Cowboy Up!!!

Here is a news flash for you all (at least it was news to me): I am a cowboy. I didn’t even know it, but I found out just today. The worst part of it is that I apparently I am the worst kind (in my mind) of cowboy, the “faux” cowboy. It isn’t that I have anything against real cowboys; it is just that in today’s world it seems all you have to do to call yourself a cowboy is listen to country music. Well, turns out that you don’t even have to do that! I’ve always had the somewhat antiquated belief that if you want to call yourself a cowboy, you should at least have ONE cow. More than one is fine, although then maybe you should refer to yourself as a cowsboy; eh, maybe not… Cattle-boy might be alright though. Anyway, I always reckoned that if I was to be at all honest about my livestock of choice, I should be a “Chicken-boy”, which also lacks that certain panache, if you know what I mean.
Well, anyway, my mom is planning a big “cowboy-western” style “shin-ding” (is that a cowboy word?) at their place and she asked my wife to help with the decorations. It worked out pretty well; Brynn had just finished up on scrap-booking and was casting around for something to throw herself into. She found it, alright. When I came home that evening, she was bringing loads of trash IN the house from her grandpa’s old dump behind our “back 40”. I try not to ask very many questions when I see this very specific kind of behavior, but I inevitably get dragged into it, and get pounded with questions about how this looks; what do I think about this, etc. The problem with all these questions about my opinion is this: I often don’t have the right answer. Example as follows: when asked if I thought the denim decorations were cool for this party; I answered “no” for the following reasons. I wear denim, but I don’t have cows. Exactly everybody I know wears denim, but very few of them own cows, thereby giving denim wearers an exemption from cowboy-hood.
That was soooo very left-brained of me. I was instantly bombarded with Better Homes and Gardens, Mary Engelbright, and Country Living magazines; all proving to me how wrong I was by the scores of glossy pages showing western themed denim-decorated walls and such. What could I say in the presence of such well studied experts? Humph, and me growing up on a farm with real cows and horses. I guess that wearing denim not only makes me a cowboy; it makes me dumb too, since I wear it almost exclusively for the lower half of me. I will allow that in the old west days most cowboys probably wore denim, but most cowboys also picked their boogers too, so could we not draw the same conclusion about people who pick boogers? Welcome to the club, everybody who is over the age of 1. All I have to say is: Saddle up, pardnuhs!
Got a pretty good quote of the day, too, from my wife Brynnie Berra, or maybe I should call her Yogi Brynna: “If it weren’t for the kids, I’d be a pretty good parent.”