Dammit dale1/9/2024 ![]() Trucks went by at a slower speed and even the pouty Camaros and t-topped teens took their time. “And it’s not as good as the billboard says it is,” Dale told the dummy. When he was finished he looked out across the street in the direction the dummy was looking and saw the Bum Bum Rum sign that was probably as responsible for the distracted drivers as technology was. He shoveled a pile of the black clay upon the thing’s shoulders, jammed his fingers deep enough to create eyes, called it a head, and set a red trucker’s hat upon the mostly featureless mound. He held the thing upright with a long handled weeder whose two front teeth held solid to the earth and never swayed. The same kind of black stuff he’d buried six dogs in (and would bury Pickle with soon.) The dark stuff was more like clay and Dale stuffed handfuls into a yellow t-shirt from his days in the nineteen-seventies. So the next day he made the dummy out of deep dirt he’d dug up far behind the farmhouse. But instead of scaring crows you’ll be scaring teenage fools.” “Get a lot of activity here?” the woman, a beautiful farmer from Gibbons, asked him. And yet, he couldn’t even rightly pull out of his own drive without checking every angle in a math book. ![]() And it’d come to a head the night Dale had hosted a woman, a thing he hadn’t done in close to twelve years and so wanted badly to impress her. Once it was where Dale had to wait long at the head of the drive, checking back and forth to see if someone was coming, inching out from the gravel to the dirt, until his powder blue Ford pickup was a true four feet out onto County 6. They bumped into people on the sidewalk and sometimes they drove their cars off the road. For this, people couldn’t quit reading ‘em. A thought carried more weight when you posted it than when you said it out loud, Dale guessed. But people were obsessed with the written word, or something like that. Even in small town Dickory, First Street was populated with what looked like deaf-mutes, everybody walking serpentine, slow, looking down, wrapped up in a conversation that couldn’t have been any more interesting than the reality going on about them. Hell, even the parents of these kids were on their Goddamn phones. Kids these days weren’t thinking about hidden drives, unless those drives were somehow electronic. ![]() Journal Media does not control and is not responsible for the content of external websites.Dale kept a dummy out forty yards from the head of his drive because lug-heads took the turn so quick they were liable to kill him one day. Users are reminded that they are fully responsible for their own created content and their own posts, comments and submissions and fully and effectively warrant and indemnify Journal Media in relation to such content and their ability to make such content, posts, comments and submissions available. Journal Media does not control and is not responsible for user created content, posts, comments, submissions or preferences. Wire service provided by Associated Press. Irish sport images provided by Inpho Photography unless otherwise stated. News images provided by Press Association and Photocall Ireland unless otherwise stated. For more information on cookies please refer to our cookies policy. You can obtain a copy of the Code, or contact the Council, at PH: (01) 6489130, Lo-Call 1890 208 080 or email: note that TheJournal.ie uses cookies to improve your experience and to provide services and advertising. TheJournal.ie supports the work of the Press Council of Ireland and the Office of the Press Ombudsman, and our staff operate within the Code of Practice.
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