It’s a wee bit early for ticker-tape parades and dancing in the streets, and the advice of Winston Wolf remains pertinent, but yesterday’s elections saw the Donks put a few points on the board.
The game ain’t over yet, and they’re a tough team to root for, but whaddare ya gonna do? At least the bench seems a little deeper this time around.
* The boots. The boots are Timberlands. “The timber lands.” OK, so it’s a stretch.
The Duke City is taking a page from the Bibleburg playbook and trying to croak panhandling.
My old hometown has spent years wrestling with the issue of how the less fortunate earn their living, losing two falls out of three.
Nevertheless, that fair Christian community persists; its latest panhandling ordinance, like the new one here, seems targeted more narrowly on the red herring of “safety,” and the ACLU is watching closely to make sure this is not just another cudgel to beat the homeless out of the public right-of-way so their betters don’t have to see them, or think about them.
The ACLU will have its eye on the Duke City, too. And it seems likely that the lawyers will earn, and the City Council will earn, and the police will earn, and the reporters will earn, and the needy will not (for a while, anyway).
Both communities have more pressing safety issues, or so it seems to me. Duke City and Bibleburg-El Paso County both are on track to break homicide records, for example.
And as regards traffic hazards, I’d say the distracted, drugged and/or drunk Duke City driver poses more of a threat to life and limb than does the limper with the homemade billboard working the median at the corner of Fifth and Vermouth.
Part of the problem may be that Limpy has found his way north and east, where the money is. I’ve seen (and donated to) representatives of the Placard People all the way out here in Dog Country, at Tramway and Montgomery. By golly, it’s one thing if they’re shambling around down by Ed Siegelman’s Ground Zero Equal Opportunity Apartments, but up here? What about our real-estate values?
What about our values, indeed.
It might be educational for some of our elected representatives to stumble a few miles in Limpy’s brogans. I’ve done a little panhandling my own bad self, back in my Jackoff Kerouac days, and I can’t recommend it as a career choice.
I was slumming, of course, as are a few of the people you see working the off-ramps. I could go back to my real, privileged life anytime I chose, and I did. But not everybody is so fortunate. If we really want to get the needy off the streets, and keep them off, we need to think a little harder, a little smarter, and with a whole lot more compassion.
On the other hand, maybe this new ordinance will stop the cashier at Whole Amazon from asking me if I want to donate my bag credits to some “worthy cause.” Bloody do-gooder.
Our “leaders” are sending thoughts and prayers around and about once more, this time to a small Baptist church outside San Antone.
I often think about tacos. (“Man, a taco sure sounds good right about now.”) I have even been known to pray for tacos. (“Jesus, let there be a taco stand around here somewhere!”)
None of this has ever gotten me a single fucking taco.
Every minute I stay in this box, I get weaker, and every minute Donnie squats over a putt … well, I’m guessing he farts.
Sometimes I get the impression the fake news thinks we rubes never leave our flyover-country shacks.
Of course hotels aren’t secure. Nothing is.
Look at the pile of luggage I dragged into the Luxor for Interbike last month. I could’ve had a crazed midget with a sawed-off shotgun inside that rolling suitcase, a MAC-10 and a couple dozen extra magazines in the messenger bag, a few bricks of C4 in the backpack, a couple of Glocks with spare mags’ in the camera bag, and the boiled head of Sean Spicer in the cooler.
Nobody batted an eyelash when I hustled all this crap from the self-park up to my room. Not even The New York Times.
Mad Blog Media 