OK, it’s only a fantasy, but it’s mine and I’m keeping it.
It’s not a very nice fantasy, but that’s only because it was born in frustration, nursed on aggravation and raised by annoyance.
Here’s the demented dream that’s kept me from tearing out my hair.
Next presidential election, I’m going to visit Seattle Iron and Metals and rent a machine they have in their scrap yard.
It’s a huge thing. Ugly as hell. Louder than a cavalry troop crossing a tin bridge. Powerful as all get out.
Has to be.
That’s because they feed large hunks of scrap metal into one end of this beast whereupon it proceeds to chew them up and spit out tiny slivers at the other. I’ve watched it work and I guarantee it’d bring tears to the eyes of real guys everywhere.
I think it could handle the Space Needle if it had to, but it’d probably take an hour or two to get it done.
I digress.
It’s good that this thing is loud because the noise it makes will cover the sound of the screams. Said screams will be coming from the folks I’m going to track down, hog tie, dangle over it, and threaten to deposit therein.
Maybe I need to back up here and explain a bit.
I’m a reasonable guy. Love the Lord. Been married to the same woman for 33 years. Pray nightly that the Mariners don’t do anything to lose Ichiro.
I admit that raising three kids has taken its toll, but I haven’t started pulling wings from flies or hearing messages from the mother ship. I have, however, reached the limit of my patience during this election season.
Here’s why:
Last Monday, the night before the election, I received six recorded phone messages. These were in addition to the dozen or so I’d gotten over the preceding weekend.
That night, though, they came at a bad time. I was near the end of one of Tom Clancy’s best ordnance-and-body-count novels.
Had to do with a bunch of radical environmentalists wanting to kill off most of mankind – except themselves, of course – to make the world safe for their group and the pink-bellied purple-spotted snail snatchers or some such. Could have been something else, but I wasn’t big into the details of their cause.
In the book, though, the radicals found themselves sucking wind because the good guys rounded them up before they could kill the rest of us. As punishment, they (the good guys) had them (the bad guys) down in some jungle (“rain forest” is the politically correct term, but I’m not going to be the one to tell that to Tarzan and Jane) and were about to leave them there unarmed and stripped down to the altogether. This would allow them to experience – up close and personal – all God’s creatures of bite and snarl.
It had a certain poetic justice to it and there’s nothing I like better than to read a book with a heart-tugging ending, but I couldn’t get through it because the constant ringing of the phone kept interrupting me.
The messages were all pretty much the same:
“Hello, I’m an extremely obnoxious and oblivious political hack who couldn’t care less about what you’re doing right now so I decided to record this message and bother the bejabbers out of you. I’m calling to ask you to vote for … (sound of phone being slammed into receiver).”
Six calls in one evening.
Not one with a human being (live or otherwise) on the other end.
Raise your hand if you experienced this. Raise your other hand if you swore you were going to vote for the opponent as payback but couldn’t because the opponent’s hacks were doing the same thing.
You’ve got to figure the folks who dreamed up this scheme were all a few clowns short of a circus.
“Hey. I know what to do. We’ll record a long, boring and inaccurate message. Then we’ll put it into an automatic dialer and call folks every night for about a week. Man, that’ll get them to vote our way.”
Right. And Ted Kennedy will join the NRA.
Next election, though, I’m going to do my part to make this a better country. I’m renting that machine.
Then I’m going to find all of these inbred possums and hang them over the business end of this monster until they promise never to do it again.
If I’m caught, I figure the worst I’ll be charged with is disturbing the peace. That’d be from everyone else who got these calls cheering in the background.
Hell of a fantasy if you ask me. And I’m keeping it.
Larry Simoneaux lives in Edmonds. Comments can be sent to larrysim@att.net.
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