Triggering Town

This here is a triggering town for blocked writers. It’s so quiet you can almost hear the g’s droppin'. Wet pencils lookin' for words to say what folks say when they ain't got nothin' to say. 

I’m an old cowhand. Like Cooper or Eastwood, a man of few words. And right now even fewer thoughts. The well’s gone dry in my ghost town.

The general store’s boarded up. Yup. The last brawl emptied the saloon. I said set em up Joe but Joe ducked and never came up. The chorus girls left on the last stage out of town with the school marm and preacher. Even the posse’s gone chasin' the sheriff and his sidekick. The card shark’s got nothin' but an arm up his sleeve.

There goes a tumbleweed scootin' down to the old corral. Now the air is stirrin'. I hear somethin' rustlin that ain’t cattle. Could be crickets tunin' up but sounds more like the piano beginnin' to roll. Darlin Lil is kickin' high and showin' her garter.

Lightnin' just split the hangin tree. Slim Pickens swallowed his toothpick. A new lore & oughta marshal is hitchin' up his horse. His gun is cocked over his long johns. He polishes his silver; gives us all a nod, by God.

The clean-cut good guys are showin' gristle and the grizzly bad guys got themselves shaved clean. They're picking up all those g's. There’s Tonto telling his side of the story at Kimosabe College. The un-masked Ranger is cleaning his eraser. Doc Holliday, the barber’s, doing surgery now, pulls teeth too.

Diamond Jim, the railroad baron, grabbed one too many and took a gilded bullet in his wallet. His ranch got foreclosed in an open and shut case.

Andy Devine’s teaching bible school with Gabby Hayes. Buffalo Bill’s gone vegan. Three amigos are hiring to pick the cactus crop across the border. Prospectors are on their hands and knees panning for a meal ticket in the gold dust.

The 3:10 from Yuma just pulled in with a fistful of lawless words. Here come the outlaws from central casting, spitting and cussing looking for work in a crowd scene. A fiddle can be heard. It’s all over and it’s just begun.

I head over to the telegraph office to send a message shot straight from the hip... Get me some wagging tongues….stop… characters wanted... stop… dead or alive.