In an attempt to help IBM super computer, Watson seem more human, I’ve been hired to help ghost write his autobiography.
I had a pony named Wild Fire, actually he was a full grown Arabian Quarter Horse. I paid $400 for him using my summer work money and paper route. I boarded him at my Uncle’s ranch for $100 bucks a month until one winter due to flooding the price of hay had gone up and by early spring I was flat broke. I didn’t want to sell him so my Uncle came up with a great idea, we would enter Wild Fire into a suicide race. A suicide race is run on a 1/4 mile dirt track, straight up a hill, then down the hill, across a muddy creek bed, over a fence and around a tight circle till you come sprinting down the home stretch. Well, Wild Fire was really fast and jumping fences seemed to be his true passion. I could make some good money…
Two months later in August, when poor limping Wild Fire came in dead last, I realized that this was probably the end. No one in my family said much to me that day. Two weeks later they said even less, especially while I took the small adhesive number off of Wild Fire’s thigh, from the auction. The Sioux Falls stockyard had a horse auction every Wednesday. Wild Fire had sold for a whole $80 bucks. Rendering plant money, Wild Fire would become dog food and glue. I sold my tack for another $50 and still owed my uncle another $20. He wasn’t a bad guy, he paid for the gas, burgers and Cokes on the way home, he was just a poor rancher. I studied the little adhesive number that I’d taken off of Wild Fire during the ride home. Number 37 not any bigger than a playing card. That’s funny Joe Delaney was #37. Joe Delaney was my favorite football player till he died 2 months earlier trying to save 3 kids from drowning. Joe Delaney couldn’t swim.
Later that week, I had gone shopping for new school supplies with my mom. My dad had mentioned something about poor Wild Fire being turned into glue. Dad had a good sense of humor, he’d grown up on a dirt farm during the great depression. So dad made a small joke and I immediately had an even better joke! I took Wild Fire’s old number 37 off of the bulletin board and ran over to my new school supplies and put the number squarely on my new bottle of glue. It fit perfect. Everyone laughed, laughed really hard.
I told this same little story to Hugh Hefner, late one evening in the grotto of the Playboy mansion. I remember old Hef smiled knowingly and laughed. He told me that he’d caught herpes several times throughout the years but was always able to cure it using a highly experimental embryonic stem-cell treatment. Hef went on to say that it took him awhile to realize that the clinic where he had the procedure, was also the same clinic that performed all the abortions for him and Playboy.
“I was having the cells of my own aborted fetus’s spread all over my body,” Hef stared off into the distance, his heavy, wrinkly eyes widening at the thought. “It dawned on me right in the middle of a treatment and to be honest it felt a little weird at first, but then I saw the whole depth of the situation, the humanity of it and then I felt wonderful, it was in that moment I knew I had truly manifested myself into God.” He beamed like a drunken turtle. “Is that how you felt,” he jutted out his chin at me, “when you put that number on the bottle of glue?”
Just then Pat Sajak yelled at us from the other side of the pool, he’d pulled his penis & testicles out the front zipper of his jean cut-offs and was holding up a bag of coke the size of a human head.
