Ron has a new agenda. Couple of days ago, it was drinking and fishing. Now, it’s intimidating Mal into giving up on his relationship with Shelly. Easy to see how he might switch from one to the other. Fish. Mal. Both are things he’d like to catch, then toss into a lake.
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.
It’s good that Mal is finally entering a wider world, making friends and doing new things, don’t you think?
Ry’s buddies sound nice. I guess Mal might wind up knowing a lot of new people and new skills after this weekend.
Assuming, of course, that nothing goes sideways on him.
Mal! Look at Mal, manning up and telling Shelly that he doesn’t know about fishing at all.
If this were a sit-com, he’d lie and keep up the pretense that he knows all about it and then get in over his head. Probably literally.
And there’d be a laugh track all over the thing.
And that guy from that show, you know the guy that’s in all those other shows since that one big show he was in during the 90’s? He’d be playing Ry.
It’d be sad.
Mal is NOT the kind of person to take to a new hobby all of a sudden, do you think?
His familiarity with the concept seems lacking, somehow.
We can only hope that Shelly won’t judge him harshly.
Mal’s expectations were pretty low. Shelly’s were almost instantly high.
They could be in a Sit-Com about now, and the dialogue wouldn’t have to change at all!
Hubriscomics as Sit-Com. If anyone here knows someone at Netflix, maybe clue ’em in! You get ‘Producer’ credit for that, nowadays, right?
It’s tough, knowing yourself the way others know you. Mal is discovering what people outside his head think of him, and that’s a jarring experience for people who think they’ve got a good bead on the World.
I’m crankier in the real world than I am inside my head.
How about you? Have you made this voyage of discovery yet? What did you learn?
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