Echoes in a Hollow Space

1. Let me thread you a story… (1-26)


2. Christina Lovejoy, town curmudgeon, takes great pride in her work. She’ll crank out a grumpy face & cynical comment for many occasions,


3. but she don’t rightly hold with raining on the parades (or birthdays, weddings, and the like) of common folk.


4. She mostly saves her curmudgeonliness for when people in power are acting like jackasses.


5. (Although it did come in handy that time the town caught Excessive Jubilance Disease a few years back.)


6. “Resistance is not futile,” Christina is fond of saying, often using a mock-robot voice. “Resistance is essential.”


7. Take, for instance, that time President Turps & Vice President Pinche passed through Portalville on their way to an economic summit.


8. Secret Service was out in force, of course, & nobody had a problem with that. After all, big men need protecting from public opinion.


9. But just the week before Prez Turps declared he would build a great big ol’ wall around our portal to keep out illegal aliens.


10. VP Pinche just nodded and gave his lord and master an idiot grin (cuz the man couldn’t find his own rear with both hands) and mumbled


11. something about subversion and perversion and conversion. Couldn’t rightly figure what he was driving at but it sounded sinister.


12. Thing is, couldn’t none of us remember seeing illegal aliens come through our portal, just the regular grey and Nordic variety,


13. plus assorted critters from the Multiverse. But they’s somewhat of this town’s lifeblood, if you know what I mean. They keep us lively,


14. and honest, if I’m being honest. Christina saw it just about the same way. She stood in the middle of Route 40 as the motorcade


15. came through town. The Secret Service swarmed to clear her out of the way, but she presented them with her grumpiest of grump faces.


16. Halted them dead in their tracks, I can tell you. Couldn’t get within ten feet of her. The motorcade had to stop.


17. “I mean the president no harm,” she told everyone. “But I AM going to speak my mind.”


18. All the tinted windows in the president’s limo spontaneously rolled down at once so he could hear what Christina had to say.


19. “You can try building a wall around our portal,” she said, “but you should know we are a small town surrounded by big power….


20. “Really big power, like HUGE, and it would be bad, very bad, and sad, very sad, if you did anything so rash.


21. “That kind of power can’t be contained. It ripples out underground, spreading from this town out and beyond,


22. “to places you can’t even imagine, like the hearts of good people, to the selfless and the courageous and the compassionate—


23. “those things you & that Pinche with you have only heard spoken of & never felt yourselves. You can’t stop feelings, can’t stop ideas.


24. “So I suggest you give up on that wall or you’ll be swallowed in an ocean of contempt that will drown you. Big water, big, big water.”


25. Christina stepped out of the road, the president’s windows rolled back up, and the motorcade went on its way.


26. But ain’t none of us heard any more nonsense about walling off the portal.

Random quote of the day:

“I don’t know if the world is run by smart men who are…putting us on, or by imbeciles who really mean it.”

—Laurence J. Peter, The Peter Principle
(often misattributed to Mark Twain)

 

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Siegfried and Roy, Leonard Maltin, or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

Random quote of the day:

“You can’t change someone’s mind if they don’t have one.”

—Bill Maher, Real Time With Bill Maher, October 2, 2009

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Siegfried and Roy, Leonard Maltin, or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

Random quote of the day:

“Everyone who thinks that I am a mystic is just an idiot.”

—Carl Jung, interview with Richard I. Evans, Professor of Psychology, University of Houston, 1957

 

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Siegfried and Roy, Leonard Maltin, or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

Random quote of the day:

“Rogues are preferable to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.”

—attributed to Alexandre Dumas (both père and fils)

 

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Siegfried and Roy, Leonard Maltin, or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.