Tag: The Stars Hollow Gazette

Do you feel exposed?

You should.

I’m not just talking about the normal routine recording of your every gesture and utterance outside carefully constructed and deliberate walls of polite procedure rooted in a more gentile and tolerant time, one where gentlemen didn’t read each other’s mail except when they could.

I mean here out on the cold windy street corner of blogdom, doing your soon to be extinct polar bear club defiance of diminishing icecaps, lime stuffed Corona in hand.

Brisk.

One hardly knows where honesty ends and self interest begins unless they are one and the same because of the bigger picture.

Grab your gaze out of the gutter and look up to the stardust from whence you came and believe in yourself again.

You can change things.  You know it’s true.  Stop smoking.  Get fit.  Care more for those around you and let them know it.

Blog more.  Sing louder.  We are not proud, or tired.  And we’ll show you the next time it comes around on the guitar.

With feeling.

Of course the four part harmony and circles and arrows on the back of each one explaining how they are to be used in evidence against me is up to you.

Me?  I’m just happy to be sitting here on the Group W bench disturbing the peace with the father rapers and mother stabbers.

Boxing Day.

On the day after Christmas…

• In feudal times the lord of the manor would give boxes of practical goods such as cloth, grains, and tools to the serfs who lived on his land.
• Many years ago on the day after Christmas servants would carry boxes to their employers when they arrived for their day’s work. Their employers would then put coins in the boxes as special end-of-year gifts.
• In churches, it was traditional to open the church’s donation box on Christmas Day and distribute it to the poorer or lower class citizens on the next day.

Take your pick.

In the world of retail Boxing Day is the day everyone brings back all the crap they got for gifts that they didn’t want or is the wrong size or the wrong color or that they shoplifted and now want full retail for instead of the 10% that the local fence will give them.

Now fortunately for me I never had to work the counter during this period of long lines and testy, hung over sales people and managers dealing with irate customers who think that making their sob story more pitiful than the last one will get them any treatment more special than what everyone gets.

1. Is it all there?
2. Is it undamaged?
3. Did you buy it here?

Bingo, have some store credit.  Go nuts.  Have a nice day.

What makes it especially crappy for the clerks is that you don’t normally get a lot of practice with the return procedures because your manager will handle it since it’s easier than training you.  Now you have 20 in a row and the first 7 or 8 are slow until you get the hang of things.

As a customer I have to warn you, this is not a swap meet.  If they didn’t have a blue size 6 on Christmas Eve, they don’t have it now either EVEN IF THE CUSTOMER RIGHT AHEAD OF YOU IN LINE JUST RETURNED A SIZE 6 IN BLUE!

It has to go back to the warehouse for processing and re-packaging.  Really.

So if you braved the surly stares today you have my admiration for your tenacity.  If you waited for the rush to pass my respect for your brilliance.

But don’t wait too long.  It all has to be out of the store before February inventory so it doesn’t have to be counted.

Well I should probably be writing some deep and profound analysis of the political situation here in New Hampshire now that I’ve had 24 hours to marinate in the WMUR media blitz and have my heirloom copy of the Concord Monitor’s anti-endorsement of Romney, but instead I’d like to share with you the good news that my niece and nephew are not as hopelessly warped politically by growing up in this particular era as many of my activist brother’s contemporaries were.

It was a source of extreme frustration to me to see so many of that generation buy into the Reagan myth.  As far as I was concerned Reagan was a traitor who openly defied Congress and sold arms to our enemies in order to finance an illegal war.  Even HW correctly called his economic policies voodoo.  Communicator?  Announcer of Noonan crafted platitudes.

It chaps my ass even today to hear his worshipers talk about that dark period of misrule as some kind of golden age.

When I look around at the Villagers, media, government, consultant and lobbyist, I wonder what kind of emotional emptiness leads them to let this brain damaged drooling zombie act as a substitute father for their Electra complex lust to shut off their minds and let daddy take care of it.

Those who benefit from the crime I can understand.  Greed is good.  But if all you want to do is abandon responsibility for your own desire to be beaten and abused I recommend lobotomy, because it causes less harm to those around you.

My niece and nephew are not fooled by this sad excuse thank goodness.  My nephew shared the story of how his employer threw an Army recruiter out on his ass and two Marines who happened to see it called him over and said- “Kid, whatever you do, don’t join.”

His mom and I greeted this anecdote with some relief, since we had our fears and he is of an age, but listening to him and his sister critique the drone of the dodos seeking to perpetuate the current horror actually gave me some hope for the future.

Well I’m once again at the lake house, sleeping on the red leather couch that used to reside at my one gran’s and typing on the desk that came from the other’s.

It’s been foggy today and out the picture window across the front porch’s snow covered Adirondack chairs you could see the fluffy and dripping trees clearly just as far as the dock and then only an impenetrable wall of white.  Even Midway Rock, a blueberry bush bearing boulder with a sloping back and sheer front perfect for the daring to jump off was invisible, though I wouldn’t have recommended that today.  Good way to break a leg.

It’s almost never good skating weather here, too much snow on the lake.  One year I tried to shovel out a rink, but the weight of the snow pack on the underlying ice pushes it down far enough that the lake leaks over the shore edges creating a two or three inch layer of slush.  I don’t much like non-rink skating anyway, too bumpy and the creaks and cracks make me a little paranoid.

But it’s ok to walk on most of the time if you stay a respectable distance from the inlets and outlets and it can be fun to go out to the thick part where our neighbor lands his seaplane in the summer.  Lots of people do the snowmobiling thing and the tracks are all over the place but I find them noisy and disruptive.

I much prefer the stiff crunch of silence.

After a year on the B Team I got my chance to be a part of the Concert Band! at the eksmas concert.

Dat, dat, thump, thump, dah, dat, dat, dat, thump, thump, thump, dah, dat, dat, thump, thump, thump, thump, dah, daaaa.

Dat dat dat dat dat dat- Dah dah daaa!

I had strep and couldn’t make it and hated myself for being weak.  Turns out it was a good thing.

Band played in two acts with the Choir in between (I wasn’t part of school choir until senior year when I had to take a minimum of 4 credits and I only needed a 1/4 from Gym to graduate).  During the break when the curtains were closed basically everybody except the clarinets and the flutes snuck under the stands and got trashed.

The second act showed it and I don’t play my horn after I have a beer because you can taste it.

I did get to sit through the dressing down given in 4th period Concert Band the next day.

The director had got out in front of the audience the night before and issued refunds.  Chairs were absent and those of us who had been humming along got a chill of fear.

But we gave what you could consider a credible performance, or at least we pretended as much.

Nobody was gone for long and three months later at the Spring Concert it was hard to tell anything had happened.

Assault On Reason, Time Excerpts

…

…

…

…

I was probably the world’s worst scout.  I was with 2 troops, each more horrible than the other and was never anything but a Tenderfoot, though I did earn some merit badges.

The first was full of the grossest reprobates and drunks at the Methodist Church (also home of the teen sex club youth group) the kind of guys who would fart in a glass and try and light it on fire at patrol meetings.

They were in fact a bunch of rip roaring pyromaniacs who would try and light just about any damn thing on fire, the bigger the better.

We were winter camping in a state park.  Not such a bad experience if you have a decent sleeping bag.  I will warn you that if there’s any snow pack at all (and this site had about 8 inches) you better watch your first step out of the tent in the morning because the residual heat from a small cook fire can melt a crater 20 feet across.  My peg was dangling when I woke up.

It was a small fire because it was put together by responsible sane adults since earlier in the day my dad had to drive one of the older wise ass patrol leaders to the hospital.

They had gone off to get wood and this rocket scientist thought it would be just as easy to hack up a picnic table.  He  was some surprised when his ax bounced off it and bit him in the leg I betcha.

It was pretty late in the day and we were all set up so they didn’t pack us all in the cars and drag us home, though I imagine they were sorely tempted.

Well, I’m kind of upset tonight because I’ve encountered some people with an attitude that is inexplicable to me.  Privately I call them Tories because the exhibit all of the classical features of Toryism.

Perpetually gloomy about the prospect of liberty they sulk inflicting their pessimism on morale.  They derive bitter satisfaction from their self-fulfilling prophecies of doom.  Openly aristocratic and monarchist they are content that their new insect overlords beat them and cheat them, panting for scraps like a common cur except a dog has too noble a soul to accept such offal.

But the worst offenders are those who think like this but still expect our votes, money, and effort as if they had some God anointed right to join the gated Village and get away from the foul smelling rabble.

What country are you from?

You have no right to my labor, property, or allegiance.  You are not the boss of me.  I am in fact YOUR boss, I gave you that job and I sign your damn check and I expect respect from my employees otherwise I fire their sorry ass and hire somebody else.

I can’t understand how the admission of several Congress people that their vote on the August FISA was influenced by fear for their personal safety because of White House lies about a potential attack on the Capital is anything but craven cowardice.  It is exactly the same thing as desertion in the face of the enemy.  Brave men have died for our freedom.  Do you have some special lucky charm that makes your miserable existence worth more than any of the 3892 that died for a lie in Iraq?  Would you sell your child for $10 million?

That’s the going rate you know.  I know what you are- now we’re just negotiating about the price.  Unless you just give it away.

Oh wait, that’s what you do.

You should be afraid of me because I know what you are…

A weakling.

Well we got our first real snow out of that last batch.  Even if I hadn’t seen it I could have told you from the roar of the snow blowers and the scrape of the plow.

While I was growing up we had a very difficult driveway to shovel.  It was made of gravel stuck together with asphalt and the gravel made it impossible slide your shovel along so it was always a pain in the ass.

Still I considered it a good snowfall if the twin piles at the end of the driveway were high enough to make good forts out of.

We’d do the whole snowman thing too, but it wasn’t like we ever had the kind of winters that you could put it up in November and say goodbye in March.

Usually you don’t get really permanent cover until mid January and by the end of February it was warming up again, at least to the extent you’d get a couple of good rains that would turn everything kind of crusty and grey as all those asphalt covered pieces of gravel that you’d scraped out of the driveway and thrown in the snow piles peeked out again.

Used to love the first mow in the spring too.  Don’t stand in front of the grass exhaust unless you want to get stung with chunks of gravel.

One tradition of the south I really like is Waffle House.  If you’re not acquainted with them they’re basically grill joints that only serve breakfast food 24/7.  Waffle House is always open.

They’re also pretty cheap.  For a couple of bucks you can stuff yourself full of greasy goodness.

When I travel it’s not that I don’t eat fast food, it’s that I want to eat something different from the ubiquitous McKing crap.

So Bojangles and Sonic, if you know where to look even here in the Northeast you can track down an A & W stand.

When I travel to places I go to a lot, I’ve got an agenda that revolves around cheap gas stations and food.  I like Sbarro’s pizza OK and fortunately it’s the kind of thing that’s easily found and quick to purchase.  I hate to spend longer than 10 minutes from Highway to Highway because that really shows up in your elapsed time more than the speed you drive because you’re basically standing still.

Driving is relaxing too.  I’m an AM guy and a summer’s drive with the Mets on the radio can be quite enjoyable.  Not much into music for some reason, perhaps because I’ve DJed a lot and I don’t much like today’s plastic celebrity artists.

I’d rather take what the road gives me though than hook up an cassette, cd, or ipod.  If I’ve heard it before I’ve heard it.  My Aunt on the other hand swears by books on tape and I’ve ridden with her and not been bored- it was new to me.  One thing I do wish I could listen to again is my copy of Alice In Wonderland as read by Cyril Ritchard.  Unfortunately it’s on vinyl.

Well I won’t pretend I’m not sitting here watching new episodes of Shin Chan instead of Olbermann, but I’ve already seen that once and the last half is so so.

Anyway it reminded me of some of the earliest Pony Parties where I used a Shin Chan YouTube to set the right mood.  I’ve seen them again recently when I was looking at some other older stuff.

Finding old stuff is kind of hard unless we label it correctly.  Then we can use tags to find them and bookmark them.

RiaD has a spot on idea that we should make all the series diaries here a little easier to find, one or 2 buttons away.  If you’re an author of one or participate in one I’d like you to please take some time and go through your back catalog and see that everything is tagged to your satisfaction.

I don’t want to initiate any tag warfare here.  For the most part it’s impossible.  The only people who can change your tags are the same ones who can edit your essays- you and all the Board Members.

What I would like you to do is regularly check back and make sure your work is properly cataloged in the library here.

I must admit I’m pretty tense and nervous this time of year.  There are incredible numbers of deadlines, much more than usual and an impossible amount of work to be done.

The fact that there is so little daylight to go buzzing around in contributes to the sense of urgency as do the cars and crowds everywhere at every time of day.  I find it almost claustrophobic.

I have a whole crowd of places to be and people to see too.  Folks want me to hang out with them for some reason, so the mail is full of invitations most of which I have politely declined.  I’ve done the 4 parties in 3 days Thanksgiving to New Years about as much as I really need to satisfy myself.

Family is of course not easily put off and this year as usual the Gilmores will visit my sister and her kids for a few days right on the 25th.  It may not be so easy for me to get internet access right from the 23rd to the  26th.  After that I’m hoping I’ll get a chance to spend some time with my Aunty Mame (who really likes this blog much better than the orange one, says it’s more relaxing) in the frozen north.

She has good ‘net, I’ve used it before, the problem is that the TV is across the hall in the other room and if I turn it up too loud it disturbs everyone else.

And of course I watch TV all.  the.  time.

That’s why it grieves me so much to bring you the following discouraging news from Reuters on the Writer’s strike-

Prolonged writers strike a nightmare for TV biz

By Paul J. Gough, Reuters

1 hour, 12 minutes ago