Every word of this story is true. Well, almost every word of this story is true. Okay, part of this story is true. Okay, okay, this story was inspired by a true story (that someone told me about). Let’s call it, “Hollywood true.”
It involves a man being abducted by aliens who conducted a series of disturbing experiments involving his…. Wait. No. That’s not the story I was going to tell you about. The story I was going to tell you about involves a moose. Actually, several moose.
Dan Joling, a writer for the Associated Press, recently penned an article warning Alaskans about “grumpy moose.” One moose kicked a woman in the head while she was out feeding her chickens. (If you’re keeping track, this is reason 185 why you should never own a chicken). Another moose charged at some folks at an Alaskan ski resort – twice. (Say what you will about moose – they’re persistent.) The “take-away,” if you will, from Joling’s article is that if Alaskan moose attended kindergarten, they would come home every day with notes saying that they didn’t “work and play well with others.”
On a related note, my wife’s family has a cabin in Montana. Here is how you get there:
Step 1. Drive to the state of Montana.
Step 2. Continue driving into the state at Montana’s legal speed limit of 500 miles an hour.
Step 3. When you reach The Middle of Nowhere, make a sharp right turn at a sign that says Fish Creek Road.
Step 4. Continue driving for several more hours, and after bouncing along on a gravel road for three full eternities, you finally arrive – at a location where you need to continue driving for several more hours.
Step 5. When your kidneys finally unionize and demand humane working conditions, you reach the cabin.
The cabin sits in a valley where no electronic communications exist, nor will they ever exist. People in the darkest, most remote corners of the jungles of Borneo will have four full bars of wifi before any electronic communication penetrates this valley. What do exist in this valley, however, are moose. Now, I would love to tell you that these Montana moose are not grumpy like those rude Alaskan moose who keep kicking women in the head as they feed their chickens. However, I am not in a position to do so. This is because WE STAY AWAY FROM THE MOOSE. My wife’s family is very large (to be precise, after the last baby was born, including cousins – the number stands at 1,383,052). All of us, at one point or another, visit the cabin, AND THIS KEY, none of us is clinically insane (Well, there is… No! I’m joking! Not a single one of us is clinically insane). So we stay away from the moose. We exercise a Zero Tolerance Moose Policy as it pertains to moose and all moose-related creatures. The nuances of their personalities, therefore, remain a mystery to us, unlike, may I point out, the Chicken Lady of Homer, Alaska. So that’s the point of my very true story.
However, now that I’ve told my moose story, on second thought, maybe I should have told you about the alien abduction instead.