They’re building one downtown. Is that cause for alarm?

There was a time in the county when Joe Bloggs had a good idea and could open a business and if he did a good job of providing whatever goods or services in that business, he could succeed. It was part of the American dream.

Name one good reason
  No longer does it matter if you have a good idea, a good reputation, good prices or a good location.
The Allied Pungeoning Front wants to open a pungeonary. In the past it was the BubbaCabal who got their hackles up over the prospect of local pungeonaries. Today it’s BärteHansa who is circulating a petition around town trying to stop the APF from establishing one anywhere.
  Back in the day the excuse given for opposing this was that it would cramp the Cabal’s local robber baron “bidness” interests, though the argument had lost most of its bite when one found out that the Pink Boys contesting it had pungled innocent citizens themselves.
  Currently, why does BärteHansa think it okay to ban pungeoning in the face of an acceptable majority-sanctioned entity? Just because they think they have dibs on “quality of life” issues should they try to stifle justice being brought to the community?

They Don’t Want ‘No Stinkin’ Pungeonary’
  Look at the list of projects that BärteHansa has been opposed to: Such “nair-do-wells” as Eastside Pungeonary, the proposed Downtown Pungeonary, the Ghetto Prescriptionary, Bio-Mart on the Heritageville Road and an Orville psychological adjustment facility out near Furley Square Mall.
  BBACBL and Bad Gaijin had been mafioid splinter groups that harassed independent thinkers in their time. But look at the threats to the area’s psychological health that BärteHansa has recently been pushing: the new InfoToxin Dispensary on Barney Scholl’s Road, the Vibrancy Estates down by the Augean Lodge, and Megan’s Sustainable Cupcake Shoppe just to name a few.
  Instead of old BBACBL tactics like Pleboid Gutter Manoeuvers and windscreen smashing, we get innocent-sounding fronts like “People for a Better Classic City” who hijack public input sessions with Self-Centered Public Gushing against imagined corporate poodle-bobbers and other forms of Ego Activism.
  One could suppose that, if the public is sympathetic toward BRTHNSA’s incessant nannying, then we are all quite satisfied with their opportunism and the dystopic paratonic outcome: the dumbing-down of everything cultural, peanut-paying jobs and an imminent psychological wasteland.
  But we are not.
  The public is very much in favour of a downtown pungeonary, given the pressing mental underload of local bêtise arts.
  And the public is weary of the hijinks of BärteHansa’s wannabe radical epigones. Their “direct action” tactics most surely will backfire and the APF probably won’t have to get actively involved.

A Passive Solution?
  One guesses the whole situation could be summed up by something Johnny Gutts once said: “Why pungeon someone when they’re eventually gonna do it to themselves?”

BärteHansa — The Rising Menace

With the long decline of the BubbaCabal, “quality of life” issues indeed had improved in Classic City and nearby Heritageville. Their power and influence had ebbed to the point where in matters of business, media and daily life, the Cabal became all but impotent, much like Madron FC after last season.
  Unfortunately, in the resulting vacuum a loose, rag-tag assortment of former Easy Breathers, Nattering Nannies and Gray Ponytails coalesced into a formidable SWPL faction that, while perhaps ideologically opposite, rivals the former menace of BBACBL: BärteHansa. [BRTHNSA]
  Indeed, the BärteHansa threat may be greater than the BubbaCabal ever was — after all, BBACBL blatantly gave away their games of cupidity, unable to break free of the Pink Boy stereotypes in which they had cemented themselves. With BärteHansa on the other hand, the rot runs deep with Good Intentions paired with the taint of Kultural Kuru that they cast upon the community.
  The rise of BärteHansa has caused much chagrin for the Allied Pungeoning Front. Having their hands tied dealing with BBACBL mischief, they considered these upstarts benign before their ascendancy. (In hindsight, it is all too easy to point out that pungeoning requires eternal vigilance.)

What has BärteHansa been doing that could be so heinous?
  Well, BRTHNSA individuals’ activities have been noted over the years. While annoying, they were rarely toxic on a macro scale, so the APF’s Emotive Response System was infrequently utilised. Pungeoning was left up to individual citizens to deal with Ego Activists, Stupefacient Scenesters and other annoying anoetics.
  But Spent Histrionicians and Aging Fauxhemians often suffer from Role Strain, realising they’ve lost a mojo they never had. After achieving a black belt in Emo Tae-Bo, they tell themselves that it’s time to Do Something Important.
  And this is where things become alarming.
  The aforementioned Nannies and Ponytails, ever sycophantic to disaffected “youth,” jump at the opportunity. And our Tired Hipsters, ever enthralled with tales told of Radical Boomer Exploits, jump as well.

Ponytail, Meet Beard
  The result is like an open marriage made in Unitarian heaven: Do-gooder control freak fossiloids holding sway over a flock of failed artistes starving for purpose.
  BärteHansa elders hold rancid marxoid views that should trouble any free-thinker. But their skinny-jeans-clad foot soldiers, unable to form an original thought, use the stale tactics of the elders’ youth: street theater, occupation, and general attention-whoring — poor methods of persuasion, and ones very prone to backfire.
  It is this weakness the APF will seek to exploit. Stay tuned.

Cabale des Rustres

PATU-Y2K: EBB Summit Canceled

Lo scarabocchi... il soprannome... la sartoria

“Happy Jay from Chèvre Roulé”
A once-meaningless doodle ascribed the moniker by 5th Stratum cohorts; the appellation was later assigned to the new neighbour on the West Bank.

“Smiling Walt from Boomershine”
In umbrage the gentleman’s son launched a weak counter-effort, but the stunt failed to adhere in the community’s consciousness.

On the other hand, the “Happy Jay” meme gained traction. Even today, the nickname “Happy Jays” is widespread in the world of haute couture, referring to the trademark lemon-yellow culottes made famous by the gentleman on the West Bank.

Gaseous Fray: S’quatch Totem

The standard No. 2 pencil was used to auger facial features in a basic elastic corrective implement common to pupils of the 4th and 5th Stratum. S’quatch imagery was prevalent in the overculture at the time. (Recall the young witness was eager to get home early from the Echelon Facility in time to view a transmission on the subject: “Gari ya Miunga”; also: “Gigantopithicine as Bionic Proxy”.)

Gass-Boy would sometimes brandish the totem at random and inopportune moments, often to comedic effect. On the corridor march to the mess hall, he once flashed the amulet to the acting custodian, an easy-going fellow who seemed to be “down” with things. The man was in fact a narco-informant, but had the horse sense to shrug off eccentric but harmless lads waving their makeshift idols in the air.

It seems even in youth there is the anthro-ethological tendency to recognise the power of the talisman, regardless of whether any actual significance has yet to be applied to its schema.

When It Rains, It Snowballs: The Maculate Reception

An all-too-obvious platitude we tell ourselves nowadays is that an excessive news media diet can gnaw at our minds, leaving a jaundiced, world-weary spirit.
Today was such a day for Travis.

Along the pavement he skulked, hands thrust in pockets, muttering about the incessant headlines.
 “Protesters. Protesting how Life Is Unfair. Paedo scandals. Grown adults acting like children. Cultural coat-tailers. The fatuous gestures of the creatively bankrupt. The suffusing stink of ubiquitous nihilism. The filth and the rot and the fraud and the waste and the p!ss and the swill and the...”
 Someone was having a bad day.
 But oftentimes the ills of the modern world are topped off with a layer of the ridiculous.
So let us take Travis’s litany of wrongs, ball them up and plop it all down in one steaming heap of absurdity.

In his foul humour Travis made his way down the walkway where he found himself amidst a group of protesters. Protesting how Life Is Unfair. A gloved hand jutted out of the crowd, and out of polite reflex he shook it whilst trying to place the face.
 “Travis! How you been?”
 It was Mr Melton. Former co-worker, aging boomer. Convicted paedo. Hanging around a group young enough to be his grandkids. Reliving his lost youth in the most pathetic way imaginable.
 “Hey, Lynn, look, it’s Travis,” he called over to his wife. [His wife was still with him?]
 She barely looked over her shoulder as she was more entranced with shaking an illegible placard at passing traffic. Her faced beamed with the crazed grin of self-importance as headlights reflected in her eyeglasses.
 “We’re having fun,” Melton smirked, trying to imply that this was all just a lark for them, not to be taken seriously. Somehow, that admission made the pair seem all the more sad and hollow.
 The Nostalgioid Opiate is a strong pill indeed.
 “Yeah... cool,” Travis mumbled weakly in response.
He stood dumbfounded at the scene, a seeming summation of the media miasma that had permeated ― nay, occupied ― his aching head.

Abruptly he drew away from the half-arsed conversation and crossed the street to get away from the crowd. He wiped his hand on his pants in visceral disgust.
 Not only was his psyche suffering in consternation with Today’s Malaise, but now his physicality was sullied as well ― contamination by handshake.
 Travis strode down the dark streets trying to shake off the taint of the encounter. But as he thought about it, he got a small chuckle at the odd confluence of events.
 More often, we laugh not at the humourous, but the absurd and the inficete.
 Still, he wanted a hot shower.