Tag Archives: fireworks

Usual Rubbish

No quarter.

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I don’t remember this room being this cramped. For crying out loud, what did they do to this place? Where’s my plastic furniture? I was weeks collecting that bedroom set!

Oh well … there’s bound to be a few glitches in any complex negotiation. The important thing is, we’re back, baby! We’ve won the right to squat in our beloved Cheney Hammer Mill once again. And when I say “beloved”, well … that’s a relative term. Next to the potting shed we’ve been crammed into all summer, the mill is a veritable palace. Sure, we have to share it with lunatics, but even that’s not unprecedented. (Just take a look through our back pages and you’ll see what I’m talking about.)

All that said, there are a few restrictions on what we’re going to be able to do as residents of the mill from here on out. Maybe it was a mistake to deputize Anti-Lincoln as our chief negotiator with the crazy upstairs neighbors. Our main thought was that he was, after all, an old country lawyer … or the antimatter equivalent of one. It’s that second element we didn’t fully consider. Antimatter country lawyer means the opposite of country lawyer … so, I don’t know … city outlaw? In any case, Anti-Lincoln didn’t come away with the better part of THAT deal.

So this is what we have to deal with:

No Tap Dancing. Okay, this shouldn’t be a problem for anyone except Marvin (my personal robot assistant), who has brass feet and sounds like he’s tap dancing when he’s just walking across the floor.

No Cops. Again, not a problem for most of us … in fact, a positive benefit for some … like Anti-Lincoln, who is (as mentioned earlier) an outlaw.

Nah, none of that, Marvin., thanks to old honest Abe, here.

No Boiled Asparagus. This is getting up my nose a bit. Unfortunately, when I complained about it, our nasty neighbors stuffed raw asparagus up my nose.

Mandatory Clapping for Fireworks. I think I may have mentioned that our upstairs neighbors love a nice fireworks display. Apparently they want to spread the love around a little. And when I say “spread”, what I really mean is enforce through the power of contract law.

No Loose Coins. I can’t figure this one out at all. They prefer that we use paper money. What the hell am I going to do with that barrel full of quarters I’ve been filling since third grade? That’s my retirement, people!

Those are the highlights. There’s more, but I’ll save it until I locate my plastic side table. Thieves!

Usual Rubbish

Fire works.

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Jesus. You can READ by it, for crying out loud. When the hell are they going to run out of bottle rockets? Where the hell are the cops? Oh, right … we’re off the books. Never mind.

Another late night here at the previously abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill in upstate New York, our adopted squathouse of longstanding and that of a pack of crazy people with a fondness for pyrotechnic displays. Our upstairs neighbors appear to be celebrating some obscure personal holiday this week, marking the occasion with obscene displays of fireworks over the mill every night and raucous drinking, dancing, fist-fights, etc., in the afternoons. At least they’re quiet for a few hours in the morning, when they are apparently sleeping off the previous night’s bender, but that’s short-lived.  And here we are again, at 2 in the morning, blinded by the rockets’ red glare, deafened by bombs bursting in air. (And strangely, the flag was still there … their family flag, with some strange runic symbols on it. Very creepy.)

Actually, our mad science advisor Mitch Macaphee has a plan to oust the new squatters. He’s starting to get annoyed, and that’s never a good thing with Mitch. We’ve been asking him to formulate something … anything that might, I don’t know, calm them down or something, make them civilized. For weeks, he kept giving us the same old bromide about it being far easier for us as civilized men to behave like savages than it was for them as savages to behave like civilized men.  (Mitch gets philosophical at times, but only to the extent that it may be expressed in terms of Star Trek dialogue.) Then they dropped a cherry bomb into his bedroom, and sophistry was out the window.

Yeah, great, Mitch. Just watch the trophy case.

I think it’s fair to point out at this juncture that Mitch has a lot of tricks up his sleeve. Granted, Marvin (my personal robot assistant) was one of those tricks, and as such, is not terribly impressive by automaton standards. Still, this is a guy who can make whole continents disappear. Not real good at making them come back again, but then half a loaf is better than no bread at all. We are encouraging him not to go too, too far. Most of what he’s suggested thus far is fire-related: atomic flame throwers, combustible gases, etc. He has taken up residence on the second floor, in the room right under their master bedroom, so …. if there are any vacancies at the mill in the next week or so, we’ll let you know.