Beware The Rodeo Zone

 

Part 26 of 30

The Mam & Pap

Royal Splendid Traveling Rodeo

If you like the impossible possibilities of the inscrutable, the mysterious, and the unexplained, you could always be a beautician. Or, avoiding the smelly classes necessary for that, go into rodeo.

There’s a signpost: “Rodeo Next Week.” Strange, isn’t it? There’s evidence all around you; it’s completely mysterious. Worn paths, strewn wood shavings indicating an arena, holes in the ground as though meant for restrooms. The weeds bending in the weird wind that kicks up at random. You think it’s oppressive, stifling, then there's a flier in the dust. The rodeo was last week and they forgot to pack the “Next Week” sign.

Yes, that was a false flag, forcing you back to apparent reality. Or was it? Couldn't that be exactly what The Rodeo Zone wants you to think, so that you will continue apace over the hill and out of sight, at which point the earth’s stranger creatures will reappear with a whole rodeo set up fully functioning, right down to the blue ribbons that competitors “win,” then pack away to “win” again at next week's show, and the week after that, and forever?

It’s a little spooky out here, like a foggy heath in Scotland or somewhere like that I’ve never been. Or one of those strange shamrock places in Ireland where they're always celebrating the earth’s fire, it’s molten core or whatever. I’ve never been to Ireland, and with their fascination with leprechauns and Irish accents I probably never will. It’d make me uncomfortable and I'd be out of place over there going “aye” and “begorrah” and the other lingo they push. Give me a good old-fashioned American rodeo alternately materializing and vanishing, portals to the great beyond and maybe back and I’ll be happy.

I certainly believe it’s possible. If rodeo energy was there once, and if we can agree that existence is more than spiritless matter, then there’s weirder things in this world possible than you can find listed in your Funk & Wagnall's encyclopedia. You occasionally discern these portals — like the Rodeo Zone — and you enter to relive whatever it was, let’s say, along with a warning, an important proviso, that, all things being other than what they seem, what it seems might be benign, but what it is is might be just the thing that consumes you, body and soul.

Say that happens. A clown leads you to the portal, promising you a good time at the rodeo in the great beyond. You foolishly step there and there’s no rodeo, but a traveling carnival. You only have thoughtful recognition of the circumstances for a few seconds, before all consciousness is mercifully removed. In those seconds you consider what you’ve now become, a beautician in an alternate world that has no hair. It's the pointlessness of hell! With another way of looking at it, it's a rodeo, true, but appearing and vanishing in some random and mad way.

I'm glad it hasn't happened to me, lately. And I'd recommend that you run -- run fast and run far -- and don't look back till you feel that you're a safe distance away, if such a thing exists.