There’s a gopher in my yard visiting from Hades proper and is constructing The Great Buffington Catacombs and I’ve been trying to kill him. Yesterday I stood outside one of his newest holes and waited like a crane waits for the right moment to snatch a frog out of the water. I waited with my Garden Claw, hoping that if he simply poked his upper half out long enough like I’d observed a dozen times I could give him some of the Claw and see what he thought about that.

Twenty minutes went by when he finally came out, and I watched and waited, very slowly getting the Garden Claw closer and closer, thinking all the while that to do a proper job I needed a proper recoil so the tool could gain maximum velocity. I considered that his reflexes were quicker than mine, and that maybe I needed to dispense with the recoil and just pin the critter. All the while, my blood was pumping like I was about to get into a fist fight. I considered this as well, and then adrenaline booted and reason out of my head as I flew into a blind rage, screamed a fantastic Rambo scream, and lunged at the eight inch gopher with my Garden Claw. My neighbor Chuck is worried about me. I missed the gopher.

I waited another twenty minutes for him to come back up, but he never did. I may have scared him to death (I hope) because there is no sign of new activity. He’s probably laying low, or maybe bleeding in his lair. If he never shows again, we won’t know until someone breaks their ankle in one of his holes and finds him, Claw wound evident, or petrified in fear. If the latter is true, I’d like to use him as a paper weight.

As I was driving home from lunch today I blasted the AC, and immediately began smelling sulfur, the same smell as the Great Destroyer smoke bombs I’d tried on the gopher prior to going Rambo. I thought it was odd, when I realized something. The times I’d bent over earlier in the week and examined a new gopher hole and smelled sulfur were not indications that the sulfur smoke had travelled and still lingered in the network of tunnels, but were instead indications that my shoes had picked up the smell from trapping the smoke in by standing on the hole. So now I need new shoes and a new lawn.

And it turns out all those meatballs didn’t give everyone the farts, it was the shoes.