This is your Community Bulletin for the week of September 10th 2016. This week is surely the beginning of some of the worst political flybuzz to settle on our town in recent years. It has set Mara Arden to walking around town, with a bullhorn in one hand and numerous signs in the other, denouncing everything from Mayor Amundsen’s totalitarian reign of terror to the Reptiloid Masonic Song Family using Leverite as a base of operation for their bid to destroy earth. She’s also wearing a sandwich-board the reads “Kill The Dutchess” on one side and “Big Paul Seed of Evil”
Fortunately, this time she is wearing something underneath the sandwich-board.
Police Chief Wells says that, as annoying as she is, Mara is fully within her First Amendment rights to protest this way, but she was reminded that, per town statute LCC6.456.66, “Mara can shout in her bullhorn as much as she likes so long as the bullhorn is turned off at the time.”
Lots of folks wrote in, a little angry about being left out of the loop regarding the winner of the North Parcel 5 bid. Those same people rarely even send Christmas cards or donations to local educational institutions, but staff have been quick to go through their personal phone books and birthday calendars to let folks know what is happening, trying to quell any hurt feelings or resentment the rather cryptic announcement caused.
In completely unrelated news, Hudson was seen leaving Stumpy’s this morning with a new axe he’d ordered last week. The damned thing was as tall as Jack Mason with a twelve-inch bit. It seems that Amazon really does deliver just about anything, anywhere! Hudson says he is clearing trees for his new log cabin. Considering the number he’ll need, he is going to have some delivered as he doesn’t want to completely clear his “little patch of heaven.” Most of us probably wouldn’t agree with his description of the north end of the quarry, but Hudson’s always been the kind of kid that liked being on his own and making do. I mean, he lived in Big Paul’s backyard in a tiny stone hovel from the time that he was twelve, because he “needed some space.”
Now he’s dragging supplies up Suicide Hill on his bike, trying to get things put together before winter sets in.
It seems like it’s always autumn and winter when the troubles around the quarry really start up. Fortunately, Hudson knows that land well, and it knows him. Hopefully, his sitting up top of that hill will ward off some of the crazy we have dealt with this summer.
Mara believes Hudson living “Up there, in the Devil [redacted]’s Land” will bring about a gateway to Hell (or Beijing or Rome, she seems to use the three pretty interchangeably). “Salt The Earth!” She screamed when asked to explain. “Let us be Gamera’s [sic?] salt pillars. Let us seep down and kill the sickness eating at us all! It is kaiju all the way down!”
[Editor’s note: we had to go look up “kaiju”. It’s giant japanese monsters like Godzilla. Guys in rubber suits beating each other up. All the way down. Yup, you heard it here first!]
Fortunately for the interviewer, the bullhorn was turned off while Mara was yelling this in his face. Despite her internet-fueled paranoid delusion and unneighborly behavior, Mara is a law-biding citizen to a fault.
However, that hasn’t stopped he from trying to turn Hudson’s move to the north side of the quarry into a major political upheaval. She has petitioned the State Attorney General to investigate the museum and strip it of its nonprofit status, declare Edna legally dead so as to break up her monopoly on “poisonous, heart killing food things,” and even asked the Forest Service to investigate whether “the bearded guy with the turban that works for you is arming unregistered foreigners in the forests outside town.”
I don’t know if this last one has reached Mr Singh’s desk yet, but he isn’t likely to be amused, considering that the “foreigners” she is referring to are our off-grid neighbors.
“Well now,” Edna said when asked for comment, “Miss Thing there can say what she likes. She’s not been welcome through these doors in years. But, she had best be careful, as she’s about to go and step on her own tongue.” According to Edna, Local and County officials do their best to keep the poor woman out of trouble, but that really, there’s probably no better place in the world for her than here. “Mara is like The Scoutmaster. She just…never really fit in. However, just because something doesn’t fit doesn’t mean it isn’t useful.”
When asked what Mara could possibly be useful for, Edna turned back to her work, snipping out “Local color…” in a way that indicated the conversation was over.
Stumpy’s will be changing up the selection a little. That new computerized inventory system Stumpy got last year has told him not only what people like, but what doesn’t sell. “I’d love to keep going over the shoe-leather jerky with a feather duster,” he laughed,” but maybe I could bring in something else. Something that sells more than once in a blue moon. Heck, I could probably bring in something edible!” He is also looking into some new suppliers so as to avoid any price increases. “I wanna avoid another boycott. I mean, yeah sure, it hurts me as a business, but really, It’s just embarrassing seeing someone standing there, refusing to come in but desperately needing a pack of smokes. Hell, I think that last boycott helped several folks finally kick the habit. So, I guess it wasn’t all bad.”
The first weeks of school have gone well, and parents around town have a spring in their step that we haven’t seen since June. Hopefully this lasts them until at least Halloween.
This Issue of your Community Bulletin is brought to you by Stumpy’s, “Serving all your local needs for more stuff.”
