Devil’s Canyon
Friedrich Nietzsche awoke from a long black ribbon of dreams. Snow was drifting outside the window and piling neatly upon the sill. A flaming log of cedar gently hissed and crackled in the fireplace, the orange glow warm and reassuring.
He turned on the bedside lamp, heavy hands molesting the stack of reading materials on the table. He chose at random, a German edition of an American dime novel. Die Abenteuer von Doc Holliday. The tawdry and colorful exploits of the tubercular gunfighter thrilled Nietzsche more than Grete’s tender kisses.
Chapter three opened explosively with a vibrant shotgun battle in a lush canyon overrun with rambling thicket and misshapen boulders. Holliday waged war with a family of corpulent land barons, mercilessly pumping buckshot and hot lead into their fat bellies, laughing as the green-brown guts of his combatants oozed out of the still-smoking cavities of their well-fed flesh.
Nietzsche fished a pencil stub out of the pocket of his red silk bathrobe. Recalling what Pascal wrote, he scribbled with the dull pencil in the wide margin of the book: Anyone who tries to act like an angel is acting like a beast.
Well, that was an interesting cross section of people.
There’s something about the idea of Nietzsche reading a dime novel western about Doc Holliday is an odd mental image.
It probably doesn’t help that everytime I hear “Doc Holliday” I think of Val Kilmer saying “I got two guns, one for the both of you.”
Kilmer pretty much owns the Holliday characterization; in fact, when I did a Google image search for Doc Holliday, Google asked me Did you mean Doc Holliday+Val Kilmer?
Anyway, I was simply amused by the concept of Nietzsche reading a dime novel western.
I have a strange sense of humor sometimes.
good sense of humor–found this more than interesting
Thank you, Scot. I enjoyed composing it. The piece was inspired by the works of novelist Bruce Olds.
I dug this part:
Holliday waged war with a family of corpulent land barons, mercilessly pumping buckshot and hot lead into their fat bellies, laughing as the green-brown guts of his combatants oozed out of the still-smoking cavities of their well-fed flesh.
Yeah, David, a bit of pulp fiction hyerbole. I liked that as well.
Ah, it’s not just me then.
I’ve had a crush on Val Kilmer since “Real Genius”, so I thought maybe I was just biased.