A couple of weeks ago I went horseback riding with my friends. But there is always one person in the group that drives everyone else crazy. There is always someone who is just an annoying, neurotic pain in the butt. And, you know what? I can’t help it, it’s just the way I am. My “friends” are a smidge intolerant. (by intolerant I mean they sometimes want me dead)

But really…why would anyone go horseback riding voluntarily? Why couldn’t we do something less lethal, like a puzzle? Or maybe reenact one of the really good wars? Horses don’t have brakes. You can pull back on those reigns all you want but if the horse doesn’t want to stop, he’s not going to stop. I don’t want to ride anything that has… an opinion. And the horses smell, they always have their nose in another horse’s butt and they are completely indifferent to the fact that you are sitting on them. I may as well be married.

But I didn’t want to again be the only one not experiencing the full thrill of the day’s activity (like when I abbreviated my involvement a bit with that roller coaster. Everyone went on, and I… held the coats.) So today, I opted to participate. (Ultimately, “participating” meant sitting in a Prius for 3 hours picking hay out of my hair but you do what you can)

I verbalized my fears with inane “What if….?” statements for the entire 35 minute ride to the horseback riding facility. “What if my horse steps on me?” “What if I step on my horse?” “What if my horse is intolerant?” (and by intolerant I mean, what if my horse wants me dead?)

When we got there, the stable boys brought out the first three horses and my friends jumped right on them. These horses seemed safe and they had an appealing, comatose-like quality. There was “Daisy”, “Sunflower” and the oldest of the three, “Mylanta”. Maybe this won’t be so bad after all. But of course, there was some commotion when they tried to bring my horse out. Apparently, “Lucifer” required extra attention, which John, the stable boy discovered as he sailed through the air and smashed into a wall.

They say never let an animal know that you are afraid of it. I think I might have tipped him off when I yanked my friend off of “Mylanta”, jumped into her saddle and started singing “I Will Survive”. After we helped “Mylanta” back on her feet, I realized that I had broken an important rule of horseback riding. If you weigh more than the horse, you shouldn’t ride it.

It was at this point that I felt my friends giving me the evil eye and I also noticed Lucifer starting to practice his high kicks. I decided that it was now in my best interest to take refuge in the supply shed and spend the remainder of the afternoon pretending to be a saddle. This seemed to do the trick for a while and no one could find me until one of the stable boys mentioned that he thought he heard a bale of hay snoring.

It wasn’t long before my “friends” were trying to get me up on “Lucifer” again which was not a graceful task since I was so scared and he was so tall, plus it’s kind of hard to mount a horse who is laughing hysterically. My fate for the rest of the afternoon seemed clear until I realized I still had a choice…and legs. I cursed out my friends and their horses and ran through the crowd toward the Prius. I even managed to knock down a sizeable roadblock along the way. (Sorry Mylanta)

In conclusion, the moral of my story is that I like puzzles and horses are evil.

And sometimes it’s ok to just hold the coats.