Quaint Vignettes From My Charming Rural Idyll

 Holy shit - did King Charles just abdicate?  We got the news five minutes ago (5 - 28 - 26  8:50AM). 

If so, and if this isn't just AI bullshit, then somewhere out in the real world, Vicus Scurra is dancing a jig. 

Miss you, buddy.

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Dementia

I keep thinking I see celebrities driving past here.  Once it was someone who was the absolute spitting image of Guy Fieri, hair and all, in a black Durango.  Another time it was The Rock.  

The other day I could have sworn I'd seen Caitlyn Doughty go by. 

It's been very puzzling. Kind of like when you have a dream, and in it there's some third-tier celebrity from the Seventies, and you wake up wondering "What on Earth brought Jeff Conaway to mind, of all people?" and it's weird.  "Why would The Rock be visiting Fruitland Idaho?" is what you have to think at times like that.  Although people should wonder that a lot more often than they probably do. 

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OO! Take a Look at My Stuff!

Check out the working!!! blender wot I got for $10.00 at a recycled building material store:

OMG it's so awesome and no, you can't see me in the reflection.     

Looky at this toaster I got from the original owners elderly grandson, way out in the sagebrush at a garage sale, for $5.00:

does it work? there's no effin' way I'm plugging the thing in, so we'll never know.    

Honestly, Idaho is a TRIP.  What I run across out here just at garage sales, just, like, lying on a sheet in someone's driveway, or digging through boxes in someone's garage, is mind boggling. And the prices - even in a retail antique place -are just wham, plotz, game over, ding ding ding WOW fade to the '70's unbelievable.  I could go so broke here. SO broke.

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Nothing so poignant as evidence of decades - long economic decline

There are few things quite as bleak as a dying small town in Idaho. Most of the old town centers nearby -  Weiser, New Plymouth, Nyssa, Parma, Emmet - are cored out and grim. The soaring Gothic banks, the Deco diners, the old fraternal lodges, 

here's one in Weiser. Knights of Pythias, Myrtle Lodge No. 26   

all empty now, boarded up, or filled with the hulks of rusty stripped cars and broken farm equipment. Grand Victorian homes, long gone to seed, have been added onto over the decades in increasingly eccentric segments until they resemble favelas (which describes Parma to a T, as long as I'm being all lyrical and shit.) Many of the narrow streets are so old that what began as a dirt track back in the Pre-Clovis is once again becoming a dirt track, not because the paving is broken, but because it has worn away.

All the old visual Western movie cliches are alive and well. It feels like deja vu, driving down some unnaturally quiet main street made up of Old West buildings, a line of vultures sunning themselves on a fence rail, a tumbleweed drifting across your path on a dusty wind. But then, as is inevitable here, you'll run into the local Stinker Station, 

get gas at the stinker!  geddit? geddit?     

bringing that perfect touch of class to Idaho's roadsides since 1936

...and yep, you're back to the future, and there's a skunk.

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Now you should go to WalMart and buy a box of these:

Eat a big ol' bowl and get back to me.