Where is that cow pie? I've misplaced it again!

Ever since I mentioned “misplaced cow pies” in my post about stories without a resolution, I have been pondering that phrase.

Before we go further into this post, I’d like you to step (carefully) over here. ➨  Isn’t it interesting that I said I was pondering and that a synonym of “ponder” is “ruminate”? Which animals ruminate? Cows! And which animals make cow pies? Cows! Holy cow, you say, what’s going on here? Well, that’s why I am here; to tell you what. There is only one degree of separation between deep thinking and cow pies!  In layman’s terms, it means that when you are in a department meeting, listening intently, and pondering the meaning of all those sounds flowing out of your supervisor’s mouth, you are essentially deep in cow pies.

Okay, you can step back over here to the main idea of the post. If you did a lot of deep thinking, please wipe your shoes. I try to keep this a clean blog. When I wrote “misplaced cow pies,” I had no idea where it came from. I still don’t. This happens to me a lot. But somehow the phrase expressed my irritation with elements in stories that the author puts in for no good reason. Stuff like violence, sex, crude language, and abuse. There’s a time and a place for all of these, just like there is for cow pies. But sometimes it seems the storyteller or the scriptwriter can’t think of what comes next, so they go out to the meadow and haul some cow pies in to make things smell earthy. I think it smells more like bull.

Writer gathering cow pies to misplace in his story.

But the real reason I think that phrase extruded out of my brain was to give me fodder for another post. Brains can be nice that way sometimes.