Because I can’t. I mean, the this one‘s built like a moose, but it’s colored like a paint horse—a shetland, maybe, or a wild horse with a winter coat:
It’s definitely not a horse, though. Look at those hind legs.
And this one‘s . . . maybe a white raccoon? The legendary ghost coon?
Whatever it is, I saw something a lot like it one night in West Texas, eating on a deer carcass: pale, used sort-of hands, sat up on its hind legs. Watched me roll past at three in the morning.
And, yeah, maybe these are both digital gags, of course. But it’s so much more exciting to think what if they’re not? This kind of stuff is probably my favorite thing about the internet. When I was a kid my nose was forever buried in every Strange Stories, Amazing Facts book I could luck onto. Believing in those outlandish entries made the world so much bigger. Now, if I can believe in this horse-moose, in this possum-looking raccoon, my world’s bigger again. And that’s the kind of place I want to live in.
Possibly related: writing about weird things, unlikely things, impossible things, it also embiggens the world. I mean, so long as you write about them in a way people can believe in.
is the NYT bestselling author of 35 or so books, +350 stories, some comic books, and all this stuff here. He lives in Boulder, Colorado, and has a few broken-down old trucks, one PhD, and way too many boots. More