“The Duck and Boss Man, My Language and, What the FORK!”

About three weeks ago this big, and I mean BIG, duck showed up here on the yard, and stayed. I say duck, but someone told me it was a Canadian Goose, but since I ain’t really sure, not to mention, this is Texas, I’ll call it a duck.

This duck ain’t afraid of humans, he’ll get to within three feet of you, if you’re offering bread, I don’t know if this means that he’s been around people before and feels comfortable with them, or if he’s never been around people, and therefore doesn’t recognize the danger. But believe this: there are guys walkin’ around here trying to figure out a way to get him in a microwave!

This prison at Three Rivers is like a bird sanctuary, we have thousands of birds who live here with us. Well, this duck is like the king of birds here. Yeah, we always bring bread out of the kitchen to feed all of the birds, and whenever he can, this duck will just bully his way around the other birds and get whatever bread he wants to eat for himself. I don’t think he’s greedy, he’s just a scrapper of a bird! Now talk about greedy, we have these black birds here, for the record I thought they were crows, but one of the guards said they were Cracklins, or something like that. These are some greedy birds! These guys will bully the little birds and, if we let them, get all of the food we throw out. But the little sparrows will darn near eat out of your hand, not quite, but damn near. They’ll come so close to us that if we wanted too, we could kick them. Being that the black birds are a little skittish and won’t get close to us we are able to feed the sparrows by dropping the food right at our feet.

Now Boss Man (our cat) is a damned terror to birds. He’ll jump on any of them dumb enough to get surprised, hell, I’ve seen him climb a tree trying to get at them, and he’s notorious for catching them, too. My point is, Boss Man’s a damn reckoning to a bird! Yep, he’s a hunter.

On the perimeter of the prison yard we have some other cats, wild ones. For the most part they stay as far away from us as they possibly can, but there’s this one cat that looks suspiciously like Boss Man, except he’s big, huge head on this guy, and one of his ears has been torn up, yeah, he’s a rough looking character. Well, ever now and then he’ll come around when we’re not on the yard and just beat the stuffing out of Boss Man! So what I’m eluding to here, is that Boss Man might be a reckoning to a sparrow, but when it comes to other cats, he’s pretty much a soft indoor, pampered brat pretending to be a real prison cat. I won’t use the “P” word here, but I could.

The other day some of the guys got the idea that they’d like to see some real National Geographic survival stuff. So they decided to herd this big duck down to the area where Boss Man hangs out – thinking of course that nature would take it’s course; bets had been made on the outcome! Well, a couple of us happened to be out there and saw what was going down, so we scooped up Boss Man, and much to the chagrin of the other cons, took him inside. In fairness to Boss Man’s pride I will admit that he was bowed up and ready to go, and wasn’t happy about us taking him inside. But the duck is as big as he is, if not bigger, and I wanted to save him the embarrassment of getting beat up in front of the whole compound, by a DUCK! He’d never have lived that down.

My Language

You might have noticed that a while back I started to clean up my language; not using as much slang as I like to. “It ain’t that I’m tryin’ ta sound smarter, ’cause I ain’t” … that being an example of what I’m referring to. The reason: well, I realized that this blog goes to my friend Conny in Switzerland, whereby she then puts it on her website, which goes all over Europe. That being, it means that some of the people who read this do so by the aid of a computer program that changes my English into, German, per se, and I got to thinking that it, the computer, might have a hard time trying to decipher my county, lingo. So that’s the reason for sudden leap on vocabulary expounding … OK, that was a little much, but you get the message.

What the FORK!

I have a Face Book account that Miss Lynn in Sheffield England handles for me. The other day, feeling full of myself, I asked her how many friends I had … she told me 312! 312, that’s it! 312! What the fork!. I hear some folks have thousands, what am I doing wrong? Do I need to post some pictures in a THONG? Now, don’t go to un-friending me, I was kidding about that! Just wondering what I could do to up that number? Any ideas?

Thanks and I love you guys! Mark

Three Rivers, 3-5-18