As with any question, the answer is typically “It depends who you ask”. So now, when we ask “What do we do now?” it really depends on who you ask. If you ask the Inspectors, you get one answer, and if you ask the guys in the bar, you get another. Aaaaand everything in between.
Sorry for the continued delays!
Mall and Shelly’s bunch are living in the past. You can’t keep focused on what you want out of the next ten minutes when you’re focused on what was going on before you came into a hole-in-the-woods bar.
Buddy’s there to help them keep some perspective. What HE wants out of the next ten minutes is to make several hundred dollars on the sale of alcoholic beverages and stay in business. See how easy that is? You can’t worry about ten minutes ago when there were no brand new customers in your hole-in-the-woods bar ten minutes ago! You need Focus! Focus on drinking alcoholic beverages!
Gotta focus on what good ol’ Buddy is saying.
Duke is an instigator. I mean, remember his team at The Great Stanky Creek OutdoorFest? It wasn’t called “Them Duke Boys” for nothing. He instigated that, and then stirred up trouble until it was just easier to keep that name than any of the others that people wanted. He laaauuuughed about that! And now, he’s trying to get Mal beat up and Ron possibly locked up. He probably hasn’t thought it that far through… probably just got as far as “I bet I can start a fight between the biggest guy here and the smallest guy here” and let it rip at that.
But here at the Buck’s Pass Bar, it’s all about who can pay what. Now. So, fight or no fight, there’s drinks to sell. Who’s buying?
I don’t suppose they wanted to rearrange the seating arrangements when they rescued Big Ron and Duke off of their truck.
I also don’t suppose they asked Mal if he had a different suggestion before everyone just piled in.
Isn’t that good?!
“Well, I’m back.”
Three guesses as to the name of the book that used that as its final words.
Apologies for the long, long, loooong delay. Life had to be lived, bills had to be paid, work had to get deadlined.
So- anyone remember where we were? It was a dark and stormy night. Something like that. Ryan and his brother Mal, and Mal’s close friend Shelley, are driving to the fishing cabin where they were expected by Ryan’s fishing buddies. Their names, according to the cartoon above, include “Big Ron”. And according to your memories of The Great Stanky Creek Outdoorfest Part 2, the other fisherman would be Duke. He must have been the guy filling out the Stanky Creek paperwork, too, ’cause the name of their team was “Them Duke Boys.” and you can’t trust Duke to fill out paperwork without some antic being perpetrated.
I don’t think I ever wrote that into the cartoons. That’s just background for you. (“Background” means stuff I meant to include in the story, then didn’t have room or inclination for)
Also, if anyone knows how to dig into the Dashboard on these dang websites and get things working correctly, by all means, get in touch and tell me how to fix this one.
Ron and Duke don’t seem to be the sorta fellas who are gonna let a good fishing trip plan roll over and kick its li’l feet in the air and expire.
Of course, they DO seem to be the sorta fellas who you read about in the paper- all about how they went on a fishing trip and drowned under odd, but not controversial, circumstances. And possibly rolled over and kicked their size 13s in the air as they expired.
Don’t nobody make a “Hey, Y’all, Watch this…” joke now, you hear?
Big Ron knows how to plan ahead. You know he’s the guy that always has the right bait for what’s biting, he has the tools to fix anything that might slow or stop the boat. Got a sharp pocket knife for getting that hook out the meat of your hand. Got one of those koosey things for putting his cup, can, or bottle into to keep it colder longer.
…and he’s got kegs for flotation when there’s gonna be a chance of the boat going to the bottom of the lake. A case of bottles isn’t going to do you any good when you need a ride back to shore in the direst of straits.
You gotta think of these things. Like Big Ron does.
Oh, Houghton Hollow. That’s the little valley at the end of Houghton lake (named for the famed explorer Sir James Houghton-Houghton) where the dam was built way back in the 1970s. There were some steep banks in the hollow that made the engineers grin with glee as they contemplated their gorgeous new dam. Plus, they got to flood half a town after it was built. Three of the engineers went in on a scuba diving company where you can dive down to “Lower Houghton Grove” and sit in a submerged van, and photograph yourself in a submerged school playground, and swim vaguely near the cemetery and then swim away again fast because it’s freakin’ creepy as hell, with all the drowned trees around it and the headstones and statues and all.
They used to tell a whole bunch of different ghost stories about the submerged town, but eventually they all got smooshed into one big ghost story about a Wukilar that was the mayor’s cursed son (or the cursed Mayor’s son, whichever) and who lived in the church next to the cemetery (graveyard, really, but who keeps track) where he lost his hands or his head in a boating accident. And now he either wanders the graves hoping a statue will lose its head that he can take for his own, or is listening to a walkman and can’t turn it off ’cause he’s missing… well, it’s a weird ghost story anyhow.
That got away from me.
…What I was going to say was “Ron ain’t wrong. Gonna be a lively weekend.”
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