Bandanas

2011-10-12 23:22:48-0400

Next to the belts were many piles of bandanas. There was a small collection of miniature log cabins by them, welcome postcards, and other souvenirs. Which should I choose? True - the mouse droppings by the cabins made them an easy item to put off the list. Many of the welcome postcards were water damaged and warped, or foxed. So: bandanas. Some were fairly plain, but others had recipes printed on them, maps, smiling cowboys and horses, crossed guns and branding irons.

I was interested in the branding irons.

When I was a kid I used one at the Lazy 8 ranch, which, as the name implies, has an infinite pasture shaped like a Klein bottle. We lost a lot of cattle, but we found a lot too. Different shapes and colors. Not always edible. Not always what you would call cattle, if you looked at them for more than a second. It was complicated and disturbing, so calling them "cattle" made things a lot easier. We would take turns branding the critters, but sometimes, we couldn't find a place to brand them. We thought maybe taking pictures of them would do, but many were kind of radioactive and didn't show up on film too well. Anyway, it was hard to leave the farm, since it was an infinite mono-surface 3d space with a negative curvature when you came at it one way and a positive one coming the other way. Sometimes, it was all you could do to keep from running into yourself, if you travelled up to the neck. 

I chased a dog up there one day and I haven't found my way back. I hope my folks don't miss me too much. I don't know how time flows out here, but in there, you can fix things like that. You get as many chances as you like. Out here, one mistake and Pfft!.