Small Town Grievances 34: Survey For The Emotionally Slimed
Small Town Grievances 34: A Survey For The Emotionally Slimed
Citizen,
If you have received this questionnaire it is because you requested one after undertaking some trial or psychic torment during one of the town’s recent calamities. Alternatively, you or a loved one in your home has registered with town hall as being one or more of the following (circle all that apply): weeper; sobber; misty eyed Mary; chronic sufferer in need of succour; tender chin; sleepless sausage; spiritually exploded; earthly mortal (terminal); unmarriable rodeo hound; victim of video rental syndrome.
These options have been pulled from town’s most common complaints. It is important that you answer each question with honesty and grace, and return the questionnaire to the Survey Board before everybody forgets about it. Please clearly mark which answer best applies to you in normal pen or pencil and leave the questionnaire somewhere obvious for a Survey Board representative to find, such as under a colourful stone or ingot, or a peach pie left to cool on a windowsill.
Please do not bury it, even if it looks obvious to your trained eyes, even if you mark it clearly with a cross of dog’s bones. The survey board is exhausted and constantly unwell. It is medically incapable of digging. It is a single married couple.
Forgive us. If you have a human heart you will forgive us.
Question 1: In what way have you been personally affected by the council’s Shadow Oaf Initiative (one day each month a vastly inept and underqualified worker is given an important municipal job to show how competent the town’s employees are and how much worse the situation could be by comparison)?
Shadow Sheriff hitched his giant car via a long thin chain to a gas fitting in my townhouse in an attempt to shift my family a little closer to church but only succeeded in starting one of those fires that can never be put out.
One or more Shadow Garbagemen honked loudly on their cheap imported bugles and demanded we all rise for “The National Anthem of Shit” before they would take away our decaying Christmas tree, which they said must have been bought from "the Distressed Man Superstore”. Is this a real place?
Shadow Mayor is abusing his cherry-picker privileges. He refuses to say if he has passed the required two-afternoon accreditation course, descending and ascending at violent and uncontrolled speeds. This has given him visible injuries to his ankles and hands. Shadow Mayor claims to be enormously under age, apparently still possessing most or all of his baby teeth, though this seems unlikely.
I have directly benefited from the Shadow Oaf Initiative or am myself a member of the Brotherhood of Oafs.
Question 2: Have you spotted or been approached by the Door-to-Door Healer in or near town in the last 12 months? If so, what was your experience?
The Door-to-Door Healer came into my home for a consultation but spent the entire time speaking too quietly to be heard and making bedroom eyebrows at my fancy expensive mantlepiece bible, which I don’t even like.
The Door-To-Door Healer told me to watch out for the bee that had allegedly landed on my arm. I saw no bee but cannot deny I felt distinctly its fearsome sting. For this he charged me $70.
The Door-to-Door Healer stared into my mouth like I was a barnyard object. “What are these, braces?” he asked me. I have never received orthodontics or any other dental attention. He had not introduced himself, and I only recognised who he was because he was showing off his famously red veins.
I saw the Door-To-Daw Healer but he was working in another capacity -- e.g. short-term mercenary besieging the water birds that have made the community college’s tsunami machine their personal maternity ward; sullen school bus driver with competing medications evident on red-veined face.
Question 3: During last season’s floods were you and your family able to enjoy refuge in the town’s Lord Horrible Tyres And Body Repair Community Apocalypse Ark?
NO, my family had alternative ark arrangements or otherwise met town buoyancy regulations.
NO, my neighbourhood Ark Warden stood ultra wide-legged across the entire length of our designated entry plank and would not grant access to my family unless we pledged money to one of the pathetic charity initiatives his daughter is mounting, an ugly attempt to reform her image after she made the news for bringing a dagger into the zoo’s rare lizard enclosure.
YES, though we were unnerved by the Ark’s rushed construction. There were many loose hooks and manglers and we became damaged.
UNCLEAR. While I attempted to take refuge on the Community Apocalypse Ark I may have been unwittingly ferried into a local business made up to imitate the ark, such as a grey-market meat restaurant or illegal geode syndicate.
Question 4: What feeling, if any, does this image provoke in you?
It is tolerable for now but I fear it will change me in time.
I cannot view it for more than an instant.
I haven’t looked at it. I don’t need to. I have known it my whole life.
I am in this image or otherwise hold the rights to it.
Question 5: God, it’s going to rain again.
How are you supposed to tell? Is there a way?
It’s not normal during this or any time of the year, I’ll grant.
Have faith in the insane pilot we contracted to seed the sky with anti-silver (?) in exchange for any five burial plots of his choosing (empty or filled) in the far-away cemetery, which you can’t even visit in the summer for the screaming of the fucking cicadas.
God, and I only just put my paper out…
You think I care about that? You don’t think I have my own problems? Neither my children or pets will sit down. They have been standing for months. And do you think there’s a hotline for that? Do you think there’s a place for me? If you think there’s help for people like us you have another thing coming.
Bonus zone: As many have requested, the following space can be used to note down any dreams you have recently experienced. Please be aware that nobody will truly free you of them unless the army invents something before these findings are published in next weekend’s Wretched Sunday Lift-out.
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Read the full Small Town Grievances archive.
More of this mess at jackvening.net