"Mom said you hit a cow with a chair?"

That's what they think of me. They think I'm some mad cow-chair-hitter. I would never do that. What I did was hit the fence with the chair to scare the cow, which I think we can all agree is rational behavior, provided you're holding a lawn chair and need to scare a cow.

What Happened Was:

So, Landlady, on account of her being a hell of a swell gal, is giving us a good deal on rent. She also has a persistent neck injury from a surgery that went haywire in the dark pre-Obamacare year of 2009. So between that and needing to do something, anything, to keep from staring at the wall until I write an all-"aLL wORk and NO play makeS JACk a DuLL Boy" blog post, I've started trying to do little tasks around the property. I patched a gravel road, which is hilarious. One of the chores I decided I should do was to establish a compost pile. I love compost. It comforts me - I feel like I'm being less wasteful, and it reassures me about death. Maybe when I die, I can quietly rot in a corner of the garden until I'm ready to be spread on marigolds.

So, I had in mind a nice neat little pile of rotting kitchen trash. Landlady apparently envisioned some kind of JUMBO NUTRIENT RECLAMATION SYSTEM, which is why she woke me up at seven the other morning to go dig up her uncle's dead vegetable garden. Apparently he'd just gotten bored with tending it and let it gently wilt, and Landlady saw all that unused mitrogen sitting around and licked her lips like  a dieter at Wawa. [HONK HONK BEEP BEEP REGIONAL HUMOR] So we ripped out all these poor little watermelon and squash vines and piled them on top of my respectable little heap of eggshells and apple cores.

Then this textversation:

Landlady (9:52 PM) i just thought of something
remember how those cows got in
i hope they dont go after what we just put down

CTN (9:54 PM) Will they, if there's fresh grass around?

Landlady: (9:55 PM) yes
cows eat grass
did you not know that

CTN: (9:57 PM) Right, but if they have grass would they eat dried up old squash vines?

Landlady: (9:58 PM) COME OUTSIDE THE COW IS EATING THE COMPOST

That was it. I had been in a bad mood all day: no matter how much Cool Whip I eat, I'm still overweight; I got turned down for a job writing gay romance novels because I "lacked the necessary experience"; I just... no. I was not having it.  I calmly put on my shoes, walked outside, and picked up the lawn chair. I brandished it at the cow, and it shied back a little, but that wasn't enough. From somewhere deep inside me, I felt a primal cry:

"I SAID HAUL ASS, PIGFUCKER!" And I slammed the plastic chair into the fencepost. The cow, seeing that I meant business, turned and "ran" off (cows can only go so fast), and I went in to have a conversation with Landlady about how cows remember things and I had better be careful.

Later that night, the cow returned, knocked over the fence, and ate all the compost, but I take my victories when I can get them. 

@OMGLOLCTN