Putting the 'dugong' back in Christdugongmas!

 Good lord, the crowds out there!  The teeming hordes have all crawled out of their dens, pale as maggots, and descended on every retail outlet here in my part of the planet.  It's like a state fair, where all the weird people you've never, ever met, but who clearly live nearby, come shambling out of the forest like lost Innsmouthians, slavering after deep fried Twinkies and corndogs.

It takes centuries of inbreeding with fish-humanoids who worship Dagon to produce a grandmother like this, and dammit, she wants waffle fries with her fried twinkies.

I do not miss The Reddest Corner of the Bluest State at all when it comes to shopping.  Yes, the crowds were thinner, but they were made up of white folks busy policing everyone else's morals, 

 

Look at the joy on those faces.  LOOK AT IT.  

folks with too much religion wearing MAGA hats, and they had truck nuts on their vehicles. On a farm truck this form of ornamentation is barely excusable, but on the family sedan it's just heartrending.  

I really have felt like a kind of social weight has been lifted from my shoulders here in town.  I live in an area with two colleges nearby, so there's a lot of diversity, a lot of young energy, and a huge out and proud LGBTQ+ community too.  Many, many hippies. Big pagan presence. Many, many people from places other than Holland.  It's wonderful!  Example:  I can exclaim 'Shit!' absentmindedly and nobody looks at me as though I'd just shot a loop of gut out my ass!  I CAN WEAR MY FRANKIE SAYS RELAX t-shirt and people laugh! And talk to me! About the Eighties! Not about how God disapproves of butt sex!

We've been doing a pile of necessary shopping amid all the holiday preppers.  Most of it's just been replacing things we lost in the flood, which was kind of boring (Oo, a blender.  Oo, a toaster.  Oo bedding.)  But now the bulk of that is finished, and we've been able to turn our thoughts more toward Christdugongmas and gifts and thank-you cards, and it's starting to be fun again. 

                                     'Merry Christdugongmas!  Ho ho holy shit I'm drowning!'

Retail is nice.  I have nothing against retail.  But thrift stores are more fun, and the thrift shopping out in this area of Bellingham is fuckin' nuts, y'all.  There are warehouse sized places, small places, weird places, smelly places, clothes only places, machinery and tool - only places, shit; I could keep going but you either get the picture, or you don't care.  I've picked up so many high-end items for so cheap lately it's stupid.  And that stock revolves, let me tell you.  Not a week goes by that they haven't all completely turned their inventory!

And here's something that kind of blew me away, now that I'm back in the new and improved, bigger, better, faster Bellingham I've found that in my absence apparently all of Bellingham has become a Designated Wildlife Corridor.  There are warning signs everywhere.  I've seen more of Gods lil' critters here in a week than I did in a month out Sumas way. Deer! Birds galore! The fattest, sleekest squirrels you've ever seen, like real American squirrels that need to go on a damn diet and stop wearing tennis shoes everywhere! 

Back in 1985, when we first lived in Bellingham, there were the occasional deer, black bear and cougars (the Wilderness Death Kitty kind) roaming around at night right in downtown, and since it invariably follows that where there's deer - and there sure in the fuck are some damn deer  - 

                                                 Yes. Not even kidding.  Like this.  Don't they look tasty?  

- there will also be black bear and Wilderness Death Kitties, I can but surmise that there are now more black bears and Wilderness Death Kitties out there too to go along with all the freakin' damn deer. 

'And we're just the vanguard! Let's not forget about coyotes, mink, wolverines, bobcat, martens, velociraptors and bass!'  

It's just like living in downtown Portland Oregon again! (sniffle)

And let me make the same parallel when it comes to nutty people.  I haven't seen so many free-range nutty people since I left Portland multiple decades of years ago.  (Don't make me count on my fingers, just move on.)  Portland back in the 1970's was overflowing with floridly nutty motherfuckers.  So too is Bellingham lo these many years later.  And the odd thing about the nutty population is:   if they're wearing a lot of pink?  Man or woman, they're meth heads.  I've had lots of people tell me the same thing, and it matches up with my observations. Apparently you ingest a certain amount of meth over time and bammo, you're weird as shit and in the girls' apparel aisle shoplifting tutus.  Meth heads love them some pink clothes.  Dora the Explorer-themed togs are au courant among the meth set, followed by Barbie anything and Glitter Girls. I do not know what this is about, but it's killed my urge to try meth once just to see what it's like.

And remember the motto of Christdugongmas:  Don't chew on your mother, even if she's already dead.

I Am Still Here

 I would have gone for the 'I Am Alive!' gambit but I'm writing this on my phone, and I can barely manage as it is in this tiny format.

Well, we are still moving in to our new apartment, and I cannot express how incredibly convenient our location is!  While still being wooded!  And scenic!  Or as scenic as the Wood Hood gets.

Yup, we went with the Wood Hood apartment.  Turns out the old cess pit has gentrified some.  Our building is very secure, very modern, and the landlord is fantastic.

Tell ya what, I am liking all this 21st century doings.  The whole place stays warm, for starters.  I don't have to huddle in the front room by the gas heater and pray for summer.  And this whole notion of energy efficiency and the roof not leaking is the cat's tits!  All six of them!  CATS HAVE SIX TITS AND ALL OF THEM ARE AWESOME!!!!

The Biker found a $500 work beater, and it's great. The only problem is that it has km instead of miles on the speedometer, and a bitch does not know metric.  I am a Murrican.  I don't need to know metric.  That's what they told us on sixth grade. We didn't need to know metric OR geography, because Murricans.  We only needed to memorize all the counties in our state and then it was off to play sports!  Because sports are important!  Like cat tits!

Anyway, this makes the thing problematic for me to drive, because it's so much more easy to leadfoot the gas when the speedo is telling you that your happy ass is moving at a tremendous rate of speed.  Driving is a competition sport, as we all know, or at least as far as I'm concerned because I never learned geography.  And I'm determined to win, for the cats.

I BREAK THE SPEED LIMITS FOR THE CATS.   

Imagine that you are a cat-ess and all you have are four tits.  Now imagine all the baby cats out there fighting like Marines every meal time because their mothers have no thumbs and can't spoon feed them, or even hold a bottle of vodka to numb the pain?  Insufficient nipplage is no joke if you're a mommy cat, and baby cats don't know metric because they don't speak English as far as anyone knows.  And that's why I must break the speed limit. I have thumbs.  I use them.  To drive.  And I use all my other assorted fingerage too.  You can take that to the bank, Paco.