DOING THINGS FOR A PARTICULAR REASON

Holidays can be so wonderful. That is providing you don’t get sucked into some participating in some silly traditions, which you don’t want to do, but feel you have to.

Now if life weren’t complicated enough and we didn’t enough crazy traditions or holidays sometimes we invent extra. Not because we need them mind you, but because we end up loving pain or acting plain stupid.

Well that is the way it works in Mediocrity. Honestly some of the so-called concerned citizens in my city are obsessed with making a fuss over the strangest things.

For example the other day a group of pet lovers decided we needed a “pet day.” And there idea of pet day involved allowing people to bring their pets to work. Like I could as Mayor be expected to force the owners of companies to do that!

I have nothing against owning a pet if that is your thing. We do have a dog at home because the kids wanted one. But I don’t have any reason to want to celebrate the fact by having to bring the flee bag to my office.

Well once I managed to dissuade these folks from that idea their next suggestion was to have a pet parade. They even wanted to have people make floats for the parade and have an animal actor be the grand marshal.

There idea was that they wanted the floats to be made out of animal fur. And one maniac even went so far to suggest that we check to see if the people who sell fur coats would be willing to donate the fur.

I’m sure you can appreciate how I didn’t find that suggestion very sane. I did eventual concede to the idea of having a parade, but without the fur floats.

Another memorable experience was when this same group wanted to consider the city starting a zoo. I felt we already have one in terms of too many people that act like monkeys, but I didn’t share that observation with them of course.

Anyway I tried to point out the cost would be considerable and for our size city that might not be realistic. One of the members of the group countered that we could keep the cost down by taking advantage of existing property that belonged to the city and convert it over to a zoo. This genius’s idea was to use the football stadium at the high school.

That led to a rather heated debate over, which was more important to the education of the youth, sports or learning about animals. I had to end the meeting before this one PE teacher who happened to be an animal lover nearly got into a fight with the person advocating converting the stadium into a zoo.

At least since they never resolved their disagreement I was spared a request for another meeting. But experience has taught me to not expect the drought in such meetings to last. So I’ll prepare with plenty of booze and aspirin as I always do.