I hate to rub it in, but I’ve just got to tell you how gleeful New Idrians were to read about Hollister’s sewage problems. It’s not that we don’t care about the health and welfare of our neighbors to the north. We do! It’s just that for once we feel we have a kindred spirit.
Perhaps, finally, the taxpaying citizens of Hollister — and more so, the farmers of the San Juan Valley – can empathize with us forgotten hillbillies and know what it’s like to yell at elected lawgivers and bureaucrats about polluted water. You have wastewater in your aquifer; we scream that our teeth are falling out of our skulls like Chicklets in a fruitless effort to attract the EPA tooth fairy to clean up our methylmercury poisoning.
And all we get are promises of another study of a study of a study, slated for a possible preliminary study of those studies in the year 2083. I’m not making this up.
In Hollister’s case, they are polluting the San Juan Aquifer with their percolated sewage, which means that San Juan citizens are drinking, oh never mind. Now the city has been ordered by the bureaucrats to do a study. The City of Hollister won’t even acknowledge the fact that their booming metropolis rests on an underground sea of briny sewage water that gives buoyancy to un-dissolved human scat– all because City Hall doesn’t want to be told what to do.
The Mad Hatters Hallucination Weekly blatted out this headline last week:Â “New Idrian tap water is tastier than Hollister’s!”
This isn’t merely unrealistic civic cheerleading. It is, however, a much welcomed boost in community morale, especially after our last Orange Acres council meeting.
It went like this:
On the agenda was an emergency action item regarding a raging firestorm on San Benito Mountain. The flames were lapping at the edges of the Wreck Room civic chambers and a vote was pending on whether to quickly sign a city contract with Bilk Boner Hose-Leach-Line-Perc Pond and Port-A-Potty Enterprises for purchase of that company’s water hoses.
Apparently our city attorney forgot to draw up the papers for this essential service months ago. The contract, he finally admitted, got buried beneath an avalanche of development agreements with — oops!, Booby Prize Homes.
It didn’t matter because our elected lawgivers were too busy cat fighting with each other like two burned out broads on bar stools. Mayor Orange the Cat sprayed the town gavel and kicked it into the lap of Vice Mayor Phony BooHoo. Phony grabbed the microphone (actually, it’s a megaphone) and called Mayor Orange a “gopher-addicted furball-hacking drunk.”
A concerned citizen asked if the city had participated in the Badlands regional groundwater study. BooHoo’s newly-surfaced and separated Siamese twin, Cousin Crony
Minutia (not to be confused with Hollister’s Tony Bruscia), answered the question by singing “On the Good Ship Lollipop.” He abruptly stopped crooning when Mayor Orange used Crony’s pants leg as a scratching post.
Suddenly, the floor of the Wreck Room trailer civic center collapsed beneath our feet with a ferocious boom. We hadn’t noticed that the encroaching fire had consumed everything around us, and the council dais and all us lawgivers fell ass over tea kettle into the charred embers below.
I quickly composed myself and attempted to bring a semblance of dignity back to the meeting. Avoiding any possible controversy, I gave out a certificate of appreciation
to the New Idrian Anti-Fireworks League for not calling in their weekly bomb threat to the Orange Acres City Hall.
Newly-mustachioed City Manager Mel the Tambourine Virtuoso led us in the Pledge of Allegiance Under Dog, and then gave a rousing rendition of “Light My Fire” on her tambourine. But no one could see anything because of all the smoke and burning duct tape.
You see? You’re not alone, Hollister. We feel your pain. Our city council up here has a collective IQ of 58, like yours. Each has the attention span of a greedy reneging Republican, the deadly Nanny-from-Hell piety of a Democrat, the myopia and denial of a Green Partyer, the hefty life insurance of a Natural Law Partyer and the egomania and bad sex life of a Nazi. Surely, your lawgivers can’t be any worse.
Moronic politicians are a fact of life — like death and taxes, like those two flies that forever fly around as they breed on top of each other in the summer. Remember, folks! You elected them, so like it or lump it.
San Carlos Creek Update: We are still waiting to hear from the state EPA to see if the New Idria watershed will be given priority on the state clean-up list this month. My brother Kemp is doubtful this will happen, and in fact could care less since he says that government intervention will only delay any real remediation. He has mathematically configured the average amount of wasted human energy and tax dollars every government agency expends, and he says it’s an exponentially driven, self-feeding nightmare, worse than the square root of Pi.
I’m thinking it might be time for us council people to apply for federal jobs. How I long for a good ol’ fascist dictatorship.
Comments about the Badlands? Email Kate “Gratuitous Plaque Giver” Woods at
kw****@pi**********.com
