Certainly you are on the edge of your seat awaiting some sort of resolution to the Donkey Situation. Here’s the status report:
The donkeys’ owner has finally been located, thanks to the expert sleuthing of Sgt. Jimmy of the Cottonmouth County Sheriff’s Dept.
Crappily, it turns out that the owner is Mr Classy from seven or eight ranches over. He is the irascible lying sumbitch who hates his neighbors, beats dogs, impales babies on pitchforks, welches on bets, drinks Miller Lite, goes to church, and eats at Cracker Barrel. He wants nothing to do with the donkeys. In fact, he’s been letting them roam free for years. Reports from ranches as far as 5 miles distant attest that these donkeys are quite the jetsetters. It’s gotten even worse since the drought. The creek that traverses all the ranches in this area has run dry, leaving a creekbed that livestock on the lam use as a sort of highway that runs for miles. These 3 donkeys are among the more notorious rogues.
Mr Classy tells Sgt. Jimmy that he is sick and tired of these donkeys, and that if he is forced to come and collect them from my place, he’ll just shoot’em.
I am now totally screwed, because although the urgency with which I require three feral donkeys is immeasurably slight, I obviously can’t send them back to that redneck dicksmoke and his cheap-ass shotgun. I mean, I jumped into 60 degree water to save that drowning jenny. It was a poignant, dramatic, and heartwarming episode that would have made an excellent feel-good segment on the local evening news. I can’t just send her off to be murdered after a thing like that, right?
So I tell Sgt Jimmy that I’ll forgive all the damages if Mr Classy will just sign the donkeys over to me. This is a pretty good deal for Mr Classy, since feral donkeys are worth quite a bit less than nothing in these days of drought and hay famine, and the damage caused by Daphne’s natatory episode, which I had intended to hit him up for, will amount to quite a pile.
So Sgt. Jimmy attempts to broker the deal, occasioning a call from Mrs Classy. She wants to know what time today I can come and get the donkeys. What do you mean, I say. Don’t I already have them? No, she says, they’re at her neighbor’s place, she can see them from the road. Sure enough. Since breakfast the donkeys have apparently traversed 3 miles of rough terrain and are now completely absent from El Rancho Deluxe.
This surprises me. It hadn’t dawned on me for some reason that the donkeys would decide to go back. Why would any donkey elect to abandon swimming pools and hay for a ranch with no swimming pools and hay? But it also drives home the realization that the three donkeys are in fact afflicted with a wanderlust woven so deeply within their mettle that even so magnetic a personality as my own is powerless against it. They’re tumbleweeds in the John Ford movie of life. “Babe, I gotta ramble” is their motto. “Don’t fence me in” is the theme song that plays during their fadeouts.
Which means I gotta fence them in.
I tell Mrs Classy that I’ll have to run some new fence before I can take custody, which should take a couple of weeks. This pisses off Mrs Classy. Since no promise of a future good deed goes unpunished, she delivers a brief but colorful monologue expressing her dissatisfaction with the time line. But what can I do?
So the anticlimax is that I still have not officially adopted 3 wild donkeys, and that the fence guy is coming out next week to take a look.
To be continued.
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