We’ve spoken before of the difficulty of getting back on horses. Even once the decision to re-mount the damn things has been made, there’s no guarantee the redoubled attempt will turn out any differently. So learned a certain marginal denizen, found in Bibliothèque Mazarine MS 520 and pictured hyeah:
Moments before this image was illuminated, I’m pretty sure we heard a certain now-mounted marginal man exclaim, “Oh, yeah, horse? Well I’ll show you…” Once more, the horse, he has done the showing.Though to his credit, the rider-now-ridden does seem pretty blasé about the whole turn of events:
Were it The Flintstones, I’d expect a closeup and a shrugged out “It’s a living!” to follow–though perhaps it’s just the smoothing from the image enlarging software I used that makes him seem so mellow.
One final thing. For those who follow this blog regularly, be on notice: horse-based-allusions are the closest I plan to come from here forward to apologizing for my lack of activity. I’m done with explaining why I haven’t done stuff. I’ve decided just to do stuff.
Strangely enough, you can thank my occasional co-blogger ((And more than occasional footnote taunter.)) Reynard for my new resolve. I’ve been pretty low lately, so low that talking my problems over with anthropomorphic twelfth-century rapist fox ((Who is himself likely the symptom of a more serious mental decline.)) didn’t seem like it could make things any worse. After much time spent insinuating impotence, incontinence, impiety, insolence–you know, basically the whole im/in- section of Roget’s Thesaurus for Bastards–even Reynard could see that there wasn’t much point. “The chump’s gotta have dignity, else it’s just sad, man,” he said, uncharacteristically thoughtful. He then added, “When I get sad, I stop being sad and be awesome instead. True story.” ((Then he left and sodomized my mom with a recently used plunger. Rubber end first. True story.))
It didn’t matter much to me that he’d tried to fob a two year old How I Met Your Mother bit off on me as some sort of hard-won wisdom, because, well–what the hell? Seems worth a try. Not like not not being sad has been working out for me.
I went to thank my inadvertent balm, but found he was already off being awesome himself: ((This picture was taken pre-revenge sodomy. But what am I saying–with Reynard, it’s never truly pre-revenge sodomy, just pre-his latest revenge sodomy. What a stinker!))
Fly on, Reynard, Fly on to great justice. ((I’m assuming the giant eagle can still fly all yoked up like that. Otherwise, seems like he’d be better off employing something from the normal range of draft animals. But never mind me. I’m just here in the footnotes over-analyzing my own jokes. Maybe it’s best if you just show yourselves out. I may be some time.))