The Tokyo-Montana Express Read Free

snowflakes
on a winter landscape that’s been covered with snow for months?
    I went to the general area where they had
landed. I was looking for two snowflakes in a world of billions. Also, there
was the matter of stepping on them, which was not a good idea.
    It was only a short time before I gave up
realizing how hopeless it was. The world’s smallest snowstorm was lost forever.
There was no way to tell the difference between it and everything else.
    I like to think that the unique courage of
that two flake snowstorm somehow lives on in a world where such things are not
always appreciated.
    I went back into the house, leaving Laurel
and Hardy lost in the snow.

A San Francisco Snake Story
    When one thinks of San Francisco, one
does not think of snakes. This is a tourist town and people come here to look
at French bread. They do not want to see snakes in San Francisco. They would
stay at home in the rest of America if the loaves of French bread were replaced
by snakes.
    But visitors to San Francisco may rest at
ease. What I am about to relate is the only San Francisco snake story that I
know.
    Once I had a beautiful Chinese woman for a
friend.
    She was very intelligent and also had an
excellent figure whose primary focus was her breasts. They were large and well
shaped. They gardened and harvested much attention wherever she went.
    It is interesting that I was more attracted
to her intelligence than I was to her body. I find intelligence in women to be
an aphrodisiac and she was one of the most intelligent people I have ever
known.
    Everybody else would be looking at her
breasts and I would be looking at her mind, which was architecturally clear and
analytical like winter starlight.
    What does a beautiful Chinese woman’s mind
have to do with a story about snakes in San Francisco you are probably asking
about now with a rising temperature of impatience.
    One day we went to a store that sold
snakes. It was some kind of reptile gardens and we were just walking around San
Francisco with no particular destination in mind and we happened upon this
professional den of snakes. So we went in.
    The store was filled with hundreds of
snakes.
    Every place you looked there were snakes.
    Alter you noticed, and I might add very shortly
after you noticed the snakes, you noticed the smell of snake shit. To my
recollection, which cannot be taken as gospel if you are a serious student of
snakes, it smelled like a sinking dead lazy sweet doughnut about the size of a
moving van, but it somehow was not bad enough to make us leave the place.
    We were fascinated by this dirty
snakehouse.
    Why didn’t the owners clean up after the
snakes?
    Snakes don’t want to live in their own
shit. They’d sooner forget the whole God-damn thing. Go back where they came
from in the first place.
    The dirty snakeshop had snakes from Africa
and South America and Asia and from all over the world lying there in shit.
They all needed one-way airplane tickets.
    In the middle of this snake horror there
was a huge cage full of very calm white mice who would all eventually end up as
the smell in that place.
    The Chinese woman and I walked about
looking at the snakes. We were appalled and fascinated at the same time by this
reptilian hell.
    We ended up at a case with two cobras in it
and they were both staring at her breasts. The heads of the snakes were very
close to the glass. They looked just like the way they do in the movies but the
movies leave out the smell of snake shit.
    The Chinese woman was not very tall, 5-1 or
so. The two stinking cobras stared at her breasts that were only a few inches
away. Maybe that is why I always liked her mind.

Football
    The confidence that he got by being
selected all-state in football lasted him all of his life. He was killed in an
automobile accident when he was twenty-two. He was buried on a rainy afternoon.
Halfway through the burial service the minister forgot what he was talking
about. Everybody stood there at the grave