New Year's Eve at Greenhorn Ranch

            For some reason I have forgotten how to fall asleep like a normal person. I haven’t gone to sleep before two to sometimes four in the morning for a week or so. And I can’t even sleep late. So here I sit at the computer trying to think of a subject for my blog. It’s not 4 a.m. yet, so I still have time. Maybe I’ll talk about New Year’s Eve at Greenhorn Ranch.

            We just passed New Year’s Day and the entrance into what the Mayans and other “seers” say is the year it all comes down - 2012. Of course there was talk of it ending in 1984, thanks to George Orwell, and then there was the dramatic transition into the 21^st century and the Y2k scare, when all the world’s computers were supposed to foul up and commerce and the entire world would go into convulsions.

           Well, we’re still here.  So let’s see if the Mayans and the others were right this time.  But we still have that dingbat Ahmadinajad and his perpetual “rain dance” attempting to bring us the Twelfth Imam, who is scheduled to pop out of a gopher hole or something and bring us the end days.  All I know is that if we get another four years of our current administration, it may be over anyway.

            Naturally, here in the mountains we don’t worry about these trivialities.  We go down to the ranch for a beer and some stompin’ around to a country western band.  There’s nothing better than wearing Levis, drinking a beer and chomping on a dead pig.  I’ve included a couple of photos from this year’s New Year’s Celebration at the ranch.

            Poor Gayle. She likes to dance, but I don’t.  Maybe it’s because I always played in the band and never developed my dancing skills. More likely, it was playing music and watching the inebriated dancers falling in love for the night.  I sometimes felt that I was contributing to a breeding frenzy. 

I guess what really turned me off from dancing was watching dancers jumping and jerking around on the dance floor, as though they were victims of the affliction called “Saint Vitus Dance.” In medieval times, entire villages would suddenly become a huge throng of writhing bodies, dancing uncontrollably while foaming at the mouth. It was sometimes thought of as a form of mass hysteria. Actually, all they needed was a rock band to appear normal to us today.

            This was Gayle and my first year going to the ranch for New Years. This is a dude ranch, after all. You know…with horses, gunslingers, and spurs.  We had nothing else to do and they had an entire pig to eat, including the apple in its mouth. They smoked the poor sucker and it was black as coal.  But it was tasty, I’ll admit.  And the band wasn’t bad at all. A little loud and, since I wouldn’t dance when Gayle asked me, we left early. But we ate the hell out of that dead pig. I passed on the apple. You know…pig germs and all…

            This is a different lifestyle here at the Greenhorn Guest Ranch and I actually find it authentic and “basic” with no pretensions.  Life is too short for people to be less than real. So let’s have a beer, eat a pig, and enjoy friends and family.