THOSE COWS LIVING IN MY OLD HOUSE

You simply cannot imagine what it is like to return to your old house and discover that it has been overrun by cattle.

I went back to see the old place but the New World Order of the Immaculate Bovine Conception had rolled over it just as they have so many of our most precious and sacred of institutions, icons and monuments.  Somebody told me there were polled herefords sprawled out inside the Lincoln Memorial.  Can you even imagine such a thing?

Anyway I went into the old house and the kitchen was full of pies.  But nobody had baked them.  Cows on the staircase.  I didn't know they could even do that.  Can a cow lay in your bed?  Well if she does it smashes everything into oblivion except maybe your worst nightmares, I can tell you.  Those will just be multiplied.

I lost count when trying to determine how many there were in the old house.  I was scared to go down to the basement because I was hearing these haunting "MOO" sounds coming up the stairs.  This whole business is most disconcerting because I know for a fact that the ghosts of many of my ancestors reside in that house.  And I know they wouldn't give the place up without a fight.  I'm betting that between the cows and the spooks there is probably a "Marco" and "Polo" type of thing going on day and night - only its "Moo" and "Boo."

One of the worst things about the New World Order Cow is that in spite of all their uppity airs and notions, they still can't help but stand around with that same look on their faces.  You know the one.  It's in the eyes, mostly.  The eyes and that sideways sliding mouth business.  Who chews their food sideways, I ask you? What sort of deity could design something like that with a straight face?  Probably on the original cow prototypes they just had the poop falling out of the sides of their heads and plopping on the ground.  It would make about as much sense.  And then there's the multiple stomach factor - oh, please, I beg you; don't get me started on that!

So I stood in the living room of my old house and stared a cow straight in the face as she stood there using her crap encrusted tail to swat flies.  No shame at all.  There were no flies in this house in the old days.  And no poop stuck to anything either.  For the most part.

It occurred to me that this cow's face looked almost exactly like my drunken old Uncle Harold, long dead and gone and may his soul rest peacefully even after the crap he pulled on me.  He had the same thing going on with the eyes.  And the sagging jowls, in his case a byproduct of all the years of sucking on a bottle of Christian Brothers brandy or maybe Mogen David wine.  Even though he was mostly on a liquid diet he  would still eat something sometimes; he was almost toothless and when he did eat he generally chewed his food kind of sideways.  How did I not make this connection before?  When I was driving the truck at harvest time he would be on the combine careening wildly through the fields, boiled to the limit, swerving and running over hay bales and grinding the header into the dirt.  Then when he was dumping grain he would come up to the window of the truck to say he had "lump jaw" and he would just spit a peach pit in through the window of the truck and into my lap.  Couldn't you just see some cow pulling something like that?

I never go anywhere without a gas mask these days.  This methane thing has gotten so out of control it is ruining everyone's lives.  The penguins are all heading back to the North Pole - you will say "Now wait, the penguins live primarily around Antarctica, not up north" and you would be right but not anymore.  They are all heading back to the North Pole.  It's portentous as hell, it means something but none of us can figure out what.  Very ominous indeed.  Personally I think it's a sign we are rocketing towards the End Days of Dairy Doom and Despair.  You won't find that one on your calendar but believe me, it's there.

Why in hell are we talking about penguins?  I have cattle living in the old house, the house where I grew up, the house where when I was a lad, for fun the ghost of my great-great grandmother would pop up in front of me out of nowhere just to see the wet poop drizzle down my legs.  Well I hope her daffy sense of humor has prepared her for this dark day.

Are there really four stomaches in a cow?  I didn't want to talk about this - but are there?  Or is it a trick?  Really is it just one stomach with four chambers, like the heart has chambers?  I'm pretty sure that cows don't even have hearts.  What use would they have for them?

I'll tell you what they do have now.  World dominance.  The Great Cow Birth, the Bovine Immaculate Conception.  It changed everything and now the cows are at the top of the food chain so to speak.  Well so be it even though, like my Uncle Harold, they don't really eat any food.  They just chew on whatever they happen to belch up from Stomach Numero Uno, coming right up alongside all that global warming methane gas.

But I'll tell you what - I am conspiring nowadays with some of the ghosts of my ancestors in hopes of ridding the family home of the accursed cows.  Most of the ghosts in my family have all grown fat and complacent and usually they spend all of their time trying to scare the soupy britches off anybody who happens by, and also performing cheap dimestore stunts like flying through closed window panes and yelling "CRASH!" really loud each time they glide effortlessly through.  I am explaining to them that this sort of thing might be funny as hell in the pages of a Casper comic book but here and now it is gaining them nothing.

We have hopes of herding the cows out.  We know they don't respond to the usual ghostly antics like opening and closing cupboard doors, making light fixtures swing, blowing out candles (uppity cows don't even have command of fire), displaying disembodied footprints which appear out of nowhere, or even something as drastic as making the radios suddenly come on at three in the morning with the volume turned way up and Laverne Baker singing "Soul on Fire" with so much angst the walls practically bleed.

What we have learned is that cows are truly terrified of only one thing:  Milk chocolate.

Chocolate, it seems, is like some dark brown apocalyptic demon substance that possesses their milk and turns it the color of mud - and makes it desirable to people everywhere.  For you see - and this just rocked me to learn - the damned cows' most fervent desire is to reclaim all of the milk and the unholy bonding of their sacred substance with chocolate is beyond blasphemy.  The milk is part of the religious foundations of the New World Order of the Yadda Yadda, you know what I'm talking about.  Anyway, they are trying to get back all the milk the same way some Christians are determined to gather up all of those thirty pieces of silver that bought out Jesus at the Gethsemane Slave-o-Rama and Swap Meet way back when.

And as far as immaculate conceptions go, consider this - who was present in that manger way back when Modern Christian Thought popped out of the ethereal womb and into our hopes and prayers?  I'll tel you who.  Cows. There were cows in that manger.  Just think about that for a minute, if you dare.

Tomorrow me and the ghosts are going to quietly plant hundreds and hundreds of Hershey bars in every nook and cranny of the old house.  They will all be unwrapped and ready to go.  When the first cow sees them, she will start bellowing like some tortured creature that has had its insides hollowed out and then replaced with swiss chard, a.k.a. the Perpetual Spinach of ancient folklore - as foretold, to be wrapped in blessed eggplant and baked into a soft, puffy turnip loaf, the most deadly natural enemy of the cows on this planet.  This will be all watched over by the Three Great Condors who are under contract as lookouts and sentries until this entire mess is finally sorted out.

Am I rambling, does this whole business seem somehow confusing or frustrating?  Does it seem to you like it just doesn't make a lick of sense?  Well what could you expect?  Now you can imagine how I feel, having come back to the old house and discovering that it has been overrun by cattle.