An alcoholic rancher was at a meeting held to decide whether liquor sales should be illegal in the town.
The rancher was against it, prohibition, I mean. Being an alcoholic, he just couldn’t stay away from the booze, and prohibition would have made life very difficult for him.
“I tell you”, the rancher said, “whiskey once saved my life!”
“How could that be?”, someone in the crowd asked him.
“Well”, the rancher said, “I was living on a farm over in the next county, back then”.
The rancher took a breath and continued. “One day, I was sitting in the house when I got such an overpowering thirst for a drink of booze, that I hitched up my mare and went into town to the tavern”.
The rancher paused again, took another deep breath, and the crowd to a man all took a deep breath with him.
He continued again, “And y’know, while I was there, a tornado comes through my farm and smashed my house to bits!”
Image used under a Collective Commons License from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Marion_Russell#/media/File:Charles_Marion_Russell_%E2%80%93_Smoke_of_a_.45_%E2%80%93_Google_Art_Project.jpg
