November 16, 2005
Woke up at 5:30 and didn’t want to get up, but I’m on this new kick—get out of the comfort zone! So, I fought my body chemicals and head-webs and jumped, no, make that, crawled, out of bed and out into the cold by 6:40.

Got into the office at seven, had a good meeting with George Laibe and Mark Boardman about the True West Moment scripts. Needs work, but we’re getting there.

Then went into my office and followed my "Out-of-the-Comfort-Zone" worklist to the T. Mailed off a 3-D spec assignment to Bob Steinhilber. I want him to do a three dimensional image of the Vaudeville Theatre in San Antonio, Texas. This is for the big Ben Thompson-King Fisher gunfight in 1884. Packaged up the entire assignment, complete with maps, floor plans and photographs both front and back and put it in the outgoing mail.

Fired up my computer and allowed myself to read my Email one time. No replys, no extra surfing. I forced myself to close-out of Email and start the True West Moment scripts. My goal was to rough in ten. I got five in the can and forwarded them to Meghan and Mark Boardman for feedback and editing.

Here’s a couple of the more interesting Emails I got this morning:

“Good to know that prostrate is, for you, normal. But you'll have to get off your back sometime.”
—Fred Nolan, referring to my gaff where I said my “prostrate” was fine, when it should have been my “prostate.” Ha.

My reply to him written after I finished the five scripts:
Fred,
I am such an idiot sometimes it takes my breath away. Good thing I'm on my back, so I don't pass out and kill more brain cells.
—BBB

Then I got this dialogue clarification from the movie Fargo:

"Kinda funny lookin?'"

"Well, he wasn't circumcised."

"Was he funny looking apart from that?"
—Alan Huffines, quoting the Cohen brother’s brilliant dialogue where policewoman Marge interviews two idiot hookers (“Go Bears!”), one of whom slept with Steve Buscemi’s character.

We got two Emails today that I think covers the waterfront as we used to say in Bullhead City when I was growing up:

Dear Folks,
"I am always impressed with your magazine, but the current Nov - Dec offering was particularly rewarding. It was bold to cover the history of homosexuality in the West -- a subject that, like your previous coverage of frontier religion, would have been easier to simply ignore. Even though I have no dog in this fight (I pride myself in being what your article stated as a man more interested in the practical and less in the theoretical) I thank you for writing about the West as it was, and not necessarily just the parts that are comfortable to your readers. I am subscribing to help balance out the indignant cancellations you’ll probably get.”
—Jason J., Traer Iowa

Here’s the second Email:
“Have you lost your top knot? First an issue dedicated to western fashion, then the Jesus thing, and finally ‘Homos on the Range’?? It's as if your goal is to become the drugstore cowboy's Cosmopolitan. Not to be sexist, but hiring attractive young women does not guarantee sales. You should hire pros with a track record and a passion for the old west. Instead you hire Abercrombie-ites. I half expect next month's edition to include something like: What your horse is really thinking when he says neigh. C'mon Boze, Cowboy up! I don't want to see you go the way of the old west. Come Back, True West!"
—Dave V., Pittsburgh, PA

I had a book signing at the Poisoned Pen Bookstore in downtown Phoenix at noon today. Drove down into the Beast (took an hour) and joined Jana Bommersbach at the Bentley Project, a hip old warehouse that has been refurbished and—hip-mobile-ized. Hard to believe this downtown slum (two blocks south of Bank One Ballpark and the railroad tracks) could be made into anything other than a meth lab. So hip, so cool. Jana and I spoke together about our Crown book, “Amazing Tails of the West”, and we were like a WWA-tag-team-comedy-duo. She was totally blue state and I was somewhere south of the red states (where sarcasm and juvenile humor is the currency), and, well, they loved us. Several people asked how long we had been performing together. Ha. We sold every single book the owner had. I guess we better get busy on our joint wild woman book, eh?

On the way back out to Cave Creek, I stopped at Ed Mell’s studio to look at some of his new paintings. Saw the Bull Canyon-Backside of the Hualapais study and the Cave Creek Horses piece he created from the deck of my crow’s nest. Sweet. Dan O’Neil from Prescott was there. He asked me what a blog is. I thought to myself, "Prescott, yes, that’s where I want to be. Where they don’t know what a blog is, yet."

Speaking of blogs, I got a call from Jim Hinkley from Kingman when I got back to the office. You know, the guy who co-wrote the Auto book I quoted from last week? After we talked about all things Route 66 and Kingman (his wife is a Hood, as in Hood’s Market where I used to buy grape fireballs and Nesbitt orange pops and sit out on the wooden steps in the summer time and listen to the airpad cooler banging away crazily in the back of the store), I asked him how he found me. Jim said a guy in Australia who makes plastic sleeves for DeSoto hood ornaments, read the blog, wrote to his co-writer John, in California, who owns a 1950 DeSoto, who then forwarded the website to John in Kingman, and so he called me on the phone.

Is that small enough for ya? Huh? Punk? You bloggin’ to me, Prescott dude?

"We’re all pretty damned stupid, just on different subjects."
—Will Rogers (paraphrased)