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Recycled Tarzans

I shouldn't have done that. Obviously, I'm not as young as I used to be, but my aged jungle yell did generate some real attention along Wannaska's main street on Friday afternoon, I kid you not. Donna peered from her between her living room curtains. Jeff, looked in the direction of the county garage from under Kraig Lee's grain dryer. Arial, the guard dog at Lee's Store, leaped to her feet and began barking to get out--so I heard, just sayin'. But it isn't the hoarseness in my throat that bothers me, it's the soreness of my chest that I beat on with both fists. Good googa mooga, was that dumb or what? Rumors are though a herd of horses thundered through town . .   

    I recycled in Wannaska on Friday afternoon. Didn't have much, just enough to think about emptying before it over-flowed. I was going to Wannaska anyway so the wife thought she'd make it worth my while. Going to the recycling bins is sort of like going to the town dump, except on a very limited variety scale. There are only magazines, newspapers, aluminum/tin, and plastic recycling bins there--no glass accepted. Roseau County doesn't recycle glass for the same reason it didn't used to recycle magazines--no money in it.

    Oh, I can see their reasoning. Nobody uses glass anymore. All a person has to do is look in the aluminum bin and see everybody drinks their beer out of aluminum cans. Somebody drinks exclusively Miller Lite beer and is missin' the ticket not recycling their hundreds of beer cans themselves. I googled (doesn't everybody?) how many empty beer cans it takes to make a pound and found it's between 32-35 cans per pound, depending on whether it's 12 or 16 oz cans. And, back in September--someplace-- each one was worth about 1.7 cents. Do the math--I'm too lazy.

    Ennaways, it's amazing I could get my two handfulls of magazines in that bin. Holy cow, they better consider expanding magazines into two bins for all the magazines people recycle. I had no idea . . . Uffdah.

   But, I was lucky. If the magazine bin would've been any fuller, I wouldn't have seen all those dozens of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan paperbacks in there. Standing on tip toe, I rummaged through somebody's old collection of perfectly good, used, Tarzan novels .. lessee, I think I saw: Tarzan of the Apes, The Return of Tarzan, The Beasts of Tarzan, The Son of Tarzan, Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar,  Jungle Tales of Tarzan, Tarzan the Untamed,     Tarzan the Terrible, Tarzan and the Golden Lion,Tarzan and the Ant Men, Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle, Tarzan and the Lost Empire, Tarzan at the Earth's Core, Tarzan the Invincible, Tarzan Triumphant, Tarzan and the City of Gold, Tarzan and the Lion Man, Tarzan and the Leopard Men, Tarzan's Quest, Tarzan the Magnificent, Tarzan and the Forbidden City, Tarzan and the Foreign Legion, Tarzan and the Tarzan Twins, Tarzan and the Madman,    Tarzan and the Castaways, Tarzan: the Lost Adventure, I think.

    I could've maybe missed a couple other non-Tarzan books, but this guy had the whole paperback collection and it's in the bottom of the magazine recycling bin in Wannaska. I knew what the wife would say if I brought any more books home, so they are still there. I figure the man or woman probably died and someone grossly  illiterate is cleanin' out the house . . .

    I never passed up reading a comic book with Tarzan in it. Great stuff, all that vine swinging from tree to tree--I wonder if they didn't get the idea of Tarzan from “The Jungle Book”? Let's see . . .

According to Wikipedia--and I'll leave that to readers to further their research-- "According to author Rudyard Kipling (who himself wrote stories of a feral child, The Jungle Book's Mowgli), Burroughs wrote Tarzan of the Apes just so that he could "find out how bad a book he could write and get away with it."

   Oddly enough, that's the exact reason another fellow and I started publishing THE RAVEN: Northwest Minnesota's Original Art, History, & Humor Journal, 24-odd years ago, just to see if we could get away with it. Now, as fate portends, we are leaving it, but it was fun while it lasted.

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