Mind Games....

If my "amusement" with the Redneck Crossing is not obsessive enough... you may now add PARANOID to obsessive.

My mission set out innocently enough - score another picture on my way to Decorah, today. Upon my approach, I can see the once "sitting" dog with the yellow cape, is now standing...wearing an orange cape. What could this mean? Does the dog have joints? Is he like the Johnny and Jane West dolls from my childhood with the hinged joints that could stand, sit and hold a gun? (I had Geronimo, too.) I needed another set of eyes. Too much to take in at 45 mph.

I get to the optimum picture taking range and the sky opens up to the most torrential rain I have seen yet this year. I can barely see the road. I can't get the shot. As I put the camera down and look to my left, I spy a little man with a red beard, wearing a yellow rain suit (or cape), holding a scoop shovel in one hand and what I believe to be a beer in the other. The moment I am directly across from him, he spins, looks right at me and holds his beer up to the air and laughs.

I felt like I had been "caught" doing something.....something I shouldn't be - and he was silently acknowledging the fact he knew I was the gawker and the picture taker. (That sounds like something Barney Fife would say, by the way... "he's one of them joke crackers....."). I quickly stuffed the camera under the seat.

I am fairly certain he was wearing the yellow cape that was draped around the sitting dog a couple days ago. I was also fairly certain, at the time, that the man was "real" or "alive" - but now... Hmm. Was he? Or was this caped crusader a ploy to wart off gawkers and picture takers? I wonder! Oh, they think they are soooooooo clever...

Game on Redneck!!