Edison Evening News, Friday, 11/16/2012

ARTS AND CULTURE: The Edison Eye Art gallery is on temporary hiatus as the health of its owner, Dana Russ, continues to decline. Just in time to fill the cultural void left by the gallery's dormancy, the Edison Longhorn Saloon has installed weekly karaoke sessions on Fridays at 9:00 pm. Residents remain uncertain about the bar's ability to redirect tourist traffic from the art gallery to the saloon, claiming that the saloon draws a distinctly different demographic than the gallery's usual crowd. "People who love the way Joel Brock's paintings express the haunted spirit of the valley through the deterioration of agricultural equipment are not the same people who get really serious about Big Buck after a few rounds of Jager," said resident Nancy Thompkins at a recent Edison Women's Club meeting. "Maybe so, but you can't presume to understand people when you are possessed by horrible little devils," countered Edison artist Carly Knutzen, of Ewings Court. Knutzen, a respected watercolor and charcoal artist whose work has sold in galleries up and down the West coast, is herself a Big Buck enthusiast, and at press time is enjoying a rekindled relationship with Jager.

ENVIRONMENT: The town cheapskate and super weird guy, Mr. Plankers, submitted a formal complaint on Wednesday to the Skagit Conservation Society for making him pay an additional $0.16 per month on his water bill. The charge has been added to the monthly water bills of all users of the Edison septic system to counteract accumulated damage to the Samish water supply. The funds will be used to sample and test water from streams throughout the watershed and to conduct ecological surveys through Padilla Bay Estuary Reserve. Plankers claims this is a direct infringement on his personal liberty and an insulting use of tax dollars, somehow, and he has emphasized to this reporter on several occasions that "Blue Herons are stupid, slow-moving, and not even blue." Plankers was last observed throwing a lit firecracker over the fence between his Japanese-style rock garden and the Edison Inn, trying to "smoke the drunks out" of the beer garden that occupies the other half of the end lot on Maccoys Court.

HEALTH AND BEAUTY: Recent college graduate and aimless, freeloading young adult Molly Morrow has been trying a number of DIY deep conditioning hair treatments in an effort to boost shine in her already unreasonably shiny hair. "It's the only thing I can control in this fucked-up world," said Morrow as she applied a solution of apple cider vinegar and egg yolk to her auburn locks.* "Plus, leaving wet towels and bowls of homemade hair conditioner around the house lets my parents know I'm still here. Sometimes I think they forget, so I like to let them know." Morrow then turned to an invisible camera and addressed the audience she wished was there: "Are you noticing a lot of stupid shit happening in your house, but you can't remember doing it? It's possible that one of your college-aged children has moved back home, and you are still in denial."

POLITICS: Edison's lone Republican voter, Dave Gordon, was seen taking down his Romney Ryan 2012 sign on Thursday morning, flipping the bird as he did so to a group of attractive blonde children walking to school. Onlookers speculated from their porches about whether Mr. Gordon will express his grief by adding another room onto his already ridiculously tacky manufactured home.

SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY: Two courteous and well-groomed Mexicans installed a brand new Kenmore washing machine in the Morrow house on Friday afternoon. "It's intimidating as hell," said Mr. Morrow. "We're going to be too scared to run it for a while, but we're happy it fits beneath the tool shelf."

Mrs. Morrow, standing in the kitchen holding a be-meatloafed spatula, remarked, "It didn't look that big in the store." 

"You gonna love dis," replied one of the Mexicans.










*Editor's Note: always wanted to use the phrase "auburn locks." Read it and weep, English 459!



   

Riding In Cars With White Supremacists

Dear Skagit Valley Herald,



I read in Sunday’s paper that you are looking for something called a Digital Content Manager. I have no idea what that is, but I can imagine what it might involve, and I think I’d probably be a lot better at it than that rag-tag team of syphilitic bums parking their Albertson’s carts in your office for eight-hour day-picnics and calling it journalism. Your leads read like fridge magnets arranged by demented children. Your cutlines read like meat tags in the world’s vaguest deli. Your paper is dying of ad cancer.

On a good day, I wouldn’t have even been reading your paper. On a good day, I would have been watching Million Dollar Homes in my underwear. But guess what? Sunday was not a good day. Sunday was a bad day. And by the time Sunday night rolled around and some vagrant hag chose to throw your paper on the bar floor rather than use it to wipe spilled gin from her skirt, I was just desperate enough and just broke enough and just drunk enough that I found myself circling your classified ads with soulful longing while the cover band played a Mariachi version of Wild Horses so beautiful it made me cry, and I knew I had reached my bottom. Digital Content Manager sounds like sex on the hood of a Pontiac when you realize your second minimum wage job pouring drinks for Republicans at a golf club is slightly less satisfying than your primary minimum wage job serving pancakes to Canadian corpses.

I’m doing this for me, Skagit Valley Herald. Not you. You need me, sure. But not as bad as I need a vacation from the freaks.

I want you to know this, Skagit Valley Herald: I’m only applying to your aesthetically and intellectually appalling paper so that I won’t have to listen to a white supremacist dishwasher explain why he only fucks married women. As Digital Content Manager for the Skagit Valley Herald, I won’t have to listen to that shit ever again. And if I’m assigned to some sort of white supremacist dishwashers beat in South Everett or some other unfathomable ghetto of the human condition, I will simply trade that beat to a less skilled reporter in exchange for oral sex.
 
All this writing has me tuckered out. I’m going to bed now, but I look forward to reading your official job offer in the morning, or whenever I finally get around to checking my email again, which probably won’t be for at least another six days, because I have a lot of drinking to do and absolutely no rent to pay. Because I live with my parents, who are themselves recovering journalists, which is why they can’t afford nice things.

Thanks for keeping such a limp finger on the indiscernible pulse of a dying industry, Skagit Valley Herald.

Thanks for being there.




Sincerely,
Molly G. Morrow

MIDNIGHT PSA: Wearing A Mexican Swimsuit On Your Period Makes You Racist In A Weird Way

 By David Schwimmer, Library Town Fashion Critic/Sexpert






Ladies, if you're like me, then you're on your period pretty much all of the time. You're probably eating a hot dog sans sauerkraut right now, thinking about David Schwimmer in a banana-colored onesie. Why can't my boyfriend's hair do the David Schwimmer? And then you reach for the ugliest, comfiest pair of panties you own. But ladies, whatever you do - don't reach for that Mexican swimsuit!


Wearing your Mexican swimsuit when you're on your period makes you racist, for the following fear-based reasons: 

A. You're admitting to yourself (and the world, if you're one of those nocturnal she-wolves that prowls the aisles of Safeway looking for Popsicles at three in the morning while you gush blood from the hole God left in you) that you're too lazy to change a tampon,*

B. Being Too Lazy To Change A Tampon = Being Mexican,

C. Mexico has a monopoly on hideous swimsuits because Mexico is too poor to shop at Target and France took all the hideous pants, and

D. You wouldn't have bought that Mexican swimsuit, you fool, if you hadn't forgotten your American swimsuit in San Diego, having decided at the last minute to tag along on your parents' day trip in hopes of scoring some sweet, cheap, Mexican smack from a "Pharmacy"/"Farmacia"/"Lobster Shack"/"Store That Sells Snake Bracelets And Only Snake Bracelets."

So ladies, next time you're tempted to just camp out for four or five days in those taxi-yellow swim trunks with the fake gold military buttons and the polka dots that look like someone burned them off a gay clown with a blow torch, remember your Mexican friends. Remember black market Xanax. Remember the Alamo. Whatever it takes. And then get out there and show the world that women can still be functional, friendly, productive members of society even though they are literally menstruating twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, three-hundred and sixty-five miraculous, weepy days a year. 




*Idea for massage clinic that caters to women on their periods: "Popsicle Massage." We sell you delicious popsicles while you get your uterus kneaded like artisan bread dough.

Withdrawal

O! Beautiful bank teller!

I know,
I know the last thing the world needs is another part-time poet
Loving you from a vast distance,
Touching the pen because you touched it,
Licking the wounds of slips and deposits
With gummy melted candy suckers
Shoved deep down in my pockets.

But your face
When you dropped and shuffled and clicked
The presidents all in a row,
How the skin of it white as piano keys -
No flats, all sharps, an echo -
Sparkled with this faint sweat,
A cashmere sweat,
A Bank of America sweat.

I knew I would be poor forever and ever.