Ranches

We recently went on a road trip through the mostly miserable landscape of a goodly portion of the American west, and while you drive through those parts you see a lot of ranches, a lot of signs for ranches, and even some ranch houses.  These sightings fill me with dread and angst, and a miserable feeling of inevitability, much in the way I imagine that the sight of the people holes made the characters feel in "The Fault of Amiagara", a feeling of inescapable doom, a horrible magnetism drawing you to - in my case, the ranch house. For some reason I suffer the same obsession with my destiny that Winston Churchill or Luke Skywalker or other great men seem to feel, but whereas they are drawn to heroic achievement, I am convinced that it is my destiny to get stuck in uncomfortable situations where I do not belong and will fail miserably; like scout camps, ski trips, motor bikes, water sports, office work, construction work, and gyms. I have failed humiliatingly at all of them, and all of those failures seem to be marked with mental, physical, and existential discomfort. Thus ranches. I can not see myself at a ranch. People at ranches ride horses primarily, that seems; amongst those who enjoy water sports and motor bikes and gyms, to be the main thing about a ranch, the reason to go to a ranch and want to live at a ranch; to ride a horse, maybe feed it an apple or two, stroke its gigantic head and murmur something meaningful in a deep emotionally healing way that only the murderous brute and you understand. When I picture myself on a ranch, I picture myself falling off a tired old horse and being laughed at by a little boy in a cowboy hat and boots who's been riding horses his entire short life. I also picture cowboys who live in the saddle and shoot coyotes and sleep on rocks and swim in muddy water holes without a care in the world, and huge beasts with horns and bitey dogs and sagebrush and rocks.  It will be hot and the water will come from a quaint pump in the back, the bathroom will be an outhouse with wash rags instead of toilet paper, there will be dust on the dinner plates, the screen door will have holes and everyone sleeps on the floor of the bunkhouse or up a ladder in the hay ("the mice don't bother you none if you don't have food on you. You'll want to use the water pump, boy"). There's no internet but a super satellite TV screen dominates the main room with constant coverage of rodeos, nascar, motocross, pro wrestling, and country music videos.   I also picture remote locations close to the highway but far from the neighbors that are very similar to the locations of crime scenes that I have read extensively about, similar in every way to the "Before" picture of the crime scene that they always include. Before.

And after all that I can not escape the horrible feeling that it is my destiny to stay at a ranch, that somehow someone will talk me into it, or surprise me with a coupon on my birthday, or there will be some confusing series of events and necessities and cajoling friends and eager embrace-the-day type flashing happy eyes and pained sighing when I attempt to voice my legitimate concerns that will make no sense because the words; "it is your destiny" will be hammering over and over relentlessly in my head and I will find myself driving to the ranch house, taking the exit and driving down the gravelly road to the ranch house, and I will feel the tendrils of failure and defeat and miserable discomfort creeping up from the roiling pit in my stomach, and I will see this