It wasn't a bit!
Some people voted Bounce Man because we genuinely like the song! So when there's a song we like more, we stop.
I wasn't voting out other songs for the bit. It was genuine appreciation for Bounce Man
I am working on a Western and am hoping for advice.
TW: Abuse, Suicide (implied)
She remembered once, years ago, catching her son crying after he'd split his palm open on barbed wire. He had tried to hide it from her. He had wiped his face before he reached her, but she had seen enough. She had told him that the world would smell weakness on a man before it smelled blood. By that night he had no bandages and had stopped crying. Much later, long after he had grown, she would sometimes catch glimpses of that same restraint in him. It is a dangerous thing to teach a child how to bury himself properly. Eventually he may become so deep you cannot reach him anymore.
She had known that even then, though she would never have admitted it. She had seen the way he swallowed pain like a stone down his throat. Some mothers might have softened at that. She had not. Once you learned the feel of control in your hands, you reached for it without thinking.
She remembered another morning, when her son had come in late from the barn, boots caked in mud. He had been young. Old enough to know better, of course, but young enough to hope she might go easy on him. She hadn't. She took his boots from him and set them by the stove. Then she'd told him he could have them back when he learned to walk like a man and not like something afraid of the wilderness. He'd done the chores that next morning without boots, without complaint, his feet raw by the time he came back inside. He tracked blood across the floor and said nothing. She felt satisfied. She had believed at the time that this hardness was love, and would train him to be a real man.
It occurred to her, with the grim clarity of a pastor delivering a sermon too late to save his congregation, that a person can mistake cruelty for instruction. She had fashioned herself into severity, a keeper of the old frontier virtues, believing the world only respected those who refused to bend. And once she had taken up that mantle, she had worn it with the zeal of a prophet, convinced that each wound she permitted, each comfort she withheld, was a necessary tithe to survive in the frontier. She had raised a son so much as she forged a disciple. She taught him to bury his pain until he buried himself. She taught him that the world devoured the weak, and so he devoured his own weakness, completing the final loop within himself. Everything circles. Everything returns. And now the circle had returned to her: a quiet house, an empty yard, a windmill turning without wind, all of it bearing witness to a truth she would not dare speak aloud.
This is a formal proposal
I think we should pack it up