Dear Southern California Edison,
Thank you just oodles for your recent correspondence and concern, urging my caution for slicing the main wire that connects Los Angeles to San Diego while my business is excavating.
I assure you. I operate two humble companies, John Boston Books and Scared o’ Bears Ranch. Currently, we’re not digging for borax, worms, nor, a la Wile E. Coyote, creating gaping wounds in Mother Earth in hopes of capturing the elusive, and, we’re guessing, mighty tasty Roadrunner.
I never could understand Wile E. Coyote in all those Warner Brothers’ cartoons. Obviously, the desert canine is comfortably well off. Long before the days of Amazon free shipping, Señor Coyote would purchase tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of dollars in equipment just to capture, then eat, the Roadrunner. Did you know this speedy, brown, black and white-streaked ground bird weighs less than a pound? And that’s with feathers.
I mean, didn’t Wile E. Coyote, during all his catalogue shopping, ever stumble upon mail order Omaha Steaks? Or use Uber Eats?
Our friend Mr. Coyote would send away for paint to disguise mountainsides as highway tunnels and here’s a sidebar. You’d think he could make a fortune painting houses because it only took him like three seconds to create a lifelike tunnel entrance, complete with blue skies, double yellow line and puffy white clouds peeking through the other end of the imaginary hole. He could have used his talents to paint entire buildings in a blink, collect a handsome payday, sit down at the Mojave Sizzler and order steak, lobster, fried shrimp and salad bar. Instead, old Wile E. purchased enough ordnance to sink Taiwan, along with 3-ton magnets, giant hot air balloons, race cars, rockets and earth movers. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear the cartoon’s creators were making a metaphor of the insane largesse of government, from our local city to the federal swamp.
Anywho. Where was I, Southern California Edison? Oh yeah. Recklessly digging holes.
Thank you for the volumes of printed materials you send, urging caution while tunneling. Despite the moniker of “Scared o’ Bears Ranch,” I regret informing you kind people at SoCalEd that the past few years, alas, I’ve been more of a deskboy than a cowboy. I used to wear out a shovel every three days, digging holes to plant orange trees or widening gopher holes so as to insert small nuclear weapons to end the miserable existence of these buck-toothed burrowing dumb-asterisked trespassing mammals. Sometimes, I’d mitigate a run-off trench to help the winter rains make their way to a storm drain in Fillmore 34 miles away. But, I can’t recall digging a canal deeper than 200 yards deep. Heck. I think the deepest I ever went was maybe 3, maybe 4 inches in that anything deeper, one tempts the rural gods to bust an axle or sprain the ankle of a sheep.
We never kept sheep. They were, how should I say this — sheepish. The nice Basque family up the canyon sometimes would have one drift off the reservation and onto our property. We’d sometimes write a ransom note, like:
Dear Jauregui Family,
If you don’t want anything baaaaaaaaa-aaaad to happen to your ewe, leave $225,000 in small, unmarked bills in our mailbox (the cute one with the redwood barn) two doors down. If you don’t, my Dad and Spain will kill you.
Yes. You’re right. We DO have a big mailbox. That’s because we’re rural.
Best wishes for your continued success,
Hunter Biden
Far be it from me to accuse you nice people at Southern California Edison. Can’t tell you how much we appreciate the electricity. Cable would seem completely redundant if we didn’t get our little streams of positive and negative ions, coursing quietly through the house. But why are you people so fixated on our digging practices, which is on land the Germans call, “das Boonies” and heretofore used by rattlesnakes and tattooed militias?
Is this some sort of ruse to get us to confess that we’re sitting on a blinding fortune of gold and rare Saugus emeralds?
We don’t have any gold mines. I mean, don’t you think you guys at SCE would have FOUND the precious metal while you were trenching up our national park-like setting, installing wire? Do we send YOU over-priced and generic slick fliers, warning you to call US when you’re digging in our neighborhood because you might disturb a family/Abominable Snowman Accidentally Shot On Our Property While Trespassing graveyard?
Or, our moonshine still. Or, our nuclear bomb shelter should Joe Biden or George Gascón get re-elected. Or, the root cellar where we jar sugar beets for the long and unforgiving Santa Clarita winters. Or, the final resting place of Jimmy Hoffa.
Don’t tell anyone this. But we had this putz of a neighbor six ranches down. A few years ago, he applied for the usual 12,016 county permits to put up a new barn. We, ahem, acquired a skeleton from COC’s Biology Department, bent it up and stuffed it in an earthen jar, then buried it under the barn site. Then we snitched to the county, pointing out our neighbors were trying to hide the fact they wanted to construct said barn on an ancient Alliklik burial site. County sent so many armed and jackbooted agents, you’d think they were doing a pre-dawn raid on Mar-a-Lago.
So. In conclusion, we shall continue to NOT dig up yard-thick SoCalEdison mother ship underground electric cable and sell it on the black market. It’s not that the family is above such felonies. We’ve just grown strangely fond and attached to the miracle of electricity and all that it powers, like the microwave and our sister Lisa’s charging stations for her various and sinful marital aids.
Oh. P.S.?
We’ve been told you can’t reboot Lisa’s unholy collection all at the same time as the lights dim at The Valencia Auto Center, especially during peak power usage periods.
Santa Clarita’s John Boston is the most prolific satirist in world history. Do visit his johnbostonbooks.com for good reading and monkey business.
