YES, IT’S TRUE, DAMMIT!

For the last two days, while I’ve been waiting for certain other intriguing phone calls to happen, my phone here at the office has been ringing with numbing regularity and repetitiousness.

Had I known it was going to be this effective, this little advertising campaign I put together more or less on the fly, I would have started taking notes on the phone calls, because I think an interesting radio-mathematical dataset could have been developed that someone with better statistics skills than mine (say, Stillllllaaaaay or Canter38 or one of the other Sec-J guys at STATS, Inc.) could use to plot exactly when every single airing of a certain radio commercial I wrote took place, and how effective it was.

Were that going on, it would be much more entertaining to edure the endless iterations of this same bit of dialogue I shall paraphrase here:

“Good morning/afternoon/evening, Saratoga Platte Valley Chamber of Commerce...”

(pause for inevitable cellphone static, either mine or the caller’s depending on the time of day and whether or not I’m at coffee or lunch)

“Hey little lady, I was just listening to the radio and you wouldn’t believe what I just heard.”

“Um, okay. What did you hear?”

“Well, I heard that Gene Watson is playing for free in Saratoga. Is that true?”

“Yes it is.”

“The Gene Watson?”

“Yes.”

“The guy who sings -” insert name of famous Gene Watson song that I had never heard of before I wound up putting together this ad campaign here “That Gene Watson?”

“Yes.”

“So what was the ticket price again?”

“It’s free, sir”

“Ain’t no such thing as free. What are you trying to pull here? You’re not going to bring out some Gene Watson impersonator are you”

(OK, OK, no one has asked me about Gene Watson impersonators. But you have to admit it’s pretty funny, and nicely conveys the depth of skepticism with which I am dealing here)

“No, it’s really Gene Watson.”

“Well hell, where is Saratoga, anyway?”

From these conversations, I feel I can safely conclude that 1) I did a good job picking radio stations and packages to plug this thing and 2) I did a bad job at writing a credible ad.

Maybe it’s because, to be perfectly honest, I’d never heard of Gene Watson at all before this thing came up. And I still wouldn’t know him if he walked into my office and said howdy as I’ve half-feared might happen all week because that’s just the sort of thing that does happen around here.

Fortunately, intimate knowledge of what I’m promoting isn’t always necessary. I know next to nothing, for instance, about what goes into maintaining a chariot race team; I just have to persuade people to come to the Donald E. Erickson Memorial Chariot Races (February 15 & 16, 2003, everybody!). I couldn’t tell a barn swallow from a bank swallow from a tree swallow, but I can still say “Hey birdwatchers, grab your binoculars and get ready for the Platte Valley Festival of Birds!” (May 24, 25 and 25, everybody!).

It’s a good thing, too.

Still and all, though, this event has driven me maybe more crazy than any other. I don’t know what it is about Gene Watson fans, but on the whole they seem completely incapable of imagining a human being who is not of their number. Of course I know all of his 35 top 40 hits! Yes, I know the lyrics to whatever song that was you just mentioned. Yes!

It makes me think of that woman in the original Blues Brothers movie who mentions that her bar features both kinds of music, Country and Western.

Shrug.

As for me, I’m going to go hide in the Lazy River Cantina while this thing is going on tomorrow night. Warren Keldsen is playing, and you all know how I feel about his stuff.

So it goes.

YEAH, I GUESS...

...The gods want me to be a writer.

There’s no other explanation for the unfathomably weird things that can and do happen to me in the course of a nominally uneventful week.

WTOTD (Weird Thing of the Day): Someone out there has a very intricate and confusing story to tell me, to judge from a slightly anguished pair of messages that were waiting on my office answering machine this morning when I finally sauntered in at 11 a.m. (after a hilarious morning with Tad the Grocer and Ramcharger the Lumber Guy and the Fat Cat Republican Banker managing to turn every innocent beginning to every conversation into an off-color joke about lubrication. No, don’t even try to imagine it. The Jeweler and I are both still in shock from the spectacle. Turn a sackful of eight-year-olds loose at a bachelor party in the Playboy mansion and you might begin to get an idea. We still don’t know what got into them).

See, sometimes, every once in a while, someone can walk into my office for a casual inquiry and wind up staying all day bullshitting with me. We who have the gift of the gab usually also have a complete inability to resist any opportunity to employ it without outside coercion, and there’s not a lot of outside coercion associated with my office hours. I sink or swim here, often as not in complete control of my schedule and modus operandi, if not of my workload overall.

And sometimes, someone can walk into my office for a casual inquiry and wind up staying all day NOT bullshitting with me, but rather having one of those rare and life-altering real conversations that leave both parties happily stunned, somewhat shaken, and careening off on new trajectories forever more.

Guess which kind of someone *I* met yesterday.

Within just a few hours, we felt like best friends. Within a few more, we were making plans to sneak away to an out-of-town jazz festival together this weekend. We had it all planned out, the time table, where we’d stay, where we’d get out of the car on the way and exercise our dogs (his is half border collie, half lab - in mannerisms, all border collie. Great dog). It was exciting, exhilirating, ludicrious.

Then my would-be traveling companion had to shoot over to Laramie for the night or so, but we’d head out as planned on Friday, be ready, this is going to be awesome, we can’t believe we’re doing this, it’s nuts, it’s unbelievable, holy shit, Kate Sherrod is actually going to get out of town and do something fun... with a person she just met....!

But then the answering machine struck this morning. In slightly vague, slightly annoyed tones (of all the times for me to have let my cell phone battery run down; I could have been fully briefed on this still-mysterious situation. Could have. But of course, counterfactual conditionals are always true because the premise is always false), my new friend informed me first that things were looking iffy but I’d know more later when he got through on my cell phone, and then that indeed, he was going to have to go to Boise and I’d know everything later when we actually got to talk, and would I please leave a message on his voice mail and tell him when the hell I might actually be reachable because there’s no way he’s going to get the whole backstory to this surprise onto the answering machine with its fascist time limtations.

So of course I called, just because it sounds like a doozy of a story and because I almost had a doozy of my own - succinctly put, the Collie of Folly almost cost us the trip anyway because it is only through a by-gods miracle that she does not currently and thoroughly reek of skunk.

And now I’m waiting to hear the story.

It’s like being a teenager or something, this day. Every time the phone rings – and it’s been ringing a lot because my latest advertising campaign seems to have been a stroke of genius – I gear up to hear the story, find out why I’m staying in Saratoga again this weekend after all.

Sometimes the cell phone rings, vibrating in my hip pocket and making me jump about 25 feet into the air.

But it’s all still, at 5 p.m., a perplexing mystery.

Guess this will teach me to make vacation plans with strangers, huh?

But you gotta admit, it would have been a great adventure, and as it is it makes a pretty good little story.

Bewildering, bewildering.

Hey, at least I found some words...

MY LIFE...

...Is going to make a magnificent surrealist novel someday. Someday. Right now, I just don't have the words.

Men. What is it with you guys? You're all insane. You hear me? INSANE.

But you're also really nice to have around, so what is there to be done about it all?

I just don't have the words.

Maybe this splendid, splendid, warm bread, freshly baked by my Enabling Assistant (not her real name) will help me find them.

Mmm... bread good.

Uh, give me a while.

BY THE PRICKING OF MY THUMBS...

It's just shy of 9:30 p.m. as I type this (though you'll not see it for at least 12 hours; Kate's Landing has no land line, so I cannot post, I can only type) and the sky is a battleground all around and above me, alternately illuminated so brightly I could read a book by its glare and glow, and sunken in darkness that seems to coat even the brightness of the street lights whose glare causes such complaint among our town's would-be stargazers.

There is lightning flashing like the sky around a sinister house in a grade B horror flick, one after the other, sometimes simultaneous, huge and sky-rending, fractally jagged like cracks in pottery, splitting the sky into shards that look ready to fly into each other, into us. Will they hurt when they hit us, those shards? Will they make a noise? What kind of damage can pieces of sky do?

And they're all over the sky, these explosions, these fireworks that were missing during that dud of a meteor shower a few weeks ago. They chase each other from quadrant to quadrant, siginalling frantically from one part of town to another. If the British are coming, they're coming by every known form of transportation, land, sea, flying carpet, spaceship, transporter beam, even the goddam Enterprise itself.

The sky has been invaded by giant fireflies and it's their very last chance to find mates before the freaking apocalypse.

It's strangely noiseless, or nearly so. This lightning looks like it's going on right on top of us, but the sounds are so late in coming (and so faint when they do come) that one can't tell which boom went with which flash... so one never knows at what point one's dog, walking cautiously alongside one in fear where usually she bounds along, pulling at the leash in hopes of locating a skunk to chase, is going to completely lose it and try to hide and cry between one's legs.

For yes, the Collie of Folly and I got caught out in this storm that is no storm. The sky is tearing itself apart, and the wind wants to rip the trees right out of the ground, but there's not a drop of moisture falling, it's all concentrated in the thick, towering clouds that glow periwinkle when another flare goes off. We were walking home from fiddling around at my absent parents' house (whenever the parents are out of town, I have to head up there and peek at the sports channels to see if maybe, just maybe, there's a soccer game on) when the air really got violent.

My dog made a beeline for my closet and buried herself in the overflow from the laundry hamper the second we entered the cabin at Kate's Landing. I had to dig her out from under it all just to disconnect her leash – and she's not budging. She's entrenched like a tick in flesh in there and won't come out for a dog biscuit, a hot dog, or anything. Guess I'll see her in the morning.

What finally did it for her kind of wigged me out as well, I think. Just as we crossed the bridge over the North Platte, the wind really whipped up, to such a frenzy that it was forcing the river to reverse its natural course and flow south. How it was I was seeing whitecaps in a streamflow that can barely float a duck's toy boat I am at a loss to explain except to say the wind wanted it that way, by god, and it was going to make whitecaps.

And still the lightning flashes on. I expect a power failure or something any minute (not to malign our local electric power cooperative, which as those things go is pretty much top of the heap as far as I'm concerned) and am smugly pleased that for once the lithium ion battery on my good old iBook is fully charged, that my alarm clock is also completely battery powered, as is my coffeemaker.

(God lord, I am turning into the Unabomber)

Actually, this storm is getting pretty eerie. When I wake tomorrow with no power (really, this storm just demands a power outage; it might be the thing's entire raison to cause one), will there also be a sinister carnival mysteriously arrived by rail in the night (the railroad runs right to the sawmill, which is just a block away; I'll feel the carnival train's passage disturbing my sleep and causing me nightmares) set up on the football field? Will Cooger and Dark be stalking the town with the Dust Witch in tow, looking for new victims?

By the pricking of my thumbs,
Something wicked this way comes.

Oh yeah, just what we needed.

NOW THAT’S WHAT I CALL A BUSINESS MEETING!

Agenda items: Economic development efforts in Carbon County, town hall politics, the gubernatorial race and its potential effect on this valley, the literary and other merits of Samuel Western’s Pushed Off the Mountain, Sold Down the River: Wyoming’s Search for Its Soul (about which more anon - since it apparently takes a while to ship. Until then you can read this excellent article Western published on the same general subject in 1999), the hard truth about the fantasy of Wyoming as a land of rugged, independent individualists when its really the most foolish flower of welfare statism, and my role in planning, fixing, and implementing all of this.

Participants: Me, and a specialist in ranch preservation and other high level business and finance issues, who is currently one of the powers behind the push to create a small and high quality ski resort near Encampment, Wyo.

Sounds a bit grim and heavy for an early morning meeting, doesn’t it? But it wasn’t, not only because said specialist/guru is a cherubically cheerful and fabulously well read and thoughtful person who is rapidly becoming something of a hero to me, but also because of the

Setting: A trail winding through Section 36, formerly a state school section, now the future site of the aforementioned Grand Encampment Mountain Resort!

This was, in other words, an ambulatory meeting. Very ambulatory. To give you some idea: the Collie of Folly, who is normally a basket case of pent up energy and excitement by 4:30 p.m. each day, is still calmly napping under my desk, somnolent in a sleep so deep she’s not even having one of her amusing pelican-chasing dreams. This is one tired dog – and no wonder.

My guru/drinking buddy/fellow effective dreamer is a hiking FOOL, folks.

More business meetings should happen this way. We live in Wyoming. What the hell are we doing sealing ourselves up in conference rooms gussied up to look just like conference rooms in the tremendous glass and steel towers of the big business districts in huge, silly cities like Denver, LA, New York, etc? Especially now that things like cell phones with wireless web access exist, making pretty much any information we might conceivably need pretty easy to access (miraculously, I had a cell signal even at the top of the mountain)? Why pretend we’re just like businessmen everywhere else, when we can trek and talk and get just as much done as they do – all in sight of our beautiful, beautiful landscapes?

So even when truly disheartening subjects came up, subjects like the hilarious irony of listening to people fussing and fussing over the attractiveness and up-to-dateness of the playground equipment in the parks in a town that has next to no children in it (almost as hilarious as that of gubernatorial and other candidates thundering on about the need to improve educational opportunities for those same all-but-nonexistent children... so that someday they, too, can leave Wyoming and go somewhere it’s actually possible to make a living, one must presume) (but hey, at least the primaries are over, and we’re down to just two would-be governors, at least one of whom [I’ll leave it to you to guess which] has seen the irony and is giving the matter appropriate attention) – even when we turned, too, to matters of truly grave import like the fate of Saratoga if a buyer is not found for the sawmill Louisiana Pacific Corporation is still convinced it can sell off as part and parcel of its entire lumber division, it was impossible to succumb to gloom or bitterness or cynicism, impossible because of the glorious views opening up to us at every bend and because of the entertaining antics of the Collie of Folly (seeking out absolutely every opportunity to get wet in the tiny little – but still substantially flowing; as we discovered today at one flume, Willow Creek is running at sufficient CFS to meet the town of Saratoga’s average water consumption – creeks all over the section) and because of the very somatic experience of the strides, the breathing, the sweat, different surfaces, different grades, lactic acid in the legs, autumn allergens in the nose, getting used to the “rest step” (new to me, though I’ve been hiking all of my life; my guru used it in his record ascent of Mt. McKinley many years ago, and still swears by it and I can see indeed its metabolic benefits but boy does it feel weird), and bodily gratitude for the many miles ridden on the bike through and around town this year that left me very well prepared for some serious hiking even though this (and how sad is this?) is only my second hiking trip this year!!!

Nothing happened this morning to lighten the load as I snapped photo after photo from the northwest corner/top of Section 36, but in such circumstances carrying it felt like no problem at all.

Best of all, on THIS hiking trip, I didn’t have to report any new forest fires!

(My only other hiking trip this summer, with the Minister of Fun and the Beautiful Cop [not their real names], was highlighted by our having discovered and reported the Hinman Fire in Colorado when it originally flared up. Of course, when we called it in it looked to us like it was burning in Commissary Park, which made it feel a lot more painfully urgent to us when we found ourselves desperately arguing with a dispatcher over whether or not what we were seeing was just some drifting smoke from the Bear Mountain Fire. Obviously a woman 40 miles away locked up in a windowless room would know better than we did what we were seeing. Obviously.)

APOLOGIES...

But today I must be brief. I've been spending all day working on The Official Steinley Cup Web Page and I can't stand one more minute of staring at a computer.

Plus, I just got invited to go on an early morning hike in the Sierra Madres with the Green Mountain Boys (not their real names) and Molly, the Collie of Folly, is having digestive issues originating from some roadkill I caught her trying to eat this morning. She's very dainty about these issues, as she is about all things (including her dining habits, if not her choice of menu items) so it's amusing enough to warrant further discussion, but that's going to have to be at a later date.

Off to give the pooch and my overstrained eyes some relief!

BEGINNINGS

Today I did something I haven’t done in years if you don’t count things like community choir
performances or major holidays: I went to church.

I’d been thinking about returning to the church in which I grew up ever since I came back to
Saratoga, but something in me always held back. Part of it might have been pride; very few of my
actual peers (by which I mean 30-something semi-hipsters with whom I went to college, hang out
now on my trips to Chicago, correspond via e-mail) have made any kind of organized religion part
of their lives - for many reasons which I still share, including dislike of authority and authoritarian
institutions, dislike of anything that smacks of the herd mentality, disdain for rules and standards
of conduct that aren’t convenient to keep, not to mention the whole crutch/opiate of the masses
doctrine that seemed a lot more realistic and reasonable to us when we were teenagers who
weren’t in a mood to believe anything we were told.

I didn’t give up on religion completely when I hit college, but I came pretty close. I went to some
Quaker meetings in upstate New York, and liked the structure (or lack thereof), the kinship they
had to a really good seminar or group discussion. They had a lot in common with the better kind
of class at Bard, these meetings: there was silence and thought and opinions expressed carefully
and with great consideration, and those who listened to a speaker listened with a care and
attention that I’m sure many a professor would wish for. Something was missing, though, so I
drifted off into secular life, another jaded, educated doubter, like so many others. I eyed devout
people with suspicion and a little bit of a sneer, found them either superstitious or smug or just
plain silly.

I still kind of do, but as I said in the first paragraph of this essay, I’ve been considering a return to
church life since I moved back to Saratoga three years ago. I’ve missed the sense of community
within a community that I enjoyed under rather unusual circumstances growing up here, and while
I think what I had is gone forever (it was a product of a deep friendship among the Presbyterian,
Episcopal and Catholic clergymen who manned the pulpits in the mid to late 1970s when I was
first learning to think about things greater than myself. We celebrated holidays together, the three
congregations; I remember Maundy Thursdays and Christmas pageants over at the Catholic
church, I remember the Presbyterian sanctuary crammed with people come to hear Mike Cole talk
and his wife sing - sort of hippie Presbyterians and people whom I still miss deeply - and how
much I adored ex-footballer [in the European sense; I just recently learned this man was once on
the Irish national team in World Cup soccer!] Father Sheridan, who I know now is at the parish
over in Rock Springs. Look out, Tommy; I’m old enough to gulp some of your whiskey!) there’s
still something there, as I was reminded today.

The occasion was something special, and I think unique to the Presbyterian church in its
methodology: the election of a new pastor. And the candidate was really something else! I had
met her (yes, her!) in passing earlier in the week, and many with whom I met her encouraged me
to come and check her out on Sunday, since they knew I’d kind of been thinking about coming
back into the fold as such anyway.

So I said I would. And I did!

I’m still sorting it all out at this point, some eight hours later. Yes, the woman we elected is
remarkable, as one of my friends observed, to listen to her is to definitely feel one has been to
church, but it’s not just that. There were points today when I cried. Usually while singing. And I
wasn’t prepared for that.

Oh, not tears of repentance, though sure ‘nuff I’m a sinner like everybody who’s at all honest with
him or herself knows himself to be. No, it was something about singing with everybody in that
particular congregational way - maybe six or seven people in the crew really knowing the tune and
the rest of us sight reading like mad, or else listening and guessing, or else just sort of chanting
like plainsong, rendering most hymns a cheerful, vaguely musical din - and realizing that while the
mantles I’ve assumed are heavy (and getting heavier for the conflict and the disappointment that
inevitably come with them) and while I’m the one to whom they’ve been given in name, I’ve
never been required to carry them alone. And no, I’m not talking about God - I still don’t believe
in that God they told me about in Sunday school or that character that appears in the canonical
bible, the Gnostic gospels, the Apocryphal Old and New Testaments, the Zohar or any of the rest
of that vast shelf of religious literature I’ve been sifting through since high school. Sorry, that’s
just going to be a really, really hard sell.

But what is there in that church on Sundays is people, people I can’t remember ever having
actually met, I’ve known them for so long (we’re talking people who have memories of me before
I could read, which is more than I have), and people who came to call this valley home while I
was still off playing city girl in Boston and New York and who have since become my friends
through trips to the opera, festival committees, sports spectatorship and politics (yeah, sometimes
that happens). They’re people who come together once a week to spend an hour or two outside
their own heads, their own concerns, people who, for a little while at least, accept how little
control we each of us individually has over what happens to us, and how that is still OK... people
who can bring themselves to rejoice even amidst tragedy and fear... people who are, like me,
actively hoping and planning for the future.

I need that.

As for the new pastor, I had a feeling about her already, but she confirmed it today. She preached
well and with passion and humor and all the qualities I would want in such a person, but what
confirmed it for me was when, during the congregational meeting after the service, when we were
to debate and vote, she told us very candidly of something that not many people (in my experience
at least) will talk about so openly, especially to strangers: a vision. She had had a vision of a map,
the center of which denoted Saratoga, when she was pondering whether or not she was being
called away from her ministry in Australia.

You see, what finally set me on my way from Boston back to Wyoming was also a vision. I woke
up one night from a dream of Lake Marie and I was crying. I was crying because I missed that
lake and all that goes with it, and because I knew that nothing was going to feel quite right again
until I returned to it.

And it proved to be true, as hers proved to be true, because she did indeed receive a call today.

Good luck, Reverend!

JUST WONDERING...

Jack: “Why do you come here?”
Marla: “It’s cheaper than a movie and there’s free coffee.”

- Early support group scene in “Fight Club”

As I struggled mightily to get out of bed this morning, my head slightly aching, this question would not leave me alone: why do nighttime meetings always and only have free coffee? Why not, oh, I dunno, icewater or raspberry kool aid or juice or milk? Yeah, milk. Why not milk?

There’s coffee at town council meetings. Coffee at water and sewer joint powers board meetings. Coffee at planning commission meetings. They serve coffee at all of those support group meetings for any kind of addiction or daunting personal problem on the list. The overeaters get it, the heroin addicts, the people with brain cancer, the alcoholics (“I’m not an alcoholic, I’m a drunk! Alcoholics go to meetings,” my dear Aunt Scarry likes to say), all discuss their woes or their programs or their dinner plans over cup after cup of free coffee.

Last night was a board meeting of the Carbon County Economic Development Corporation in Rawlins. Of course there was coffee, and plenty of it, and it was distressingly, overwhelmingly, dangerously good. Good enough to where I’m pretty sure it wasn’t decaf (the very concept of which offends me highly). Good enough to where I drank, oh, about five cups. I couldn’t help myself, because, well, good god do I love coffee.

I have a pot before leaving the house. I have a cup or two with my own dear personal mom after we take the Collie of Folly on her morning constitutional/pelican hunt (a comic sight if ever there was one, watching this very agile and energetic sheep herding dog go charging into the water to chase a pelican and then, wallowing awkwardly in the water, decide after a few flailing motions that what she really wanted was just a drink, thank you. Border follies are maybe not the greatest water dogs). I take a traveler cup to work. I drink maybe another pot’s worth my 10 a.m. coffee klatsch with the Sewer King, the Fat Cat Republican Bastard, the Lord Macklebrains, Obie the Artist, Tad the Grocer (not their real names) and many others. Then usually in the afternoon I dash off to Lollypop’s for some kind of hot or cold latte concoction, unless I’ve switched to iced tea.

I mean, I LOVE coffee. Maybe even more than beer, though I know that’s sacrilege for Lady Steinley to say... so maybe I’ll say I love it as much as beer. No, wait, some of my brewer friends may be reading this. Almost as much as beer.

Anyway, I like coffee a lot.

So what happens when I come to all these nighttime meetings to discuss things like Ki-Nitrifying bacteria or whether Joe Blow’s new outbuilding sticks out a few feet past the setback line or how we’re going to get this here Carbon Bucks program started... and there’s a whole big lovely urn of coffee to guzzle to my heart’s content?

Why, I drink it, of course.

And then curse myself at midnight, at 1 a.m., at 2 a.m., at 3, 4, 5 a.m. for not being able to wind down and follow the advice of pretty much everyone in my life, the many who care enough about me and my future to follow me around like some demented modern day Greek chorus and chant “Get some sleeeep! Get some sleeeeeeeep!”

Of course, some of my best ideas come out of these wacky restless twisting and turning and collie disturbing nights. Of course they do! Of course!

Like the idea for this column.

Thank god I don’t have anything particularly important to do today. Dinner at the parents’ house and then sleeep, blissful sleeeeep, for the first time since many days before the Steinley Cup. No conferences, no meetings, no nighttime coffee, no need to rise early in the morning. Just sleep.

Until it’s time to make the coffee.

PEE ON, MACDUFF!

(Or maybe that should say McGruff)

As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, the new dog park is about up and open and will soon contain among its other features a series of fire hydrants set aside for the park’s denizens to do with as nature dictates. As I also mentioned, one of the sponsoring group’s fundraising gimmicks has been to sell space on these hydrants on which donors can arrange to have a “favorite” person’s name painted.

As I did not mention, however, because I did not yet know that I had been so honored myself, I have been so honored myself!

My monstrous vanity ate this up almost before I could properly swallow it. Someone in this town considers me so interesting for whatever reason that he or she (I asked the park organizers not to reveal to me who was my benefactor) chose to leave a lasting monument to my name and work in this, our sexiest new facility! I rule!

Of course, (Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my close-up) I asked the crew if I can pick the color (bright neon yellow or flaming, flaming red) and how big the letters were going to be – naturally I want it vividly visible from a good distance and from outside the fence – but alas, I get no special privileges for being a council member.

Phooey. I’m really starting to wonder what holding elective office is really good for.

So anyway, it seems that my dream, long expressed shyly and only to very good friends, of someday having my name on a place to which hundreds, if not thousands, will make daily pilgrimages is going to be realized long before I even get a proper publishing contract.

God, I love this town.

WOO HOO, MORE TRAFFIC!

I have a feeling your numbers, dear readers, are about to swell. I have learned this evening that someone around town has been telling at least a few individuals that derogatory remarks are being made about them personally and by name on this here web page. None of said individuals (including, I suspect, whoever started the rumor) has read this page, obviously, or they would know that's completely impossible.

Well, unless my dog knows how to read and takes umbrage at my accusing her of having pulled the curtain rod down on my head, but she has no case and no one else to pin it on. And she comes running gaily when I call to her by her extended name, "Molly the Collie of Folly" and gives me doggie kisses.

Speaking of doggie kisses, everybody mark your calendars for August 31 at 4 p.m., when we'll have a ribbon cutting for the doggie park up by the baseball fields. This is the kind of project that I love, because the people who really, really wanted it to happen didn't just sit around and bitch about how "someone" should do it: they drew up some plans, figured out the costs, dreamed up some really clever fundraising efforts (my favorite is "fire hydrant" sponsorships: anyone can pay a small sum of money and get someone's name painted on one of several fire hydrants being installed on the part for, um, marking by park visitors) and made it happen! All the town did was donate the land and a little bit of money.

So even if you think it's a silly idea, come on over to that ribbon cutting and pat them on the back for their efforts. It's something we can promote as a town amenity that will enhance our dog friendly image (something dear to the hearts of many in our business community especially) and maybe keep a little poop off the sidewalks.

Hell, if it weren't raining right now, I'd be taking the Border Folly up to check it out right now. But I suppose that will have to wait for another day.

Hope everybody remembered to vote! Polls just closed!

OH YEAH, CALL ME LADY STEINLEY

One of the ladies with whom I walk the Collie of Folly out at the lake mornings likes to say that she wants to come back in her next life as a pelican.

I can see her point – pelicans seem to have a pretty groovy life, floating around with other pelicans, eating fish (of course you know they spit out the trout; they only eat trash fish. So sayeth certain state-certified wildlife experts in our area, anyway. Well, I made up the part about spitting out trout, because, well, I think it’s funny), occasionally flying away when the train goes by, and once in a while just floating off by oneself to contemplate the mysteries of pelicanity. No deadlines, no pissed off constituents, no questions about heating costs for the hot pool, and the only bills they ever see are attached to their faces. Looks like fun.

But then again, a lot of my coffee buddies would like nothing better than to get to shoot every last big-billed one of them out of the sky or off the water. So it looks like a happy life, but maybe not a very long one.

No, no, especially after this weekend I know what I want to be in my next life.

I want to be a microbrewer.

I had a chance this weekend to spend most of my time working with and for microbrewers from all over the region as part of the Steinley Cup, the official Wyoming state microbrew competition we hold every year on an island park here in Saratoga, and without exception they are some of the happiest, most easy going, generally delightful people I have ever met. Even when I approached them with the Pitcher of Judgment (to be filled with a generous sample of each brewer’s competition ale – pale ale this year – for extensive examination and criticism by the panel of brewing hot shots from Colorado who join us each year for this purpose) I saw huge smiles, open and affectionate faces, a generosity of spirit that is rare indeed in this modern world of ours.

And who wouldn’t grin, to be called upon to do what one loves to do anyway and to receive the kind of enthusiasm that only serious and devoted beer fans (a class apart from mere drunkards, beer fans love the beverage for itself, drink it with passion and pleasure, and maybe occasionally overdo it enough to be a pain in the ass but mostly they just drink a lot of it and sink into a happy daze) can express in return? They love what they make and take tremendous and justifiable pride in the results even before anyone else tries the stuff, and on days like Saturday they get to share it with everyone without having to mess with mundane stuff like making change.

I suspect most of them of having been nerds like myself back in the day, nerds who got hung up on weird enthusiasms for organic chemistry or microbiology but who didn’t have the personality or temprament to hole up in a lab somewhere in a long white coat with just petri dishes of goo for company. These are the true “A” students my old biology professor used to reminisce about, the truly unusual and gifted ones who did NOT go to medical school or seek PhDs and fellowships and all the academic/scientific rot that goes with them. They saved that for the B+ students, he maintained, and as I watched my own colleagues I could see exactly what he meant. The B+ers were worker bees, diligent studiers, organized and driven. The As, the As... the As liked to talk to people, and to do off the wall things like, well, like brew beer. One of the best science students Bard had seen in years brewed beer for his senior project – the actual research was something on yeast cultures – and is probably happily cranking the stuff out for some groovy little pub somewhere in upstate New York now, as he was underenthused about the graduate program he was sort of supposed to go into after we graduated...

Anyway, it’s largely these people who make this weekend my favorite of the entire year (I used to joke about it as my Christmas), even though now much of it is my responsibility. I was on my feet for 12-13 hours crossing the island back and forth, everyone bugging me about something, dealing with pissed off people who wanted to bring their dogs on the island and were unaware that my board had voted on Thursday to ask people not to bring dogs because at that point it was too late to do anything much but put up a sign – with predictable results. Fire all the rock salt in my ass you want, I really don’t care; for one day out of the entire year there’s a substantial population of my favorite people right down the street from Kate’s Landing and nothing can kill that.

And it was worth it, worth it all, the sweat and sunburn, the sore, sore feet, the “water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink” effect (after I awarded the cup I just couldn’t take it anymore. Carrying all that beer around for judges and volunteers and the band without having time to try any myself, I stood there on stage and finished my awards presentation by saying “somebody give me a drink” and somebody did, Saint Danno as he will henceforth be called) (though it’s largely because of him that I seem to have acquired a new nickname, Lady Steinley. He kept asking, during the ritual pre-Steinley bash at the Wolf/Cantina in which the brewers and judges and tournament officials drink Maker’s Mark from the Steinley itself, if that was “Lord Steinley’s Cup” the way hockey’s Stanley Cup is Lord Stanley’s cup, and my volunteers en masse informed him that it was LADY STEINLEY’S CUP, DAMMIT and that I was Lady Steinley. It appears to have stuck. Oh dear.). It was worth it seeing all of the smiles and the dogs and people playing and dancing (damn, Coda d’West gets my vote for Best Party Band Ever), and then... and then...

Then I announced the winner, an incredible release after walking around for a good hour or so being the only person on the planet who knew who the winner was. It’s kind of the best and the worst part of running a competition like this, keeping the secret, watching the doings of the person who will shortly be hoisting the cup over his head, seeing the nervous, hopeful little glints in the eyes of the three people whose beers I’d had to pull extra samples from for the last round of judging. Watching the winner at work, especially – a guy whose entire cadre of volunteers had deserted him at the last minute and left him pulling his beer all afternoon in the sun, by himself – was both fun and excruciating. I wanted so badly to just pull him aside and whisper in his ear, just to see that smile get wider...

And when it did, it really did. Some smiles are bigger than the face that holds them, and this was one. The winner was dazed and glowing all night, holding the cup close to him and cradling it like a newborn – except when the crew were drinking from it (as I live and breathe, no more Maker’s Mark for... at least a year). He kept saying, over and over, that he had already had a blast even before he won the Steinley, and those of us for whom this wasn’t the first Steinley weekend knew exactly what he meant.

TONIGHT’S POSTING...

Has been canceled due to a crisis of a most serious nature.

My arch enemy, Liver Sirloin, now an aviation attorney down in Dallas, TX (yes, yes, everyone is very proud that he found a way to combine his passions for airplanes with his innate talents for being a pain in the ass. If he ever finds a way to incorporate his equal passion for molotov cocktails and other recipes from The Anarchist Cookbook, look out), just hit town.

That garbled music you heard was the theme song to “The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly” being whistled inexpertly in the background by his mother as he strode through the saloon doors at the Saratoga/Platte Valley Kennel of Commerce.

Molly the Border Folly did not even bark. She took one look at each of us and ran under my desk to hide.

He’s coming over tonight for dueling wine glasses. He’s got a merlot, while I’ve got a fine, fine shiraz.

Two may enter, only one leaves.

Spectators are welcome at Kate’s Landing tonight as this clown once again tries to convince me to give up my libertine Libertarian ways and embrace the dark side (he was mortified indeed to see my Freudenthal for Governor signs) and that guy from Texas who lives in the White House.

Rest assured, LIANT readers, that our (ir)regular posting schedule will resume tomorrow... if I get done getting everything ready for the Steinley Cup. Or Saturday... if I survive running the Steinley Cup. Or Sunday... after the chili cook-off.

(God, I can’t wait for September)

AS USUAL, AN ALTERNATE PROPOSAL

"In parts of the US, 'three strikes, you're out' legislation is used to lock up repeat felons and throw away the key. In 1998, the township of Wayne, Pennsylvania, applied the same idea to corporate crime. In Wayne, any corporation with three or more regulatory violations within seven years is barred from setting up shop."

The above quotation comes from the latest online issue of Adbusters' Newsletter. It caught my eye for reasons that it won't be hard for long-time readers of Life in a Northern Town or recent readers of our local dead tree media outlet to figure out.

Back in November 2001, I published on this very blog my take on the issue of business licensing in Saratoga, which notion our beloved town clerk, Squeaky, and Superman, our zoning/streets/engineering guy, were insisting needed to be explored, implemented and enforced to protect the credulous citizens of our little town from voracious and unscrupulous out-of-town "fly by night" paving and roofing contractors (Never mind that, to my knowledge, no one has come crying to them, the police, the chamber of commerce, the mayor or anyone else who might conceivably be thought to occupy a position of authority to date begging for such "protection.")

You can read my original rant on this matter by clicking HERE and scrolling down to the entry for November 26 if you want a refresher; basically all of those arguments still stand, and indeed, once I published this opinion no more was heard in council chambers or on the street about the matter. No one seemed willing to even try to refute the logic with which I backed up by assertion that nowhere in Saratoga's Municipal Code was there language requiring everyone who does business in Saratoga to have a business license issued by our municipal government. The language that appears to say so actually does not when one takes even a cursory look at it, remembering at bottom that words mean what they mean and are arranged the way they are for a reason, especially when they're arranged to form a law.

Shocking, shocking, I know.

So as I said, not a peep about this was heard again, until Squeaky brought it up again last week. She had never given up on the idea and apparently just kept it weakly alive, nursing it deep within her bureaucratic widdle heart until presumably we dotards elected by the people who actually live in this town forgot all about it and she could bring it up like it was a brand new thang.

Well, not even the mayor had forgotten last November, and so he told her the first step in this process, if she really wanted to open this up again, would be to gather public input by throwing a few coffee hours at town hall and seeing what the people had to say.

Said coffee hours have since been planned and announced: the first is set for 9 a.m. on Tuesday, Aug. 20 (PRIMARY ELECTION DAY, EVERYBODY!!!!!) and the second for 10 a.m. on Wednesday, Aug. 21, both in council chambers at the Saratoga Town Hall.

There's a cute little ad and also a back page story disclosing same. The story, however, leaves something to be desired.

Squeaky is quoted as saying that "the current ordinances require a register of businesses, a fee for business licenses, and renewal of licenses on a yearly basis."

Sorry to keep hammering on this, but LIKE HELL THEY DO.

So anyway, as the title of this entry might suggest, I have something of a counter-proposal to intruding more nosiness, bureacracy and tinpot dictator opportunities into Saratoga life.

If the issue really is out of town or other contractors doing the dirty on unsuspecting citizens, then maybe it's time people who need driveway paving or roofing or other contracting work either 1) accept the fact that in doing business with strangers they are accepting certain risks with which we can't really help them (we're never, through legislation or any other means, going to remove every single danger, potential for harm, or inconvenience out of life, everybody. Deal with it) or 2) start checking with, oh, say THE CHAMBER OF COMMERCE when they're looking for someone to do the job. Pretty much everybody LOCAL who does this kind of work is a member of the chamber, and the chamber does receive feedback on their work from time to time, oh yes.

Another plank in the plan is to have people who do go ahead and take the sucker offer made by whatever gypsy pavers come to town to share their tale of woe with me at the chamber so I can warn others and make appropriate recommendations if someone else calls me before accepting said sucker offer.

We don't have a Better Business Bureau here, but we are a small town and we do have a chamber of commerce, so what the hell, people?

And if this still isn't enough, we can adopt a "three strikes and you're out" rule for out-of-towners, can't we? Three legitimate complaints from customers or building inspectors and your company is banned from doing business here.

Superman says that would rule out our local contractors pretty quickly, but I don't think he's listening to the key modifier – legitimate – when he dismisses my suggestion. I'm not talking about three people whining about feeling they were overcharged or offended by someone's buttcrack or dissatisfied with the aesthetic quality of the workmanship. I'm talking about a real, actionable beef, one that poses a threat to safety, public infrastructure or neighboring property values.

Yeah, verifying the legitimacy of these "strikes" might create a bit more work for Superman, but like chasing down every business in Saratoga to get them "registered" wouldn't?

What do you want, folks?

Come to one of next week's coffee hours at town hall and tell 'em, dammit!

A MEMORABLE FANCY

(Yes, yes, the title of this entry is ripped off wholly from items in William Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell. To quote good old Oscar Wilde “Immature artists borrow; mature artists steal.” And yes, I do claim to be mature, at least compared to most artists I know; how many of them have had to sit down and argue about whether or not to vote in a sewer rate increase?)

Last night I drove out to the gravel pits south of town at about 1 a.m. for a special event: the Perseid meteor shower, the best opportunity for viewing which was supposed to be last night at about 1 a.m. At first I was just amused at the thought of having ventured out to sit amongst piles of little rocks dug out of the ground so I could watch big rocks flying through the sky, but then, as so often happens, a companion’s remark set me off on another train of thought altogether.

She was astonished at how densely filled the sky above Wyoming is with stars; how clear the path of the Milky Way, how challenging to trace out are the outlines of the constellations when even the faintest stars are easily visible. And she told us that in her home town (Phoenix, AZ – poor thing!) her sky has maybe two or three stars in it. Pollution – air and light – obscures the rest.

How fortunate we are, though we’re high and dry and can grow little but cattle feed even in a wet year. How fortunate we are, though we pay higher prices for groceries and phone service and can’t rely on overnight deliveries to actually reach us overnight. How fortunate we are, though it’s a 42-mile drive to see even bad, overblown “blockbuster” movies and a 76- or 132-mile drive to see more unusual ones.

How fortunate we are because we can still gauge our place in the universe by looking up at the night sky.

Which, of course, got me thinking about why it is that we’re so fortunate. Why don’t we, who live in one of the loveliest little river valleys in the west, have a problem with light pollution, air pollution and all the west? What has kept us from turning into Steamboat or Jackson or any of those other places my townsfolk always jump to their Chicken Little conclusions about whenever that scary subject of (shh!) economic development comes up?

Well, water of course.

Every town, ranch, industrial operation or subdivision in our valley depends on the same little watershed, which is governed and allocated under the same set of rules and regulations and doctrines as the rest of Wyoming, with the ultimate authority being the doctrine of prior appropriation – that principle that water rights established earlier in time take precedence over those established later, no matter what those rights are used for. This principle only really makes itself felt in low water years like this one, as happened, for instance, this spring, when the Wyoming State Engineers office put a “call” on the North Platte River.

When a call is put on our North Platte River, what happens is that nobody can use his or her water rights unless those rights are older than 1914, which is the age of the water right on Pathfinder Reservoir, upon which irrigators downstream of us depend. Until that reservoir is filled up, hands off, everybody.

The town of Saratoga has, at present, rights on just enough water to meet our basic municipal needs (household water, lawn watering, fire suppression, etc.) to squeak through a call on the river without noticeable hardship (except on our water plant operator, who always sweats bullets), though sometimes we have to stop watering the grass in the town’s parks.

Our basic needs being pretty much enough to take care of the 1726 people who officially live in Saratoga according to the last census, that is.

More people than that and we have a small problem – not catastrophic because of course we can negotiate with other owners of “old” water rights to a certain degree (though there is also a doctrine in place in Wyoming water law that says you can’t separate a water right from the land to which it belongs, i.e. you can’t just buy Rancher X’s water right and use it someplace else. I believe you have to buy Rancher X’s land, too, and furthermore you have to somehow use it on that land, though this is something I’m going to have to look up), or we can buy another municipality’s surplus (we were preparing early this summer to try to buy some water out of Hog Park reservoir if need be, because Cheyenne doesn’t quite need all of it YET).

BUT, if we wind up seriously growing, we start needing serious water, and at a certain point we will run up against the need to spend serious money to start pulling stunts like diverting other rivers or building dams or aqueducts and all of those other money sink horrors the tales of which make books like Cadillac Desert such chilling fun for budding Western politicians like me to read. Water follows money, we say out here in the west, but there has to be a critical mass of money that we are probably a long ways off from yet.

I take odd comfort in this, though as your Chamber chick and a member of the board of the Carbon County Economic Development Corporation I probably shouldn’t as such. I suppose I’m supposed to be all about growth and development and rah rah rah and I am to a degree, but it’s a very, very delicate balancing act; we need more people and more business to stablilize an economy that often feels on the brink of disaster (feels so even if it really isn’t, but that feeling is a very real issue when we’re talking about our much vaunted quality of life: how enjoyable is it to live here when one is always worrying about if it’s going to be possible to stay?), but we don’t... we don’t...

We don’t want to give up that beautiful night sky and our unparalleled view of those meteors streaking through it in strange silence, unreal looking and yet more real than anything we as a species have ever built, older by far than anything we see around us, still being flung about by forces set in motion before our sun could even glow.

Heavy stuff to be thinking about in the middle of a meteor shower, but if not then, when, I asked myself. And that’s when my memorable fancy overcame me.

There has been set in motion a study to take a look at every conceivable angle and aspect of our municipal water system here in Saratoga. A consulting engineer and a whole team of geologists, hydrologists, anthropologists, archeologists and lots of otherlogists are looking at everything from leaks in the water supply lines to billing procedures to evaporation rates in the ditches to the groundwater profile of our valley.

Groundwater.

Groundwater is what originally made the amazing desert metropolises of Phoenix, Tucson, Los Angeles possible. Yes, they have diverted a lot of surface water, these cities, but they have also pumped up a million-year accumulation of groundwater that only gets replaced in the aquefers at a rate of something like 2% of the total per year, pumped up so much so fast that some parts of their territories have sunken visibly to the point where highway fissures burst open overnight as one section of land sank and another did not.

Groundwater makes a lot of idiocy and short-term thinking possible. Development of it is an easy fix when a sudden influx of new residents hits an area. And where there is one easy fix, there are others.

Groundwater could change everything.

As a particularly spectacular, even comet-like meteor streaked right over my head and frightened my dog under the car, I suddenly saw my valley lit up like the grid of Los Angeles. And I saw it sinking. I smelled auto exhaust and heard police sirens. I saw a megalopolis where the teeny, cute little towns of Riverside and Encampment and a lot of ranches had been.

It scared me witless.

I’ve never been so glad that so much of the water that is actually in our underground aquefers around here is basically alka selzer in my life.

ANOTHER ENDORSEMENT

Life in a Northern Town now proudly endorses its first ever non-Libertarian fringe party candidate! Never in LIANT’s whole long life did it ever suspect that one day it would be cheering on, of all things, a Green Party candidacy, but that was before your humble blogger read the latest issue of the Buffalo Beast, a spin-off of the world’s bitchiest alternative newspaper, the Exile over in Moscow (Russia, not Idaho), whose book was the first ever selection of the LIANT Book Club.

There it is, in the Beast’s fifth ever issue, just published on Aug. 2: Saying he has “nothing to hide” Erie County Green Party chairman Paul Fallon announced his candidacy for Buffalo, NY’s 26th Congressional District in the nude!

Furthermore, he offered free beer to reporters, but reportedly none of them took him up on that.

Furthermore, he nakedly stated in his opening remarks to the press that he was running because Republican incumbent Tom Reynolds (for whom state legislators created the 26th district special just to protect him from serious challenges) is “a big fucking asshole.”

As Beasteditor Matt Taibbi (fellow graduate of Beaudacious Bard College – overeducating iconoclastic, unproductive freaks without spending a dime of taxpayer money since 1934(tm)) observed in his coverage of this historic event, "No way a candidate with clothes on gets that on the air." (Fallon's remark, suitably bleeped over for public broadcast, was quoted on area radio and TV reports)

Taibbi's report continues: "What started out as a gimmick started to sound curiously like politics when, in response to a question about whether he was a credible candidate, he answered, 'Why not me? I represent actual people. How many of us have a mansion in Clarence like Tom Reynolds, or rich corporate friends who'll pay $5,000 a pop to play golf with you at Pebble Beach?'"


I’m so adding this to my own playbook.

(P.S. For the full story, click HERE. There's even a photo from the press conference!)

SO THAT’S WHAT TV IS FOR...!

Every once in a while, even your humble blogger gets curious about what fare is on offer on what Harlan Ellison memorably referred to as “the glass teat,” so last night I wandered over to a friend’s house to watch some cable TV...

...And found myself ankle deep in, what else, Wyoming politics!

Wyoming Public Radio and TV held a candidate forum last night to allow our bizarre range of would-be governors to sound off on the issues, and WOW. It was better than Monty Python at the Hollywood Bowl, better than the Flying Karamozov Brothers’ staging of The Comedy of Errors, better than an all-chicken cast performing The Bald Soprano.

I.E., silly, absurd and overwhelmingly surreal.

Or, as the Punk Martha Stewart memorably put it, “We should be watching this downtown in a bar getting blasted.”

And indeed, the spectacle before us begged to be turned into a drinking game. Every time Sheridan Shutupicrat John H. Self utters another incomprehensible two-word answer that has no bearing at all on the question, DRINK. Every time Ray Hunkins tries to use the fact that he was involved up to his neck in the litigation surrounding the school funding issue as a reason why he should be voted into office to fix it, DRINK. Every time Paul Hickey does the same thing, DRINK. Every time Ken Casner reveals he has no idea whatsoever what a governor even does, DRINK. Every time Steve Watt tries to play the “working class” card as an excuse for his ignorance on an issue, DRINK. Every time poor Toby Simpson gets scared and stops in the middle of a sentence, DRINK. Every time Eli Bebout expresses pride in his terrifying voting record as a member-for-life in the Wyoming state house, DRINK. Every time Bill Sniffin points to the amount of money he’s spent on advertising and what has amounted to paper spam as a reason why he’s our man, DRINK. Every time moderator Susan Anderson “accidentally” forgets to give Dave Freudenthal a chance to answer the question everyone else has been blathering about, DRINK.

On second thought, it’s probably a good thing we weren’t watching the forum downtown in a bar making a drinking game of it. We’d have both been hospitalized with alcohol poisoning. It would have been like playing the old “DUNE” drinking game my best friend and I invented in college to go along with the David Lynch film of that novel, in which one was to drink every time t he word “spice” was mentioned and in which one was guaranteed to be seeing at least two Baron Vladimir Harkonnens by the time Paul and his Daddy had left Planet Caladan.

There were some moments that will live long in my memory, such as when, called upon to give his answer to a horribly worded and open-ended question from an audience member – what would you as governor do to help women and children? (with what? window washing? choosing peanut butter? driving tractors? preventing lead poisoning from pencil chewing?) – and Mr. Self said "In Sheridan we have an organization for that. It's called the Salvation Army. That's it." By far my favorite statement of the entire event!!!!!

Another good one was when the Punk Martha Stewart made the astonishing observation that Ray Hunkins was wearing eye make-up. I had thought it was maybe just the light, but the PMS is a professional cosmetologist AND a videographer and she was unequivocal in her assessment of his appearance. Eyeliner a deep mauve, with blue shadow on his lids and mascara that is really too dark for his complexion. He must have a Mary Kay representative on his support team.

Oh well, the forum did, at least, confirm my choice and my priorities for the coming Primary Election Aug. 20. Freudenthal is the only person, Democrat or Republican (not that there’s much difference, especially in Wyoming; the way I usually tell them apart is largely tied in to the degree to which they want to shove me back into the kitchen where I belong) who seems to have even researched the requirements for the job for which he is interviewing. He was the only one honest and intelligent enough to point out that action on prescription medication prices for senior citizens is really not something that a Wyoming governor can take effectively without concurrent efforts on the part of the Federal government, for example (and also the only one to just come right out and say “Well, I’d like a different Congress and different Senate”). He’s also the only one who displayed any awareness that economic development is not a commodity that can just be obtained somewhere (I’d summarize most of the other candidates’ understanding of the concept as “If I was your governor, I’d sure enough go out and get us some of that there economic development” though their expressions of same might not be so fluently grammatical as that. I am a softy, I know, I know).

At this point the only other person I would even consider would probably be Toby Simpson, a former mayor of Greybull (I always prefer candidates who’ve spent time in the municipal trenches in which I currently wallow) who has some good ideas but is still too terrified or stage frightened to express them clearly. I sincerely hope he sticks with this a while, as all he needs is some polish and some confidence.

For this time around, though, it’s still Freudenthal for me (for more information about his campaign, surf over to His website at govdave.com – gotta love that URL). I’ve made my decision about which of the two stupid major parties I shall sign on with come Primary Election Day, and it’s the donkeys so I can make sure he gets the nod.

So yes, you can call this a formal endorsement.

Pass the Guiness...

OOH! OOH! DREAM COME TRUE!...

Well, sort of.

Since I was elected to Saratoga’s town council a little over a year and a half ago, I have held one dream close to my heart, cherished it like a cute puppy or a rare and precious orchid or a proven anti-gravity technology.

I was fer-shootin’ sure that it would be great, great fun to get to repeal a stupid, pointless ordinance, or at least that it would be more fun to repeal an existing stupid pointless ordinance than passing new stupid, pointless ordinances is.

Instead of muttering somewhat dementedly to myself “ho, hum, another stupid, pointless ordinance added to the books despite my ‘no’ vote” I would get to shout out from the rooftops “Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes! Ooh! Ooh! Ooh! Yes! Yes! Yes! We got rid of that stupid law that says its illegal to ride an ugly horse in town!” (to use my personal favorite example from dumblaws.com).

Well, reality is never so satisfying, is it?

Case in point, Ordinance #708, which my colleagues and I passed last night on the first reading. I mean, check out the promising text with which this baby begins: AN ORDINANCE REPEALING!

“Repealing” is fast becoming one of my favorite words ever. Its dictionary meaning is “to revoke or rescind”, it is derived from the Middle English “repelen” from the Anglo-Norman “repeler” alteration of the Old French “rapeler” meaning to re-appeal – “appeal” of course coming from the Latin “appellere”, “to entreat”, meaning the word originally meant “to entreat again” or basically to beg a body to maybe reconsider an unjust or unenforceable or basically dumb decision, which is pretty much what it’s all about, really. So yes, it’s a wonderful word, music to the ear, tingly to the toes, a word with which I imagine angels would sing me to sleep in multi-part harmonies were I the sort of person who in any way deserves to be sung to sleep by angels.

But alas, the header on Ordinance #708 continues, getting drearier by the word: “AN ORDINANCE REPEALING" – ah, just wanted to type that word again – "OBSOLETE OR UNCONSTITUTIONAL ORDINANCES AND/OR PORTIONS THEREOF FOR THE TOWN OF SARATOGA, CARBON COUNTY, WYOMING

What follows after a wad of formal cover-your-ass “WHEREAS” clauses is a short, terse hit lists of ordinances that are to be hereby repealed. And what a dull lot they are – almost as dull as the reasons for which they are being repealed, by recommendation of the legal reviewer and publication company that we overpaid grossly to update our municipal codebook. To wit:

- We shall hereby repeal 5.20.020 prohibiting the sale of liquor in pool or billiard halls because, well, there aren’t any pool or billiard halls anymore but there are pool tables in a few of the bars.

- We shall hereby repeal 8.04.030 which allows for the removal by the fire warden or chief of police of any “dangerous accumulation of waste, rubble or inflammable material or any other serious fire hazard or any obstruction in streets and alleys likely to interfere with the operations of the fire department” because this is superseded by 8.12.050 which governs crap lying around generally and makes it a misdemeanor offense to let it pile up. Yawn.

- We shall hereby repeal 8.08.060 for similar reasons. 8.08.060 says if an animal dies on you, you have to bury it, and if you bury it, you have to do it outside city limits. Basically, beating a dead horse when you consider that whole crap thing discussed above.

- We shall hereby repeal 9.24.020 prohibiting gambling – OK, actually this is the only really interesting one, because while of course we’re not legalizing gambling in Saratoga we are making things a little bit easier for, e.g. certain male-dominated social clubs who weekly engage in games that are most certainly not Canasta in a certain back room of a certain pub and who also conduct calcutta auctions once a year for our town's annual chariot races, 10% of the take from which goes to pay part of your humble blogger’s annual salary but I’m of course getting ahead of myself – because the definition of gambling contained therein is hilariously restrictive and makes criminals even of, say, the Saratoga Middle School Booster Club’s halftime cake raffle ladies.

That definition reads: “No person shall play, deal, carry on or conduct any game whatsoever or any plan scheme or device for money, checks, credits, goods, chattels or anything of value by means of cards, dice, wheels, slot machines, vending devices, tops, punchboards, lotteries, raffles or any contrivance, means, device or machine of any denomination or name whatsoever within the town.”

I mean, holy crap, we should all be jail!

So anyway, we’re going to replace this with language more closely aligned with Wyoming state law, specifically §6-7-101 (a)(iii) which discusses gambling thusly:

"Gambling" means risking any property for gain contingent in whole or in part upon lot, chance, the operation of a gambling device or the happening or outcome of an event, including a sporting event, over which the person taking a risk has no control, but does not include:
 
(A)  Bona fide contests of skill, speed, strength or endurance in which awards are made only to entrants or the owners of entries;
 
(B)  Bona fide business transactions which are valid under the law of contracts;
 
(C)  Other acts or transactions now or hereafter expressly authorized by law;
 
(D)  Raffles or bingo conducted, or pull tabs sold, by charitable or nonprofit organizations where the tickets for the raffle or bingo are sold only in this state and the pull tabs are sold only on the premises owned or occupied by the charitable or nonprofit organization;
 
(E)  Any game, wager or transaction which is incidental to a bona fide social relationship, is participated in by natural persons only, and in which no person is participating, directly or indirectly, in professional gambling; or
 
(F)  Calcutta wagering on contests or events conducted by a bona fide nationally chartered veterans', religious, charitable, educational or fraternal organization or nonprofit local civic or service club organized or incorporated under the laws of this state

Much better, no? Now: ONWARD!

- We shall hereby repeal 9.24.060 which prohibits prostitution because, well, it’s a felony offense and kind of beyond our jurisdiction now since it’s illegal all over the state (for now. But I may stay in politics for a while yet, so stay tuned).

- We shall hereby repeal 9.28.040 which prohibits threatening to use a weapon on someone. Again, illegal all over the state, pretty much out of our hands to say whether it’s legal or not in Saratoga.

- Ditto 9.28.050 regarding concealed carrying of firearms. I’m getting sleepy again. You?

- And we’re also getting rid of 12.16.030(a)(4), one of the rules of the hot pool saying “no obscene or profane language,” not because everybody’s decided that the hot pool is a fine place to cuss, but rather because “No person in the town shall make, countenance or assist in making any improper noise, riot, disturbance or breach of the peace or use profane, obscene or offensive language to any person” according to 9.20.030. So, it’s actually illegal to cuss everywhere in the city limits, so we don’t need to emphasize it at the hot pool. What a fucking relief that is!

And so another dream disappoints when it comes true. Like discovering you have to pay taxes on your lottery winnings or finally getting a date with that special someone one has been admiring from afar only to learn that said someone is actually a crashing bore with daunting personal hygiene problems, the fulfillment isn’t what it’s cracked up to be.

But hey, at least I got to bore you all with some etymology.

DECISIONS, DECISIONS

As those of you who have been paying attention to the world around us already know, we are as of today just two weeks away from Wyoming’s primary election (For those of you just joining us, why don’t you just skip this blog entry, ok? Wouldn’t want to give you a headache or make you scratch your scalp bloody or anything, would we? And just pretend all of those cute, colorful signs in the yards of the many, many people around who are much smarter than you are are just there for decoration).

Once upon a time, I let primary election day pass by with nary a thought because my political party never had more than one person vying for its nomination (and usually about half of the candidates on said party’s slate had been drafted, using various and sundry methods of persuasion, by your humble blogger in her capacity as the executive director [unpaid] of the state party). If I voted at all in the primaries, it was merely to make sure that it would continue to be possible to do so against the chance that someday there would be a real primary with choices and contested votes and all.

Running a third party in a big liberal state that will remain nameless (but rhymes, somewhat poorly, with Taxachusetts) had its ups and downs, o yes...

Last time around, I did vote in the primaries, but I was still stubbornly registered as a member of the nation’s largest and wackiest third party (yes, yes, yes, it’s the Libertarians. But they’re not all crackpots like the big letter writers in Wyoming; they’re not!) so all I got to vote on were non-partisan offices like Saratoga’s mayorship and two town council seats.

That’s all right; it was all I cared about anyway. There was no gubernatorial election, our member of the Wyoming state house was running unopposed as was our state’s lone Congresswoman (effectively, at least – as she is again, more’s the pity). Our senior member of the U.S. Senate had token opposition at best, and that only in the general election – no other Republican even wanted to try. So ho hum, guess I’ll just do my boring civic duty and register my preference for mayor (our current fella, who is running again this time) and council (not much of a choice there, since basically one of two incumbents and a local looney were all that were on offer)...

(Interestingly enough, the primary election of 2000 was how my own political career got its premature start, when an old classmate of mine decided she’d write me in for town council. I fell for the town clerk’s old “can we put your name in a hat” gambit and the rest is history)

This time around is a little more interesting, however. Not only is there a pretty hotly contested governor’s race, with bigshot tough guys who bring pantloads of name recognition and dubious experience to the contest, but there is actually someone running against our incumbent state house representative as well.

So I guess I’m finally going to have to pick a real political party, if I want to make a difference in any of these newly important primaries.

But there’s a problem!

My favorite candidate for governor (I’ll save you the trouble of asking; it’s THIS GUY) is on a Democratic ticket with several others who have been spending even more money on campaign ads and whatnot. He could probably use my vote to survive the primary and take on whichever of a raft of lunatics gunning for the Republican nomination comes out on top in the general election.

BUT...

The guy who is giving our long-standing incumbent state house member a run for his money is running for the same party’s nomination. And of course, both of them are Republicans.

Never in my life have I hated this two-party system bullshit more.

See, the nice thing is that I can re-register and change my party affiliation right on primary election day, but the not-so-nice thing is that, by current state law, I have to pick one and can therefore only vote in either the Democratic or the Republican primary.

So I have to decide which one is more important: that my guy for state house (hint: not the incumbent) nails the local Republican nomination, or that my guy for governor gets the Democratic nod to move on. High stakes either way: the Republican primary is winner-take-all, There Can Be Only One, the Tribe Has Spoken, the general election all but meaningless, which most of the time leads me to conclude that I have to register as a Republican on Aug. 20.

BUT...

There are a lot of yo-yos on the Democratic ballot for governor, and only one whom I actually like – and he’s the only candidate for governor that I like, period (i.e. I really, really don’t want anyone else in that governor’s mansion come January. Not any of the Republican candidates, not any loose cannon Libertarians, none of ‘em). And whoever wins the governor’s race is king of our castle for four years, whereas if my challenger loses out to the incumbent for our state house seat, we’re still only stuck with the incumbent for two more before there’s another chance to boot him out.

Plus, a governor is in office, at work (if you can call it that) all year round, while state house members are only in formal session for about two months and in committee meetings from time to time a total of maybe ten more days out of the year.

In other words, a governor can do a lot more damage.

So as you see, I’m still on the horns of a dilemma, and they’re pretty uncomfortable sitting, I can tell you.

A solution has occurred to me, though. I’m not the only kid in town with a schizophrenic display of political yard signs (Bucholz/Freudenthal seems to be a pretty popular combination). Maybe I need to call a caucus among those with displays like mine and we’ll divvy it up: half of us can make the Whiny Democrat Sacrifice to preserve our gubernatorial candidate, and the other half can take the Fat Cat Republican Pledge to see our boy through to the state house.

But really, we shouldn't be having to do this. Once upon a time, there were open primaries in our fair state and voters were just voters. Why did we allow this to vanish?

Anyone?

SIGNS AND PORTENTS

As is not unknown to happen around these parts, I had a bit of a revelation last night whilst walking home from a local pub.

I was not struck blind, did not see a burning bush, had no dreams of angels or ladders, was not slyly approached by Athene dressed as a cute shepherd boy, no. It was much more mysterious than that.

The message I received has been plaguing my waking and sleeping hours nonstop since my 10 p.m. stroll, and still I come no closer to unraveling its mysteries, unscrewing its inscrutability.

So I’m turning to you, my faithful readers, for help.

The message is deceptively simple: two letters and a punctuation mark.

Ready?

CI!

That’s the letter “C” as in “cacophony” or “criminologist” or “cunning”, followed by the letter “I” as in “illumination” or “I-Mac” or “immunodeficiency,” followed by an exclamation mark!

What does it mean, what does it mean?

Perhaps the way in which the secret message was transmitted to me may shed some light on its significance.

Between most of the better quality pubs in Saratoga and the sanctuary of Kate’s Landing, is, quite naturally, a bridge that crosses what in ordinary years we fondly refer to as the North Platte River (but this year tends to get called “that $$^&#&!ing trickle we have to save for the cranes in Nebraska” or some such). And in that river live many, many things... minnows, insect larvae, crawdads, water snakes, the occasional labrador in search of his frisbee, dying trout, and of course, my new option in oracular organisms, mallard ducks.

As in a whole flotilla of them.

Just north of the bridge.

All facing in the same direction (south), like a marching band awaiting a signal from the drum major.

And like a marching band on the move, as I approached the midpoint on the bridge and stopped to lean over and look at them, they began their drills.

Some turned around and headed north. Others headed south along their previously-chosen vectors. Others remained quite firmly in place, their gazes still locked on some strange unknown fixed and immovable point in the distance.

Then, slowly, the whole flotilla began to drift gently north, still performing its intricate drills that, I realized, seemed almost to form, you guessed it, letters.

Indeed, they were letters. English letters! And then possibly, now that I think about it, some Greek ones... I kept waiting at the time for the little bar to appear on what looked emphatically like it was going to be capital “A” (CIA! Ohmigodeverybodyduckandhideyourguns!) but just now I realized in my oracular fashion that an “A” without a bar is, in fact, a capital LAMBDA (the Greek letter “L”).

So maybe the message was CIL!

Yeah, that makes much more sense, doesn’t it?

So anyway, my first thought this morning was that maybe what was being designated was Roman numerals, which would make the original message “101!” perhaps the number that would be the “winning” number at coffee this morning and thus one to be chosen at all costs.

Of course, given that “L” I just realized was there, the number would actually be something like “149” (C=100, I=1, L=50. Usually a smaller unit before a larger, like the I before the L designates that the actual number is the value of the larger minus the smaller, i.e., 50-1, i.e. 49).

But the winning number at coffee today was less than 100 because there were only like six of us there and was actually 85 (for those who care about this sort of thing, the number I chose was 84, meaning I NAILED THE CANTINA OWNER, who accused me of channelling the Sewer King and the Pressman, which maybe I was, maybe I was. Anyway, Macklebrains bought coffee today. Woo!). So whatever the message was had nothing to do with the numbers game (unless 101 or 149 were the magic numbers for the High Table at lunch today...).

Actually, of course, the Roman numeral theory is a pretty weak one, else why would the final “digit” have been in Greek instead of the Latin alphabet we use for English?

So I guess I have to get more exotic.

Again, just dangling off the first conclusion to which I jumped, LAMBDA in days of yore was the symbol the Spartan army had emblazoned on its shields (“L” for “Lakedaemon,” that part of the southern Peloponnesian peninsula where the city of Sparta stood). And as everybody knows, Sparta was one of the two combatants in the Peloponnesian war, about which the first proper history was ever written, Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War (one of my very favorite books), the other being, of course, Athens, and didn ‘t I already mention that city’s patron goddess, Athene? WEIRD, man. WEIRD!

So maybe I can expect a visit from 101 Spartans sometime soon!

That’s unlikely, though, since there really aren’t any anymore.

So... hell, I dunno. Maybe the ducks were just telling me to “Congregate In Lebanon.”

Or “Concentrate Intense Lager.”

Or “Consume Insect Larvae” (hey, maybe they were just telling me the fishing is good?).

What do you folks think?

I just know this meant something, dammit!

SO WHERE IS THISGUY SHOPPING?

My out of town readers are probably getting a little bored with this (then again, maybe not), but Beautiful Bob has struck again, and this time, as many predicted, he’s wasting his energy on your humble blogger.

I say wasting not only because he is making it inherently difficult to take him seriously, but also because in attacking me he is attacking someone who can’t get voted out of office for two more years. So, fine with me!

His schtick this time requires a bit of background information to fully savor.

About two years ago, when I was still working for a certain local media outlet, I did a big splashy feature story during an extremely slow news week profiling “Saratoga’s Dogs of Business.” It was a big photo-and-feature article on all of the interesting dogs who served as “official greeters” or what have you in Saratoga’s business community. It was cute and widely regarded as one of my more interesting efforts (myself, I’m still prouder of my column about trying to fry an egg on the sidewalk that appeared in that same issue, but never mind) and was considered for a Wyoming Press Award at the time.

Now BB is on about “what a difference two years makes.”

In wildly hilarious fashion.

To wit:

Rollie, Megan, Gunner, Tula, Sam, Skippy, Rascal, Princess and Whiskey we miss you, even if the New Sheriff in town thinks you’re quaint.

Now, there’s a lot that is wrong with this sentence even from a strictly rhetorical point of view (why would we MISS something just because it’s found QUAINT?) (MISS: “To feel the lack or loss of” [I’m assuming this is the use of the word he wishes to make - none of the other definitions, such as “to fail to hit, reach, catch, meet or otherwise make contact with”, seem to apply]; QUAINT: charmingly odd, especially in an old-fashioned way), but it’s also pretty wildly inaccurate from a factual point of view.

Oddly enough, I had been contemplating updating that very article for this very web page, because contrary to the implications made by BB “(a new town council and a new sheriff in town (directed by the Mayor) with a no dog agenda has stripped this small (and getting smaller) community of all its personality and made it like any town USA)” there are still plenty of dogs in residence in Saratoga’s downtown and outlying businesses.

I’ll first account for those listed in my original article that are “missed” (noting that BB left out poor Squeaker at Zeiger Enterprises, as well as the much-loved dogs at Town & Country Realty but I’ll get to T&C in a moment).

Rollie - his daddy closed up the barber shop to go RVing. But Rollie - actually spelled “Raleigh” like the tobacco, my original mistake in the article - was there in the barber shop like a “little black mop” until its very last day in business.

Megan - Still holding court at Laura M. Usually there are photos of her featured on the web page, too.

Gunner - Missing, presumed dead. His daddy has since acquired a golden lab puppy who has yet to appear at the Cantina, but his grandpa has a new chocolate lab puppy, Bud, that is often to be seen either at the Catina or Saulcy Land Company, depending on whether it’s grandpa or grandma who got dibs that day.

Tula - Almost stepped on her the last time I was shopping at Buggie Bear Station. Most definitely still there, cute, nervous and cuddly as ever.

Sam - Still bravely guarding Erickson’s Gifts and the Hot Dog Shop, still getting lots of treats from Hot Dog Shop patrons. I will also note that “Aunt” Ellie sometimes “forgets” to charge regulars for the “naked” hot dogs we order for our own pets. What a sweetie!

Skippy - Hat Creek’s “Bow Legged Cow Dog” mascot is still there from time to time, but he’s getting old. He was already mostly blind and largely deaf when I first did the story two years ago, but last I saw, just a few weeks ago, he was still hanging on.

Rascal - His mommy no longer works at the Chamber of Commerce, so he stays at home. In his place at the Chamber of Commerce are not one but TWO dogs: my enabling assistant’s wacky Wheaton Terrier/Poodle mix, Hobbes, and my own beloved Collie of Folly, Molly. Sometimes you can see both of them, perched in either window, watching people go by and waiting to lick the next office visitor to death. They are definitely a draw here.

Princess - Too, the store which Princess ruled has closed down due to owner’s ill health. Dear Vi doesn’t live here anymore and we do miss her.

Whiskey - While it is true that one of our officers DID ticket Whiskey for having a paw sticking out onto the sidewalk during said officer’s first week on duty, that foolishness has not been repeated, and Whiskey is still very much in evidence at Do It Best, and also frequently joins us for coffee in the morning at the Cantina, where his duties are most assiduously performed: he serves as drool spigot, pony whip and toast thief, and takes his responsibilities most seriously.

Some BB failed to mention... Leo and Romo used to hang at Town & Country Realty, but Leo is no more and Romo’s mommy has moved to Shepard ERA Realty. I’ve not seen Romo there, but it is a big office to find such a little dog in.

Zeke the Tree Climbing Dog can still be met at Hack’s Tackle and Outfitters when he’s not farting around in the river behind the store.

Plus there is a pomeranian, whose name I can’t ever remember, romping around most days at Second Impressions, and Far Out West Bed and Breakfast is home to not one but two bichon friezes.

So, um, by my reckoning, the difference that two years has made is that there are MORE dogs of business in Saratoga, not fewer.

I wonder where it is that BB has been shopping that he hasn’t noticed this trend?