Life is fun and exciting, especially when I bitch about it

Being a journalist, I get to cover some fun and exciting stuff. One example is town council. Seven councilors battle it out on a bi-weekly basis to keep the town thriving. They discuss the important issues and tackle the most minuscule details. I wouldn’t take their job for anything in the world, not even to put Mr. Show back on television. Sorry Joel.

At the latest meeting, one hot debate sticks out in my mind. It was the wording of a bylaw. The bylaw dealt with skating on frozen ponds and rivers and the posting of thin ice signs. The controversy was between “not uniformly consistent” versus “uniformly inconsistent.” The conversation went back and forth between two councilors. The public gathering, three people, found the whole ordeal amusing. The council took the matter very seriously. Now whenever the ice is not uniformly consistent, thin ice signs must be posted 75 metres apart. God bless the councilors and all their hard work.

Another subject on the agenda was the smoking bylaw. Should the town regulate where, when and who can smoke? Should the town stay out of the situation? The local bottle depot lady came with a report. Surprisingly enough places that make business off smokers didn’t want the town to do anything. Places that didn’t care, just didn’t care. And the minority of people who don’t want to die from a slow, painful cancerous death were opposed. I’m a non-smoker and don’t really care. My lungs enjoy clean, fresh air, but they don’t cry every time some second hand smoke comes their way. I’m still sitting on the fence on this subject. Should I leave because I don’t smoke and want some fresh air or should smokers leave because they have a nicotine addiction? In a perfect world, we’d invent a cigarette that didn’t give off second hand smoke. Everyone would be happy then. Or why don’t cigarette companies cure cancer. They have the money, and then more people would smoke, if they didn’t have to worry about dying from cancer.

Should the town of Rocky pay for the maintenance of our beloved windmill, or tear it down and replace it with a plaque on a rock? The windmill remembers all the Dutch/Canadian war heroes during world war 1, but that doesn’t really matter. Who cares about WWI? I do. I can’t believe the town would even think about demolishing something so important. We should just start kicking over tombstones and pissing on the graves. So it costs a little money. It’s a small price to pay. I’m glad I’m not in the bottom of some bloody, muddy trench awaiting my death. They’ll throw money at a $10,000 dollar clock, but remembering our war heroes is too much to ask.

The next greatest event in a small town journalist’s week is police briefs. The amount of small stupid crimes is outstanding. People report everything. “RCMP were informed about a student who left for school and failed to show up. The youth was located in Rocky a short time later.” Who cares? Amazingly it’s crime that sparks the readers interest the most.

“A complaint was made under the Mental Health Act about an unstable person who had left the Rocky hospital.” I believe this person was none other than Joel. His not wearing any pants antic finally made its way into the news. There’s even a pantless picture of Joel on this blog. After seven long years, Joel finally achieved his goal of being known as the pantless guy. Check that off the to-do list. He tried the backwards, inside-out shirt routine for a while, butt that didn’t last too long. Actually it was for only one day. A thumbs up for trying though. Not too many people would dare attempt the feat, but Joel wasn’t afraid of what his classmates thought.