on cling wrap and guns

It’s time these Pokes woke up, for there is much to poke. Originally I had intended for them to be a place to replicate the sort of sometimes acerbic, sometimes playful commentary I used to make first in the Central Western Sunday paper in central New South Wales, then in Allan Reeder’s Market-Place across Anglican Australia. I thought I’d reproduce my pew sheet commentary for a wider readership (if anyone clicked by). Perhaps I still will, and perhaps this will be a place for more astringent comment still, though I will never quite reach the skills of Georgia Lewis’ The Rant Mistress or robyncadwallader’s Write in Pencil Only. I note, too, Robyn’s far less narcissistic title! Still, it’s time this sleeping microbe re-awoke, so that my penmanship is not spent merely on Broken Moments and its long and potentially soporific homiletic.

So here I am, in downtown Loveland, Colorado, attending a conference that has been illuminating mostly for the wrong reasons but illuminating nevertheless, muttering profanities about stewed US coffee, observing snippets of the Great Hegemonists’ kulcha, and preparing once more to engage on the micro On The Road adventure that so far (pre-conference) took me from Chicago to Denver via Presho (as you do), exposed me to the Badlands and Wall Drug (and I could tell you which was badder, which was more devoid of goodness, in my books)and Mount Rushmore, and which will now hurtle me across the I80 back to Chicago.

US sport (though thanks to mine hosts I did manage to watch the All Blacks annihilate Les Bleus) has bemused me, US cuisine fattened me, and did I mention US Coffee? US politics has frightened me, US geography exhilarated me, and ironically my 700+ song shuffle has taken me again and again, 90% of the time, back into the voluntary hegemony of US colonialism. Well: except for “Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep.” That was British. Don’t ask.

I won’t even go into the complexities of a society which wraps its apples (at least in this motel) in cling wrap for fear of salmonella contagion, but allows children to carry guns, presumably as part of the well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State. Nope, I won’t go there, because I want to get out of Loveland alive, and who knows when I might want to visit Presho once again?

So the sleeping microbe has stirred, and while you’ve escaped most of my ruminations on the delights of downtown Presho, South Dakota (a town that after some thought reminded me uncannily of Augathella in south-west Queensland), I will now surface more regularly, with whimsy and acid, to titillate the pixels of your iWorld (or execrable alternative).