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This must be Columnist Sweeps Month, since the Post just ran a full-page survey, asking readers to select their favorite columnists. Which means somebody will finish last, and poverty, or even worse, a real job, may loom if I add that to my other distinctions.
So I began looking for an anonymous tape to boost my
ratings. Immediately I found two tapes from an anonymous
source, lying right next to my office boom box. Sensational
tapes, too -- The Kink Kronikles and The Life and
Times of Country Joe and the Fish. There's no better
music for writing than Dead End Street
and Death
Sound Blues.
But alas, the tapes were not really from an anonymous source. Greg Truitt had left the tapes while I was out, and even worse, he wants them back.
Oh well. Maybe somebody will come by with a ratings booster. On my doorstep Tuesday morning is one Michael Bush. Could be one of Neil's kinfolk with some juicy Silverado gossip, right?
No relation. This Bush is a lobbyist for noble causes, and he'd like to see children's issues get more than a candlelight vigil.
Bush has problems with children performing migrant farm labor instead of going to school, as well as US imports of things like rugs produced by full-time 10-year-old weavers.
Farmers love to hire children to pick crops,
he
said. They're docile, obedient, tractable.
And that's exactly what the kids will learn how to be
if they go to school,
I said. So what's the
advantage of education? And if we don't buy cheap rugs from
the Third World, those kids will starve. That's an
improvement?
Our friend Lisa appeared Wednesday morning. With a groom in the car and a wedding license in hand, she requested my services as an ordained minister in the Universal Life Church.
No,
I protested. I've performed two weddings,
one of them yours, and they both ended in divorce. I'm not
doing it again.
Look, Ed, that's only two strikes. It takes three
strikes before you're out. If this one doesn't work,
honest, I'll never ask you again.
Upon her promise, I yielded and signed the certificate, even though it couldn't help in the Sweeps. The doorbell again. Hopes rose, for it was Bob Norfleet, my lifetime-NRA neighbor who gets lots of entertaining mail from the We-Love-Ollie crowd. But he had no right-wing follies; instead he wanted me to return his copy of Fool's Progress by Edward Abbey. Then the phone rang. This could be it.
It was an outfit called HEMP -- Help End Marijuana Prohibition. They're holding a big educational rally at the Boulder courthouse at noon on Oct. 8, to point out that hemp has historically been quite useful -- paper, clothing, oil, food (hemp saved George Bush's life during WWII, and he's yet to show a smidgen of gratitude) -- and that America's imbecilic drug laws, passed through ignorance and bigotry, are depriving us of an important resource. But that's like child labor; everybody with an IQ in double digits already knows of such evils.
Nothing sensational no matter how hard I look. Maybe I
can hold on till the next Sweep. There's a pit bull down
the street; I could take our brainless chow dog down there.
(How stupid is she? Major stupid. She licks tax agents and
bites people with checks.) After all, it was H.H. Tammen, a
founder of the Post, who said A dog fight on Champa
Street is more important than a war in Europe.
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