The Wannaskan Almanac for Thor’s Day January 25, 2018

A second cousin of mine--no, wait, maybe she’s ‘a cousin once removed’ instead, (never could keep that straight)--emailed me the other day, and among other things, told me she had been reading her grandma's nearly everyday journal entrys from 1980-1990. She mentioned that my name comes up quite a bit followed by her infamous question marks, the cousin said, adding gramma wrote with about the same emotion concerning cleaning out the refrigerator, details of the weather, her brother's blood pressure, as she did about Mt. St. Helens erupting.

That worries me. Well, who else has written me into their diary? I know I’ve neglected to, for several years now. Oh, I tried restarting a journal a few years back, but just couldn’t meet deadline. To my credit, I had kept a lengthy journal, thirty-some years ago, titled “Hot Coffee & Cold Beer” or “Cold Coffee & Warm Beer.”(I don’t remember for sure) that morphed into 3500 pages over thirteen volumes, then went through a few stages of severe editing after I sobered up. I remember burning pages, at some point I think, though it’s vague.

I know I didn’t worry anything about cleaning out the refrigerator, the weather, my non-existent brother’s blood pressure (or anybody else’s) nor gave a hang about Mount Saint Helen’s erupting. I may have become anal about other equally pointless things, like the cats burrowing into the water pump heat tape, shorting it out and causing my pipes, plus the line between the toilet and the septic tank, to freeze--that, may have perturbed me enough to write about it.

Then too, I doubt there’s anything emotional in them that couldn’t have been expressed shooting a gun out the backdoor. That’s why real writers live in the country. We enjoy the liberty of gun ownership, expressed on a whim or notion, at the stroke of midnight on New Years Eve or the 4th of July in lieu of firecrackers, or we just feel good enough to waste some ammunition.

Nobody thinks twice about hearing gunshots echoing through the woods or over water here in Palmville or Grimstad Townships (the township next door) as probably 100% of us own, minimally, five various firearms or more, each for a specific use from small caliber rifles for nailing squirrels and woodchucks, to 12-gauge and 20-gauge shotguns for upland birds, ducks and geese, to pistols for target shooting, to high-powered rifles for deer, bear, and other pesky large critters, and some old-timey black powder weaponry for a lot of spark, smoke and cinders. In Wannaska, on Sunday, somebody even shoots the church bell to ring it, I kid you not, an’ he keeps his pistol in his vest pocket.

It don’t pay to be the jumpy sort in Wannaska. You jump when someone shoots, and they’ll seize on that like a tick on a hound. You might not think anyone has noticed, but jumpin’ or twitchin’ in anticipation hereabouts, will git your name in someone’s diary for sure.

Excerpt/ The  Golden era of Liberty, written and published in Palmville, by John J. Hovorka (1911-1988)
“Ye Editor has been accused of fanaticism because of his tirade against the Nazis in the June T.G.E. Well, I freely admit the language used is somewhat unbecoming from a dilettante philosopher ... but I am not a dilettante, but the Backwoods Wilderness Filosopher, and I maintain that if more philosophers spoke out against those human skunks, lousy bastards and rats, neither Hitler nor Mussolini would have been able to terrorize the civilized world.”

Free Publicity
If you crave publicity
And would like to have it free,
Do not the editor see--
Jump in a well or climb a tree
By Oscar Dunn (JJH)