Cowboys

Again I'm too tired to write anything profound here, waiting for sleep to take over in Medora, North Dakota.  My son is already sleeping beside me.  He wanted to stay in a motel, he said he didn't sleep well in the tent last night and he felt nauseous and stomach-achy.  This inn is behind a bookstore that used to be a motel.  Then the couple decided to build a new inn to finance the bookstore.  We looked for books, specifically I wanted Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance for my son to read, because the son in that book also has stomachache as he accompanies his dad on a roadtrip, and some more singalong music for the car, such as Beatles.  Unfortunately they only had cowboy books and cowboy music.  I recalled that earlier, when we checked in, I had noticed that the bookshop owner was dressed as a cowboy.  In fact this town is focused on cowboy iconography and even has a cowboy museum, but I wonder if they might sell more books if they expanded their range just a little.  He seemed very happy though, being a bookshop cowboy, and even his baby son was dressed in a cowboyish outfit.  When we drove through another town, in Nevada or Idaho, I noticed a sign for the National Cowboy Poetry Convention.  I guess there's an entire cowboy society out there, with everything from cowboy poets and cowboy singers to cowboy cops and cowboy criminals.  I wonder who are the Indians to these Cowboys, and whether I'm being racist just remembering that we used to play a game called Cowboys and Indians when I was a kid.