https://medium.com/@philgarber/blog

The Day the Sheriff Stood Tall

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It was a blustery, November 1886 day in Dodge City and you could feel the wind go right through you, right to your bones. The tumbleweeds was a tumbling and the air it was a chilly. I reported to work like I did every day for the last nye on four years. It started as a day like any other but afore it was done it would be the kind of day not even a rattlesnake would want.

My name is Marshal Joe and I am the law in these parts, whether it’s settling a score between two cattle men or getting in between an angry husband and the man he thinks has been makin love with his wife. But today, it would be different, today I’d be settling a score that’s been a boiling since 2016, the day that old Donald was elected mayor of this here town, at least that’s what he said, but I don’t think he really got enough votes. That’s another story for another time.

I knew that Donald would be carousing above the Lonely L Bar, with the women of the night, like he is most every day and I knew that he didn’t have the best of reputations with the ladies, seeing how he sometimes got a little too physical. But that wasn’t the real problem with Donald, the real issue was that everybody knew he was a getting rich by trimming the top off the taxes that were paid by every honest, hardworking man in this small Texas town.

He’d ride around town on a new stallion every day, with his kin close behind, especially Junior who seemed to always be waiting to fill his daddy’s shoes. Everybody knew he wasn’t paid enough as mayor to afford such ponies but Donald didn’t care because he thought he was above the law.

I was playing a hand of pinochle with my good friend Barry that day when Donald came to me and demanded that I arrest the town doctor, Doc Fauci, just because he refused to ignore a bad cold that was a spreading to everybody and has killed nie on 40 people. Durn, there’s only a couple hundred people in the whole town and if that cold isn’t stopped it could wipe out just about all of us, including the womenfolk and the children.

But Donald knew the people would blame him for the bad cold and say he hadn’t done nothing to stop it from spreading, except maybe to tell people that the doctor was plumb off his rocker. I knew Doc Fauci and I knew he was a right honorable man and the exact opposite of that low-down, rascal Donald.

I had drawn a line in the sand and Donald had crossed it. I told him to lay off Doc Fauci but he ignored me like I was some kind of polluted cactus. So this was the day we settled things once and for all.

I told Donald to meet me in the street and we’d settle this like men not like girls, which seemed to be Donald’s style. Well he hesitated and said he couldn’t meet me because he had to give some blasted speech somewhere about something that he called “the wall.”

I knew there was no dang speech just like there was no cotton picking wall and I told Donald so. Well he couldn’t rightly just walk away with his tail tween his legs although that was often his way, like when he was drafted to serve in the cavalry and came up with some phony, lame excuse about spurs on his bones, or something, which is why they called him Mayor Bone Spurs, at least behind his back they did.

I told him I wasn’t going to listen to any more of his lies and that it was going to be him or me. And he looked downright fearful but he proceeded outside where we faced off from 50 paces. The wind was kicking up and it blew his combover right to the back of his head, leaving him to look like some kind of a lonely cue ball or something.

I told him to draw but he just fell down. I didn’t know what happened but I ran to him and saw he’d been shot dead, right there on the street, but not by me. Well, I knowed there was more than a few people what wanted Mayor Bone Spurs to be eliminated from office, permanently. And there was so many haters that I wouldn’t rightly know where to start so I didn’t and that’s how Dodge rid itself of the most downright illegal stealing varmint ever to call himself mayor.

I did not watch the election night television orgies because I couldn’t stand the torture so I watched a Netflix movie about a woman trying to find her son in blood-stained, battered, war-torn Lebanon. The Netflix movie was relatively comforting compared with the election news.

So here I sit in the purgatory of COVID-19 not knowing if I’m about to make love or about to get fucked. And I have a very bad headache but it’s my heart ache that is most painful because I don’t want to believe that so many people in the country can be so wrong.

You can only say “I can’t believe this” so many times before you had to admit “Yes, I believe this.” There was a time when it almost seemed like it was dawn in America but now it feels like sundown is approaching.

Nail biting down to the bone, waiting for the pot to boil, waiting for the paint to dry, waiting for the flowers to bloom showing that ET is alive, waiting for Godot or a Chinese water torture, call it whatever you want but it is torture waiting for the final vote tallies and even then, knowing that Trump will do anything to stay in as president.

Am I making love or getting fucked?

We don’t need the Russians to hack or influence, we’ve got QAnon and all the other crazies who are dancing through the world wide web of lunacy.

It’s not literally true that your blood is blue until it hits the air and turns red from the oxygen but the metaphor is right on that when you are cut your blood turns red and while it still flows freely in your veins, it is blue.

BTW, the U.S. officially left the Paris climate accord today.