...ago...

...please, everybody, note the date at the top of one of these Far Side cartoons. Now THOSE were the 'good ol' days' of cartooning!! Yeah, Calvin & Hobbes and Peanuts are great too, but absolutely NOTHING will get a guaranteed belly-laugh out of me like the Far Side!! I'm really glad I bought all the Far Side books I saw in the 80's! Last count, I have 3 great big Far Side Anthologies, & 6 or 7, regular-size books of them beside my bed. Cuz I like to read books that make me laugh before I go to sleep. Last night I was reading "Angela's Ashes"...about halfway through, I realized 'this is some of the most depressing shit I EVER read'...but I'm reading it cuz Mom always talked about how good it was, and it's one of the ones I have from her, and it'd kinda be a dishonor to her memory not to read it, ya know?) But after a couple hours, I rolled over & got a Far Side book, then the movie "Arachnophobia" was on, and I had to watch it again...(it started at 3 am), but I fell asleep a half hour into it.

Okay...I promised...Crybaby Bridge...

We were out driving around one night (I guess summer), and couldn't think of anywhere to go to cause trouble or anything, Tif was at Mom & Dad's for the evening, and T knew how fascinated I was by ghost stories and stuff like that, so all of a sudden he said "Hey, you wanna see something really scary?" & that was even BEFORE Twilight Zone movie! Of course I said yeah! So we left town and started heading northeast. After about a half hour, I said Where are we headed?? And he told me the crybaby bridge story, which I had never heard before (naive!), and I was practically jumping up and down in the car. It was about another 45 minutes away, and we went out on a lonely country road in the middle of woods, and went down a little, like, horsetrail, towards a small suspension bridge...out in the middle of nowhere! How weird is that?? We could see it, but we were a ways away from it, in the middle of the woods. We just sat there in the car with the windows rolled down, and the radio off. And all of a sudden, I did hear what sounded like a baby crying! I don't know, maybe it was just that I was so spooked out by talking about it all the way over, and hearing the legend from him, but, wow! We got out of the car to listen better, and in about 2 minutes, we heard like an old train on some tracks (no tracks anywhere nearby though!)! It sounded like one of those old steam-engine trains, and we could hear the wheels on the tracks, and a train bell (you know, like a big old one, clang, clang! No horn, or anything). That right there scared me even worse than the crybaby thing! I turned around and tried to run to the car, and of course, tripped over the sticks & stuff on the ground (we WERE in the middle of the woods!), and fell promptly on my face! I got up, & looked back, and T was standing there laughing his ASS off at me! However, he WAS walking (actually 'meandering') after me toward the car! Once we were in, he said "Neat! You wanna ride down closer & see the bridge, & look for the tracks?" Ha! Are you kidding me? I want to go home! To my big scary apartment (the first one I rented, with just me & Tif living there, a 2 story apartment, with the locked attic that had a hand painted on the wall with the fingers on fire & the number 13 on the palm of it.)...but it was MY apartment, and MY ghost that I knew!

The crybaby bridge legend is, like I said, there's one in every state, but like in the 1800's a girl had a baby and her parents didn't know. So she gave birth to it by herself out in the woods, and threw it off the bridge so nobody ever knew. But you always heard it cry at night...

BoUnCeS!! LibbY!