STAYING AHEAD OF THE GAME

Lots of luck on this one! The only way to honestly do this in some cases is to cheat! Or at least learn to be a very creative liar.

But we do talk about it anyway. It makes for one of my more popular speeches that I have to give at council meetings or wherever. People just love to hear are we are smarter and more astute that everyone else. Progressive works in their too. As does the word, visionary.

All of which sets the stage for a play of anticipation. It is fantasy naturally, but no one admits it.

The problem where I live and as Mayor is essentially one of denial. People really don’t want to know the truth. They probably wouldn’t even live in my city if they wanted real progress.

That is because of a variety of reasons. For one thing, most of the citizens don’t even care about what goes on. If they did, they wouldn’t keep elected a completely incompetent leader and devout crook such as myself to office. It is just a case of my having managed to dole out more crap than the rest which helps to get me elected.

Another problem is that they won’t go for any major renovations that might actually improve our city if it means it will cost them anything. Good enough is not a way of staying ahead of the game in my book.

So we are trapped in this “don’t bother me zone” of involvement and commitment. Yet nobody wants to admit it.

Thus we have to maintain the illusion of being visionary and in theory “ahead” of the game, which we never really are. And I get the joy of talking about it.

There are moments naturally when we simply have to do the “progress” thing. That means stuff like you know having ceremony to celebrate some new building being finished.

Of course we never bother to spend time with them facing the fact that any “new” building in our city is normally an old building being given a facelift. That is one tidbit of detail we don’t bother to go into detail about.

I guess you could say then that in my city the real joy of “staying ahead of the game” is in the lying department. We are really good and pretending.

So perhaps it is a matter of staying ahead of time as a game. Oh you never really win in that game, but if you lie well enough then nobody notices the score!

It works for me. Plus gives me lots of practice with speeches that are often simply a rewrite of what I said last year and too many before that.