emails, they send love emails, some with naked selfies attached, others with pictures of their pet pig’s butt, sometimes I can’t tell the difference between the two…eh, it’s a mixed bag) of this here blog may recall when CCB personally took on the Woodward County Commission about their refusal to raise the POW-MIA flag on the third flag pole at the new Events Center, with one commissioner commenting that he wasn’t sure it was a legal flag to raise.
HA!  Guess what was flying yesterday at the Events Center?  Yep, the POW-MIA flag.

Now do I deserve credit for making that happen?  Probably not, but I’ll pretend I do and get as much mileage out of it as I can. 

But, I digress.

…so anyway, Cousin Fred and I were standing in line waiting to check-in.  Cousin Fred began throwing out ideas for our next entrepreneurial enterprise. 

The Buffalo Chip thing is short-lived. First of all hedge apples have kind of a short shelf life…who knew?  Someone suggested freezing them, but the freezer here at the compound is already filled with frozen badger meat (long story).  Plus, once the wife decided to come out of her room, she was appalled at the condition of the kitchen where we’d been producing product (producing product – I just come by it naturally – such a gift) and threatened to feed Cousin Fred and I to the Nephew’s pigs if we didn’t cease production (producing product thru production - I'm a genius I'm tellin' ya). 

Next thing I know she’s on the phone with the FDA’s hotline ratting us out.  Supposedly, the sheriff’s department is serving a cease and desist injunction on us, but I figure it’ll be Monday before they get someone to the compound (the injunction serving deputy is conducting an undercover operation at the Cosmic City Sonic) and by then we will have sold all of our stock. 

Cousin Fred is thinking big.  He wants us to go Hollywood, in a manner of speaking.  With all the outdoor reality shows going on, he figures there must be something we can do since there appears to be a lot of outdoors around here.  He claims he knows some big time TV and movie producers out in California and says they’re always looking for fresh ideas.

He suggested that we become storm cellar inspectors.  The idea is to go around to storm cellars in the area where we conduct free inspections without actually asking if we can conduct an inspection. Of course, that means a trip down into some of the scariest holes in the ground on earth! 

When I was a little guy and my grandparents still lived on the “Old Place” (the Old Place is the original farm homestead that my great-great-grandmother settled soon after coming to America) the storm cellar was…well, scary…no, that’s not a strong enough word.  The storm cellar was terrifying…no, horrifying…almost there…eh, I’ll think of it.  Anyway, there were snakes, mice, all manner of things that go bump in the night down there.  The walls were lined with jars of fruit that had been canned and carefully placed in the storm cellar sometime before Lola Hall (look it up) was born.  The canned fruit, of course, attracted the stuff that goes bump in the night. Actually, the sound of something going bump in the night was a snake knocking a fruit jar off the shelf which brought in the rats/mice which the snake then ate (ain’t the cycle of life in nature grand?).

Frankly, I’d rather have taken a chance on an F-5 tornado than have to spend more than 10 seconds on the top step of that cellar.

I related all of that to Cousin Fred, who in turn said that was precisely the point.  His plan is for us to descend into really old (we’re talking land run cellars) storm cellars at 3AM during a new moon with nothing but candles to light the way.  There will be farm dogs barking in the background and someone yelling “Who’s out there” just before firing both barrels of a side-by-side shotgun at us.

According to Cousin Fred, it’ll make for great television. 

I was still considering all of this when we finally got to the front of the line where the big burly guy with a clipboard in hand was looking for our names. Finally, he showed us where we had been scratched off the list by the event promoter.  Seems I pissed the guy off with some of my comments in this blog…imagine that. 

So, now Cousin Fred and I will be selling our Buffalo Chips from the far northern end of the Fairgrounds parking lot along with the guy in a pair of women’s panties selling Indonesian mini-skirts and shooting a pistol into the air. 

Please do look for us out there.  As an incentive, I’ll be making my world-famous Rib Ranch Replication ribs and serving Rib Ranch Cole slaw. 

It’ll be a long weekend.  And keep those naked selfies coming in!