The Innis Reports: Fired Up & Having Fun

The Innis Reports:

Fired Up & Having Fun

by

Huxley Innis

Published by Blue Pig Publishing

Distributed by Smashwords

Copyright © 2015 by Huxley Innis

Cover art by Satodesigners

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

Thank you for purchasing this ebook. This book remains the copyrighted property of the author, and may not be re-distributed or re-sold to others for commercial or non-commercial purposes. If you enjoyed this book, please encourage your friends to purchase their own copy from their favorite authorized retailer. Thank you for your support.

Contents

About This Collection

The Lazy Beaver

A Mexican and His Marbles

A Mexican and His Marbles Revisited: The Groovy Shindig

Who Are You?

About the Author

Other Books by Huxley Innis

About this Collection

Hold on tight... Huxley Innis is back with a new collection of reports ready to transport you into an odd literary otherworld guaranteed to blow your mind. Fired Up & Having Fun invites you, Wise Reader, into the Lazy Beaver tavern trilogy. A three report, three-alarm roller coaster ride of reading sure to leave you shocked and shaken. The fourth report has nothing to do with the Lazy Beaver tavern trilogy or the Lazy Beaver tavern. But it has everything to do with honesty and insanity colliding head-on at a major event honoring writers, writing and literature. Prepare yourself, Wise Reader, for an outrageously strange, hilariously hallucinatory trip into the HI mind... Get settled. Get comfortable. Then get ready... That’s all. That’s it. There’s nothing more to say... What are you waiting for? Go on in...

The Lazy Beaver

To string incongruities and absurdities together in a wandering and sometimes purposeless way, and seem innocently unaware that they are absurdities, is the basis of the American art, if my position is correct.

--Mark Twain

The Lazy Beaver hasn’t always been referred to as the Lazy Beaver that certain strains of society have come to unwittingly assume. In fact, for most of its rugged enduring existence in this little secret piece of paradise peacefully nestled between the High Hills that closely hug the low mountains not too far (but safely positioned high enough, thank Horus) from the inevitably rising levels of the Great Blue Pacific Ocean, it has commonly and simply been referred to as, the Cabin.

This particular report chronicles the history of the notorious yet celebrated two-story structure that ultimately came to be known, in recent memory anyway, as the Lazy Beaver tavern here on the spectacular West Coast where oddly enough by accident, coincidence, or some funny kind of homeoteleutonic design, an alarming number of past and present inhabitants names (sometimes the first; sometimes the sur; sometimes both), end with the letter y...? Why? Hell if I know.

Anyway whatever, I would like to take you inside Wise Reader, sit down together, relax, chill out, a little later maybe freak out, have a drink, and spark up a serious...discourse.

The Lazy Beaver you see, is central to many of the reports that I have filed and will continue to file about any subject at all that happens to spark my interest, stir my cranium, motivate my medulla oblongata, or challenge my habitually hesitant hypothalamus, or until my ashes are spread around the planet on banana leaf boats blessed by ancient, heavenly, highly wise and private Amazonian tribes who employ bamboo-chewing scribes from other cultures of like mind to travel down sacred rivers in beautiful dugout canoes just before sunrise singing songs of silver (gold is too expensive and I’m just not worth it) while setting portions of my pyramid-piled ashes allegorically afloat on those previously blessed banana leaf boats that are then bowed and sung to until shared horizons slowly swallow my final image from their honored eyes... Now breathe.

The two-story structure that is the Lazy Beaver was built in the year 1848 by Hank Feathers Fenton. He acquired the nickname Feathers because of his fascination with (and consequent wearing of) the magnificent eagle feather headdresses worn by the Aboriginal People of that time. However, Fenton had lived his entire life seven-hundred miles inland before one day deciding to move to the wild and mysterious West Coast to hammer out a proper life for himself, and was completely ignorant of the unique headgear worn by the Coast Salish Indians, who did not wear eagle feather headdresses at all, but instead wore woven basket hats made from spruce root and cedar bark. This erroneous assumption caused quite a stir with the local Coast Salish who unanimously considered Fenton to be a goddamn fucking dumb-ass fool. Once word got around that a white man wearing an eagle feather headdress (rather than the local, sponsor-driven, arbitrarily approved, hand-woven basket hat) was running around in the forest, more often than not, naked and drunk, he was routinely mocked and scorned. One chief even went so far as to make a public statement to the then fledgling local media, in which he proclaimed that Fenton was, quote: a presumptuous, ignorant, little-dicked yahoo.

Actually a millwright by trade, he built his house out of logs and stone, but was not in any way associated with those three little pigs who were also building houses around that time, but with considerably less care and with questionable materials indeed: straw? sticks? and...bricks. Well I guess bricks would be okay, nothing wrong with bricks I suppose...no doubt very sturdy...but straw and sticks? Honestly, what the hell were those first two pigs thinking? I mean, what did they expect would happen when the wolf huffed and puffed like a mother? And although Feathers never needed to concern himself with his cabin being blown down by the mighty breath of a fairy tale wolf, he did have to concern himself with random attempted break and enters by a rogue six-hundred pound grizzly bear that frequented the area looking for easy meals.

Ridiculed beyond recognition; unable to tolerate the constant jeers and barbs he was subjected to by the Coast Salish Indians regarding the whole headdress fiasco, Hank Feathers Fenton fled to California in search of gold and a backbone.

Feathers sold the Cabin and surrounding three acres of land to brothers Billy and Jimmy Looney, whom together built a small hotel a hundred yards or so from the Cabin which sadly ended up being used for lumber storage over the next decade. The new hotel, christened the Looney Inn attracted a myriad of mentally unstable guests, like the retired hired preacher who started a fire in his room one night using a mixture of potassium permanganate and glycerol (that he secretly acquired the day prior from some weird, dodgy-eyed chemist and part-time pugilist named Wayne) because he feared more than anything--the dark--and believed that the bright light might somehow protect him from ghouls and vampires and a frightening assortment of vicious, dangerous forest creatures he claimed were definitely coming for him. But for the retired hired preacher, it was the ghouls and vampires that were especially concerning. That’s what he told everyone anyway. And well, he did wear a string of garlic bulbs around his neck...just in case. He was also of the conviction that the intense heat produced by the fire would keep everyone warm and cozy during that long, cold, humidity-riddled Pacific Northwest night since there weren’t enough of those really warm Hudson’s Bay Company wool blankets to go around. And some of the guests had inadvertently and unfortunately forgot to bring warm (but itchy as all hell) woolen socks along when they began the long perilous journey west, poor bastards. Anyway whatever. The hotel which was entirely made of wood, burned to the ground as a result of the retired hired preacher’s delusional recklessness. The Cabin, thank Simon son of Joseph, sat upwind from the fire and was spared. Fortunately, all twenty guests and four staff members managed to escape the inferno.

Aaaahh yes. Right, I almost forgot. There is another little side story to this story that has been told countless times over many weary years, but I will happily retell the tale for you Wise Reader; right here, right now... By the time the flames had safely subsided for them to get close enough, all twenty guests, the staff and...Wayne, the weird dodgy-eyed chemist and part-time pugilist (who was technically responsible for the fire in the first place by way of his careless contribution of combustibles to an unlicensed retired hired preacher suffering from heavy pyrotechnical paranoia aaand—something else that I should perhaps, out of simple respect for history’s deranged dead and in the name of common everyday ethics, not even mention here in these pages—a secret something I discovered in my research for this report and something I should probably choose to leave undisturbed, safe within the protective legal confines of a 140 year old signed and witnessed non-disclosure agreement... But I won’t. I bloody well won’t. Won’t leave the subject undisturbed, I mean. Fuck it. Why should I goddamnit? I’m a journalist...of sorts, a reporter of news, an earnest observer and predator of straight poop publication opportunities. Fuck the non-disclosure agreement. I didn’t sign it. Okay, so anyway here it is: He—Wayne--was often caught peeing in very public places, sometimes with strange friends and sometimes on those same strange friends aaand according to those privately-owned historical documents I...discovered [I’ve been advised by my legal team to just keep quiet and smile nice regarding the where and how of my...discovery] and quickly came into sole possession of after the fragile, long held and yellowed court-prepared papers were traded for an ounce of Jamaican Lambsbread and a bottle of Ron del Barrilito 3 Star Puerto Rican rum...some of them enjoyed this particular fetishism so much, they would drink beer after beer after beer until their bellies were about to burst, then quickly unbutton their britches letting a long yellow river roar or, in the case of the ladies, a hurried gathering of their flounced, floor-flirting skirts into a firmly held collection of crumpled fabric up around their waists so as not to soil the fine fabric hems of course, allowing them the liberty to squat squarely and release, sending a golden shower gushing down upon some weirdly excited and eagerly anticipating participant. A number of innocent bystanders, or "non-participants" according to the participants who used the term flippantly and always with an indubitably derogatory tone attached—the gawkers, rubberneckers, were unexpectedly peed upon in public resulting in, to say the least, a sudden salinizing sort of trauma that in the end left many of these unfortunate non-participants requiring many long difficult hours of counselling with the majority of victims needing years to recover. Sadly, some, after having been publicly peed upon in such a brazen way, never recovered--their embarrassing secret blown to unrecoverable bits by a bullet through the brain. The thought of ever getting peed upon again even accidently by a dog say, some asshole out walking his dog...imagine, you’re standing waiting for a bus, then the dog stops at your feet, quickly lifts its leg while looking off in another direction in an adroit attempt to distract you, and it works. Before you know it, he’s running off after his asshole of an owner who is way up ahead clapping his hands and calling, Here boy! That’s when you start to feel a sticky wet combination of warmth and cold--but getting colder as the wind presses the wet pant-leg against your lower leg molding the darkening fabric to the muscle and bone beneath it. You look down. The horror returns like a family’s collectively-despised, cussing-loud, verbally-abusive drunk cousin who calls to say he just got out of prison and is on his way over for Christmas dinner and a place to crash for a while... Memories maul your mind like a coalition of ravenous jaguars. Reality recoils and you scream...

After having read their harrowing accounts, written by their own hands, in their own words--as difficult as it was sometimes, I must confess, the intimicy of my newly acquired revelations provided me a stark understanding of how shocked, humiliated, and degraded they must have felt, not to mention cold and wet), unanimously agreed to heartily participate in making good use of the Looney Inn’s fiery demise by enjoying an impromptu salmon barbeque and hymn-filled sing-along that then somehow quickly advanced into a raging, intoxicating, fire-dance-induced orgy of sorts that roared on high for some time before sliding smoothly and slowly