I was scrolling through some old files the other day and I found a few paragraphs I wrote about Paul Bunyan. I can't remember why I wrote it, other than a bizarre need to really stick it to a fictional charcacter. It seems to have no relevance to anything at all. Since I can't figure out how I would work it into another piece, please enjoy it in all its random glory. Paul Bunyan was not, as is popularly believed, a giant of a man. He was, in fact, very small and the wild tales of his size were originally cruel and sarcastic jokes at his expense. After a long, hard day of trying to keep up with the real loggers, usually by jumping up and down excitedly at their heels and asking annoying questions, Bunyan would join them at dinner each night, where his fellow loggers would each try to "one up" the others by inventing a story of Paul's giant-sized exploits. As Paul listened to one improbable story after another, his face would grow redder and redder until he would jump up and demand to fight his maligners. Paul would lose these fights because he was very small. Each night he would cry himself to sleep and each morning his boundless enthusiasm would reemerge like the Phoenix of Legend, saying to himself that if he gave it just one more shot, the other loggers would see him for the neat person his mother always said he was and become his friends.
Bunyan suffered this treatment night and day for six years before hanging himself from the lowest branch of the tallest in tree in America. The suicide note pinned to his shirt claimed the symbolism of this act would be readily apparent. Or at least that's what it would have said had Paul been literate enough to actually write a note and not just cobble some sticks and leaves together with some mud. Either way, the meaning of the gesture was lost on his fellow loggers and future historians.
...and I found with the text this curious line, set a small distance away: Also, he was sexually inadequate, and as a time-traveling prostitute, I should know.