The lowly and largely misunderstood Town of Lamont, currently recovering from any number of tragic and quite disturbing municipal traumas, was faced with a menacing dilemma that could only happen in a place like the Palouse after an area farmer/rancher, Flem Snopes, age 56, obviously forgot to take his medication(s) and has somehow failed (or was it indeed deliberate?) to differentiate his supposedly innocent although quite cantankerous neighbors from the largely rebellious and ill-mannered herd that he spends a vast majority of his largely empty and meaning-starved life with, doggone it! "So, there I was, talking on the phone in the office when all of a sudden the door burst open and some guy with a bandanna over his face came riding in on horseback waving some rope thing over his head and the next thing I knew my hands and feet were tied together like a dadburn rodeo calf or whatever and some stupid horse was poking his big, slobbery nose right in my upturned face!" said an area Mayor who was victim number 7 in the latest round of humiliating citizen subjugations. "And to top it all off, I had just vacuumed the doggone carpet for the first time in 3 months, too!! Now there are muddy hoof prints all over the place and the stupid Town vacuum is clogged with those unfortunate horse droppings that I tried to vacuum up after I managed to untie myself several hours later! And how was I supposed to know that you cannot vacuum up 'road apples'? (they did sit there for quite some time, if you think about it!) I don't remember reading that prohibition in the vacuum's owner's manual, for crying out loud!" he fumed, somehow missing the point - although that is not a surprise. "And sadly, I was on the phone with the County Commissioner's office and they must have heard the whole darn thing! Oh, how humiliating! What must they think of us? Why must we always air our dirty laundry for the whole darn world to see?" he whined!"Well, I was out watering those new trees that the Town buys every year when, out of the blue, I felt a coarse rope wrap itself around my upper torso and then I was quite indelicately jerked to the ground and hogtied in something under 6 seconds - a new Town record!" said the proud, beaming Fester Bodine, age 63, a retired rancher. "Sure, I have a rope burn between several of my chins, but hey, I hold the Town record now - so in your face, Lamont! Try to beat that! That doggone Thelma Snodgrass took almost 8 seconds to immobilize while she was out checking her mail - so I beat her by a full 2 seconds!" he raved before thrusting his arms towards the Heavens in the universal victory salute immortalized by 'Rocky Balboa' in one or more of those exhilarating "Rocky' movies that Lamont so identifies with. "Oh yeah, and those Festoon toddler twins took almost 14 doggone seconds - but there was 2 of them and all - so that don't really count, I don't 'recon!" he admitted graciously - showing a level of fairness that Lamont is renowned for across all of extreme northwest Whitman County.
This unfortunate disruption, one of several that seem to plague Lamont on an almost weekly basis, was brought to a peaceful yet quite dramatic end after the perpetrator's wife, Elma Snopes, age 53, provided her husband's long neglected medications to a veterinarian from the Spokane Zoo who delivered the much needed (although slightly over-prescribed!) dose (plus an indeterminate amount of large animal tranquilizer!) to Flem via the Zoo's ever-handy tranquilizer gun. (Dang, we need to get one of those!) Flem, now as docile as a lamb, is expected to be resting comfortably for at least a week or two. "Hey, don't blame me! I am used to tranquilizing elephants and rhinos and other large mammals, doggone it! How am I supposed to know how much it takes to bring a mere man down - especially those crazy ones that come from a place like Lamont, for goodness sake?" he bellowed defensively! (well, he does have a point there!) "They never taught us that in Vet School, for crying out loud!" he said, protesting just a little too much!
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