April 22nd, 1876

Thirty-One Goddamn years.
Thirty-One Goddamn years and I'm still out here. I have been a fake man for a third of my life. I laughed at it before.
I laughed.

And laughed and laughed and laughed.

And here I am: fucked.

I took this job in.
In.
In somewhere here in Arizona.
Lands that used to be open.

Used to belong to others.

The others I know more than the ones I used to be.

And here I am. A guard. A scoundrel. A shadow of a ghost who thought hisself a poet.
They had to leave these lands.
They were placed in sanctuaries by our government.
Who the hells rules this country? I thought we defeated the slavers.

I'm making no goddamn sense.
It makes no goddamn sense.
I almost used improper grammar. Grammar that would make an old teacher of mine - from over half my life ago - give me the most stern of glances.

Just glances, yeah, but that's enough from a man, a gentleman, you respect.

My only hope is that my glance becomes a gentleman's glance.

But no, I am a lone vagabond.
Whether I became a stereotype by choice or by circumstance is not the issue. The true issue is that I lost myself in the mystique. Yeah, the poet Isaac Chambers died years ago.

And Caleb Black, the Magical Western Anti-Hero now rides amongst cows, trying to shoot bears.

But really, he wants to be... He wants to be something other than a reflection of a memory.
He wants to more than a hiccup of the past.
He wants to be of Thirde Person and he wants to- oh, fuck it.

Let's shoot a goddamn bear.