Let's talk about honesty, grrrr, rrrfff, rrrfff

Garrison Keillor's Podcast

Prairie Home Productions

Society & Culture, Fiction, Comedy Fiction, Improv, Comedy

4.8 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 1 June 2024

⏱️ 7 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The fact is that when I was a kid in Minnesota, struggling my way through six-foot snowdrifts to school, long before lightweight down coats were invented — I was an 82-pound fourth-grader wearing 42 pounds of heavy woolens and corduroy, and one day I was caught by a pack of coyotes who carried me away to their den where I remained for several years and learned their language of growling, snuffling, snorting. I, being prehensile, was sent into the henhouse to snatch chickens, while the others distracted the farmer’s dog, and I bit the chickens’ throats and bled them dry and carried the bodies back to the den where we ate them raw.I was rescued by hunters and returned to my parents who had recovered from their grief and didn’t know what to do with me. I relearned English and I regained a semblance of good manners, though even now, years later, I sometimes urinate on the bathroom floor to mark my space against intruders, which upsets my wife and so does my habit of woofing in my sleep and sometimes I’ve smelled feathers in my sleep and attacked my pillow and chewed a hole in it, so we switched to foam rubber.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Whenever I open an egg carton I think of the chicken at work in the factory creating this elliptical work of art onto a conveyor belt to be stolen
0:28.5	away and then the hormones in the chicken feed kick in and the process of creation repeats itself.
0:38.0	Sort of like me and Limerix.
0:42.0	I write a good one and it stimulates the process of creation of a next limbric and pretty soon I have a
0:50.5	hundred of them which I could collect in a book, but I won't because very few people
0:57.0	appreciate Lemrics. Women don't, because so many cruel Lericks have been written about women,
1:05.0	and when men read a limeric, they think,
1:09.0	well, I could have done better than that.
1:11.0	Men being the compulsive competitors that they are. And meanwhile
1:17.0	here I am with this work of art in my hand. Minneapolis is great, have you seen it? The streets go from Aldrich to
1:27.6	Zenith. It's the birthplace of Prince, than whom no one since has been any hipper, I mean it. The city is good for
1:38.0	the sickly, the streets are numerical strictly, and alphabetical all so that medical teams can get to you
1:47.4	quickly. I handed this to a friend I'm in St. Paul as I am telling this and he said nice and he handed it back.
1:58.2	It's a useless work of art, not like the egg, which in addition to being a source of life is also good in
2:06.8	cakes, omelets, egg muffins, nog, and so forth.
2:12.4	But at least that Limerick is factual and provides information about
2:18.0	the street system of Minneapolis and it honors Prince. It's not like this one. A lady who lives in Vancouver drank two courts of
2:27.8	varnish remover and did not get ill and vomit but still it didn't do much to improve her.
2:36.6	Well, there's no such lady, of course, and the raider, the listener, whoever, knows this immediately even before I get to the varnish remover.
2:48.5	It's fiction, which I've devoted a good deal of my life to, even though I come from a family of farmers,
2:56.3	engineers, teachers, caregivers, people who sought to be useful citizens and not merely decorative. Why did I make up
3:06.9	things instead of learning to fix things? The fact is that when I was a kid in Minnesota, struggling my way through six foot
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Prairie Home Productions, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Prairie Home Productions and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.