A man told me that one day his neighbor’s teenage daughter came to the door with her boyfriend. “Honor student, cheer leader, a real sweet kid. First time I had met the boyfriend,” he said.

He said she asked to borrow a pipe wrench and a propane torch. He agreed, but first he needed to show them how to safely use the torch,  ”Because I’d hate for either of you to burn yourself.”

The following day, he awoke to sirens. He looked outside and saw two police cars and an ambulance parked in his neighbor’s lawn. Donning a bathrobe, he walked outside and asked a police officer what happened.

“It’s a mess in there. Some boy got his head smashed in with a pipe wrench. He’s burned real bad, too.”

“Since my fingerprints were all over the tools, they questioned me for several hours. But they eventually figured out what happened.”  The man leaned on the wall and grinned. “And that,” the man told me, “is why I never loan out my tools.”

Photo credit: naturescapesphotography

She left Cincinnati to look for work related to the Marcellus shale. Her plan was to find work, settle down, and make a fresh start.

She had heard there were boom towns here like those out on the frozen North Dakota prairie, places where you could count the available hotel rooms and the unemployed on one hand.

These boom towns are places where anyone who can turn a wrench can find good work, dishwashers make fifteen dollars an hour, and even a college-educated office jockey could become a roughneck and prosper alongside pipe fitters and welders.

I wished her all the best.

Photo credit: nicholas_t

A trucker in a purple oxford shirt and cowboy hat decided I wanted to hear about a puppeteer and his magical city.

Everything in the world, he said, is subject to the control of the puppeteer. Hamsters, dogs, people. However, the puppeteer generally takes a laissez-faire attitude toward his puppets, so much so that for six thousand years, this puppeteer will allow naughty children and bad weather to torment his puppets with impunity.

On the morning of the seven thousandth year, the puppeteer will finally take a serious interest in his puppets. The puppeteer will demonstrate this interest by raining fire down upon the world.

After most of Earth’s land is nice and crispy, a magical city will descend from the sky and put down over the eastern United States. All but a few thousand good people will be crushed beneath the city’s foundation.

The city will be encapsulated by clear glass and offer all the equitable benefits of Scandinavian socialism, the primary exceptions being a comfortable year-round temperature and the exclusion of foreigners, homosexuals, and uppity women.

In the parched land outside, all the degenerate, starving sodomites who survived will paw the glass and try to get at the lush gardens inside, because they long for nothing more than humid air and green tomatoes. Many will conspire to attack the city, but their efforts will be futile and the walls will remain unbreached.

At the end of the seven thousandth, nine hundred and ninety ninth year , the puppeteer will close the curtain on this mummers farce and all will be right in the world.

Happy Easter.

Photo credit: potzuyoko

Met a middle-aged man from The City. He held a ragged black nylon leash, at the end of which cowered an emaciated dog with tail tucked. The man ran his hands through his curly brown hair and asked me where he should go to have a meltdown.

The DC cherry blossoms came early this year, I said.

The bastards set it all up, he said. They were out to make him pay.

The dog led him out the door before I could find out what he had purchased.

photo credit: kiuko

3-27-12 21:44pm Update: During my 72 hour giveaway, 578 people downloaded this book. Reaction also his #8 in the Amazon Sci-Fi>Adventure bestseller list. Early reviews have been great, though my copy editor and I allowed a couple silly typos to slip through. (“Meat me at the river” makes me giggle like a teenager). I expect to pull the book early next week to correct these.

Two years, five countries, and one baby later, my sci-fi adventure novel Reaction is out and FREE for the next 72 hours. http://shar.es/pK7ca available on Amazon.

If you enjoy this work, I would appreciate it if you could either take a couple minutes and leave a brief review or share this work with your friends. I’m just getting started, and I need all the help I can get.

Thank You!

Yesterday I met a Russian émigré, occupation unknown. He told me that he has driven across several countries, including the U.S.A., Argentina, Turkey, the Netherlands, Mexico, and a couple others I can’t recall. These places have passable-to-excellent public roads, he said, and most of them have some kind of public rest areas along these roads.

But the one country he won’t traverse is his own: at one time they had almost as many nuclear weapons as the United States, but not a single rest area in vast stretches of the country. Never mind the frequent shakedowns, non-existent asphalt, and bleak scenery.

A country, he said, may be judged on the quality of its public facilities, and in Russia, you have to make shit in the bushes.

Photo credit: akudrin

After the Army, Everett became an steel worker who specialized in bridge construction. He liked dangling from a nylon rope hundreds of feet from the ground below. He joked that his job was riveting, but he never joked about the paycheck. Sometimes he made more in a month than his father had made in a year, at least until the power company paid his father for his land so they could flood his hollow and make a cooling pond.

When the kids came along, Everett started driving a rig, a profession his wife deemed safer. “At least you’ll have some metal around you,” she had said. But two years later, when that Caprice pulled out in front of him, he had wished he had just a little less metal around him, and so he returned to the trade to once again dangle from the naked steel girders of unfinished bridges.

Photo credit: highwaysagency

I posted the story “A Good Family” on Amazon a couple weeks ago (link).
(You can also read it here for free, for now).

A few days ago a spry old man from the coal fields told me his story. I didn’t catch his name, but let’s call him Jerry.

Jerry was born in a coal camp near Mingo County, one of eight children. His father spent 25 years in the mines before succumbing to black lung. At a young age, this man knew he didn’t want to work in the mines, so when he was old enough he joined the military.

In the military, almost every man Jerry met expected our boy would be an ignorant bumpkin with a propensity towards moonshine and incest, given what they had heard about those “coal-mining hillbillies.” However, when the brass handed out promotions, they went to him first, and and he quickly found himself in a position of responsibility.

After fighting in what he called a “horror of a war,” he returned to the states, where he began working as an insurance investigator. This work took him all over the country and he said he always tried to represent mountain people well wherever he went.

Jerry was particularly proud of one exchange he had with his boss, a New Jersey man with unfavorable preconceptions about Appalachian people. After working with him for some time, his boss once asked him: “You work harder than any of these other guys. I underestimated you. Where did you get your work ethic?”

Jerry replied: “the coal camp.”

I must have one of those faces, because people like to tell me tales. I smile, nod, and sip my coffee while they tell me how their brother allowed their mother to die of neglect, how their husband got drunk and bought an airplane, or how their ancestors ended up in West Virginia by hitching a ride on a whiskey wagon.

As an exercise for me and an entertainment for you, I’m going to start sharing some of these tales here.

I make no promises as to the frequency  or veracity of these anecdotes. However, I’ll do my hillbilly best to make them short, cohesive, reasonably frequent, and at least mildly compelling.

P.S. If I know you personally, I’ll do you the courtesy of asking permission before publishing to my little blog.

So that each piece will stand alone, the first Told Tale will be in an upcoming post, either tomorrow or the next day (or whenever I get around to writing it).