Story Excerpt

Certain fashionable happenings kept on trucking in the Newer World, while others pulled a Bruce Willis and died hard. One habit that didn’t make the journey was Land Goblinin’. This involved two gentlemen staking their land (and pride) against each other in a classic battle of thespian wit. Let me explain…

Say that English-Dude #1 is strutting down the calle and falls head over his heels for the estate of English-Dude #2. The proper course of action is to then propose terms of engagement (i.e. “Do you want to get goblinin’, puto?”). If the challenger agrees, he (the exclusion of females from this age-old tango ignited England’s first women’s rights movement) sets the time and place. The event is ON.

With neither time limit nor impartial judge, the two square off and proceed to perform their best impersonation…of a goblin. Crowds of up to three thousand have been witness to these disputes between two grown men wielding septors, sporting rags upon chains and barking antiquated mouthplay like they were conducting an auction at the apocalypse. The match ends when one inferior goblin concedes to the other, forfeiting every acre of property in turn. The victor gobbles up his prize and moves on, sick with swagger, towards a much bigger & better future.

Thomas Jefferson, in his earliest recorded quote, weighed in on the green subject: “You know, I think it fortunate that the colonies did not inherit Land Goblinin’ from the British. I believe this for one reason and one reason all alone: if the art of outright land seizure were left up to the stale & silly whims of goblin-mimicry, we might not be able to carousel around this wooden continent. Can you imagine me dressing up like some mystical creature every time some random jackass grows jealous of my pad? Instead of a United States stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific Oceans, there might be three or five or twenty small countries, each as weak as—say—Mexico or Peru. Who knows? And what’s more gay than pretending you’re a goblin?”

Wait a minute. That sounds familiar (all but that last part at least).