Election day recap

I keep alluding to the fact that I’ve been working too much, meaning the blogging nonsense has to take a back seat. And I see my professional exploits made Page 2 of the Citizens’ Voice. No, I was not named or interviewed in that story, but the high-rise in question has been my pest control domain of late.

The thing is, even though I am a specialist who’s responsibility is the detection and exclusion of subterranean termites from structures small, tall, old and new, this bed bug epidemic is suddenly getting out of hand. A couple of years ago, bed bugs were something we studied just in case. And now, a select few of us are fast becoming experts on them.

Get this, Halloween night, with women and children making their rounds up and down the street, some jackass appears and does a brake stand down the street with his rice burner, ground effects, asinine muffler, ridiculous rear spoiler and all. Nice. Women pulling their kids back out of fear.

So I sauntered on down there and rapped on his passenger side window with an expandable baton. In all honestly, I’m surprised the window didn’t shatter into nothingness. Er, disappointed I was.

Well, this is what getting older and wiser does to a former madman. Twenty years ago, I would have gleefully punched that side window out, emergency room or no emergency room. But now, alas, now I’m, um, civilized. Sucks, it does.

Anywho, the Latino guy in the driver’s seat lowered the window about two inches (pussy), said something unintelligible and he looked kind of worried. And what I shouted at him would cause NEPA’s resident Latino apologist, WILK’s Steve Corbett, to faint dead away.

To say it was politically incorrect and then some would be an understatement rivaling all known understatements. It was downright provocative in a pussy-whipped, easily-led country on the decline.

Basically, he had two choices: split or get your head, face and who knows what else split. So he split. And rather quickly, too.

That’s what I thought, tough (rice burner) guy!!!

Nothing oxymoronic about that, the tough guy in the hopped-up Neon. No?

I had a phone conversation with controller-elect Walter Griffith the morning before election day. Very, very early on. Even before Sue Henry got to cackling about the election. We covered a wide range of topics including my utter disdain for one of his two opponents. We talked about the waste. The still bloated county government. And the red ink that seems to ebb and flow from the courthouse much like the acid-tinged mine water seeps up from the soil in these here parts.

The ghost jobs. The county official caught selling cars during the daytime. Who still does, by the way. The polka queen who thinks we’re all too completely stupid to follow that she works part-time at her supposedly full-time job. The football player turned inept commissioner. The inept minority commissioner too short to play football. And the newest of the inept commissioners who always seems to say and do the right things, even while the county teeters on the edge of the financial abyss.

And I reminded him that during my management days, when I was considered hyper-aggression but extremely effective at controlling costs and generating profits, I reminded him that the key to controlling costs was by taking things personally. The best way to protect and secure the assets of your employer is to pretend that those assets are yours, that you own them. And in Walter’s case, now that he’s been elected, in effect, those assets--our tax dollars--are his. And ours.

As far as I’m concerned, Walter has taken the profligate spending of our elected and appointed misfits personally for quite some time now. But I figured that he’d win the election day scrum quite handily and then be showered with attention and praise and adulation and Allah only knows what. So I just wanted to remind him what led him to this fateful day…taking it personally.

Funny though, as different as we may be in constitution, habit and what have you, he reminded me that we are kindred souls in that we’ve both been making tons of noise for many years now. That we have. And hopefully, the majority of the noise will be coming from him from here on out.

Election day recap:

I arrived at Dan Flood Elementary by 6:55, voted, and departed at 7:09. Not bad. Easy. Voter #3 I was, with a line of 7 more waiting on behind me.

Makes you wonder why more folks can’t manage a vote. Makes me wonder why 191,041 people register to do a thing, but only a third of them follow though. Apathetic pretenders. Do-nothing complainers. Dumb-asses motivated only when Hope & Change snake oil salesmen come to town promising Utopian fixes and taxpayer-supported gifts. Whiners who mistakenly think registering to vote actually counts as some sort of tally in itself.

For row officers, I went all republican. You know it.

For the Wilkes-Barre school board, I voted for Christine Katsock and Harry Hass and that’s it. No votes for incumbents. Sorry, but the decades-long rumors and the taint that is wholesale indictments makes me wish that all of the incumbents had the mettle to do the right thing and just walk away.

Judges? I voted for Hughes and Amesbury. I voted for Hughes because he is not a Luzerne County Democrat, and I voted for Amesbury because with his somewhat advanced age comes a built-in term limit. Good guys both, so it seems. And Tina Gartley seems to have deserved my vote as well.

On the judge retention votes I voted no and then a resounding no. I’m still not buying the insufferably laughable bit about nobody knowing nothing while perfectly fine kids were being warehoused for money. I’m not buying it.

I wrote in David Yonki’s name for jury commissioner, as did a couple of my coworkers at my request. But after seeing that awful picture of those hideous shorts, I might demand a recall. Something or other. Last time I vote as I’m instructed to do.

Dude, what is up with that?

And that’s all I got. That’s my election day recounting.

With that said, it feels uplifting to have a couple of republican row officers in waiting, even though one of them seems ungrateful and vengeful for whatever unimaginable reason. It feels empowering to think that we’ve actually got a two-party system in this county again. And it makes me hopeful for the future knowing that Renita Fennick is tirelessly working to make this a two-horse race for the foreseeable future.

CHS ‘76, baby!!!

Renita, you did it your way. The legitimate way. I did it my way. The brazen, oft-acerbic, internet in-your-face way. Fred Williams did it his way, via the zircon-encrusted microphone. For me, people such as Nancy Kemp, Ambrose Meletsky (the Mickey Mantle of Luzerne County activists) and Mary Camp were the noise-making pioneers. They caused us, they motivated us to eventually find our way. Still others like Walter Griffith did it their way. As Walter alluded to during our phone conversation, we’re all kindred souls of sorts.

But in the end, no matter our varied and dogged approaches, all that matters now is that we get ourselves a responsive, a responsible and a completely transparent government.

Renita, if I can help at all, feel free to use me.

Later