East Coast Earthquake

 

The thing is, I did not feel the earthquake that has so discombobulated the East Coast this morning, Really. I did not feel the thing at all. I was sitting in my comfortable chair at work minding my own business and the earth moved and I did not realize that the earth had moved. Having missed the earth moving, I simply went on with my bureaucratic life as if nothing had happened because for me, nothing had. Well, better luck next time, I suppose. And that was that, or at least that was what I thought. 

Apparently, not feeling the earth move during an earthquake is a sign of diminished mental capacity. People kept coming into the egregious mold pit wherein I labor for my daily bread and demanding to know how I coped with the great East Coast earthquake of 2024 and were deeply shocked that I coped with the massive catastrophe by not realizing it was happening at the time. Now, I would understand this lack of insight on my part if the quake was an event on the order of the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 or the Tokyo earthquake of 1923—it would take several deep hits off of a very large bong with incredibly strong weed to ignore disasters as large as those—but it wasn’t; from what I understand the quake measured 4.8 on the Richter scale, which several people from California have assured me is the planetary version of mild heartburn and not something to be worried about at all. Trees shook, plates rattled, pets were perturbed, and that was about it. The East Coast has hurricanes that do all of that and more, and in the winter we have nor’easters that leave you and yours up to your backsides in freezing cold mucky water, an altogether unpleasant experience. I am still pumping water out of my cellar from our last meteorological misadventure.

My guess is that it was the novelty of this intense non-disaster that has impressed itself on everyone’s mind. We don’t get a lot of earthquakes here in the Vampire State; the last one that I remember hereabouts was when the Attorney General managed to push the Governor out of office on sexual harassment charges, which people tell me is not the same thing at all, although I am certain that it was the same thing to the Governor. He was planning to run for re-election for the umpteenth time, but as Mr. Burns says, the best-laid plans of mice and men aft times gang agley. For years I had no clue what an agley was; I thought an agley was some sort of French cookie before an out of breath Scottish tourist stumbled into this place looking for a men's room and told me what it meant in the post-micturation interview where I told him how to get to the train station.

Be that as it may, many of the patrons of this mycological sinkhole regarded my insensitivity to the travails of Mother Earth as somewhat odd, given their own traumatic experiences, but I must say that insensitivity to what is going on around me is something people have been accusing me of for more years than I care to remember. The accusers are usually women, for some reason or another, teachers and librarians and other strange females that I became involved with in bars who decided that they did not like me anymore. I was never sure what the problem was, but it was usually something about not paying attention to their feelings. I thought I was paying attention, but my perception was clearly off as I am an insensitive lout. I know that because people, and by people I mean women, keep telling me that I am and who am I to argue with such a widespread and deeply held opinion? I do wish, however, that my mother would stop agreeing with them. It's an uncomfortable feeling when a boy can't be sure that his mom has his back.

 

Notice of intent

Just popping here to let you guys know that there is, in fact, stuff on the way, and no, I am not making that up. Not right now, of course, but certainly by Sunday, I think. Until then, enjoy the comforts of hearth and home, kith and kin, this and that, you get my drift. Meanwhile, here in the Vampire State, the leaders of both the State Senate (a Republican) and the State Assembly (a Democrat) are both under indictment for being more crooked than a pig's penis. Bipartisanship, it's a wonderful thing.

UPDATE: I am sitting here at my desk in the egregious mold pit wherein I labor for my daily bread.  This is not unusual; I often sit at my desk here, except when I go for lunch, whereupon I will leave my desk and this building behind in a valiant but ultimately futile attempt to break free of the suffocating bounds of a rotting Christian morality and establish myself as an avatar of the Nietzschean Ubermensch with a Subway's meatball marinara sandwich and two chocolate chip cookies,  instead of the increasingly decadent roast beef  sandwich with mayonnaise and black pepper; but what is striking me as very strange is that I am the only one who seems to be doing so. Sitting at my desk, I mean, just in case you lost the thread of the previous sentence as thoroughly as I did. The place is empty. Did someone declare a national holiday today, and if so, how come I am the only person who didn't get the memo? Curiouser and curiouser, Akaky said to himself, and then wondered when the rabbit with the watch will going to show up, preferably with some not stale lemon danish. Cherry danish is acceptable as well, but raspberry danish is not. Standards must be upheld, lest the fabric of civilization disintegrate completely and leave us all in a Hobbesian state of nature without any clean underwear.

BLOODSUCKERS AND OTHER DEMOCRATS: Bedbugs are all the rage in New York these days, in the same way that radical chic and mau-mauing the flak catchers used to be. There’s scarcely a day goes by any more without some new report of bedbugs showing up in the local media and sometimes in their beds as well. And now I hear that there’s even bedbugs in the Waldorf-Astoria, and you now that when the grande dame of Manhattan hotels bows to a passing fashion then somehow or other we’ve reached some sort of very important cultural milestone and nothing, absolutely nothing, will ever be the same way ever again. The bedbug has become so popular here that there is even a movement underway to get Albany to declare the bedbug the state insect, a job Joel Steinberg has held for many years. Strangely enough, I have not heard that the bedbug craze has reached Albany itself, but then bloodsucking is an old habit there and the arrival of a fresh batch of parasites would not unduly alarm the inhabitants.

Why bedbugs should be so popular this year is something of a mystery. Granted, fashions in insects change, just as they do for women’s hats and men’s suits (single breasted or double breasted, sir, or do you even care?). Only a few years ago, anyone who wanted to be anybody had spiders in their houses and made sure all the dinner party guests saw the creepy little things whenever the guests came for dinner. Spiders were the thing to have in your house, no doubt the result of the Spiderman movies, and the rarer and more dangerous the arachnid the more chic you would be. The traffic in black widow spiders alone almost brought that species to the brink of extinction and many arachnid counterfeiters did a booming business in painting funnel weaver spiders, an altogether harmless species, black, and then selling them as black widows to an unsuspecting public. This sort of thing would have gone on for years, had it not been for one more of the fickle public’s sudden twists and turns, a pivot that dropped spiders like a Pet Rock and made the praying mantis the headless king of fashionable insects. With the meteoric rise of the praying mantis, a phrase I’ve never really understood, given that meteors don’t rise, they fall, bathrooms all over New York resounded with the sound of the fashion conscious flushing their now terribly passé spiders down the drain. Not all the spiders died in their sudden descent into New York’s sewer system; I’ve heard stories that many spiders survived and flourished in the lower depths, with generations of spiders leaving behind webs so thick they ensnare rats the size of small dogs and even the occasional baby alligator now and again.

And before the spiders were all the rage, there was Beatle mania, which flourished for a few years in the 1960’s, and before that Crickets were big, at least until Buddy Holly died, and before him fleas were wildly popular, for reasons I am not sure I fathom at the moment. You would think that after all the misadventures the fleas caused in the fourteenth century, what with the little critters spreading the bubonic plague throughout the length and breadth of Europe and killing a quarter of the continent’s population, people would regard fleas as something horrific, something no sane person would ever choose to get involved with, like hard drugs or devil worship or the life insurance business, but you would be wrong. We are talking fashion here, boys and girls, and if fashion dictates that fleas are in this year, then fleas are in and you’d better have your fleas out where the cognoscenti, a word that does not come with a side order of marinara sauce, which is a bit of a cheat, if you ask me, can see them. Yes, fleas were everywhere in those days. There were flea markets to shop at and fleabags to put your flea market purchases in while you took in a flea circus and wished everyone a Fleas Navidad, which I always thought was a good name for a stripper. Vanessa Cardui is another good name for a stripper, combining, as it does, choreography and lepidopterology, but I digress here.

The spider rage lasted until the late 1990’s, when it faded from view at about the time the Lewinsky scandal struck. With a distracted press and a polarized political situation in the country, the spider went the way of the Nehru jacket and the liberal Republican. After that, the bug craze ended for a while. There were a few attempts to resurrect it; for a while everyone thought that the deer tick was going to be the next new thing, but the tick didn’t really go anywhere, despite all the type, and most of the best minds in advertising slowly, and very reluctantly, gave up and came to the conclusion that America’s long love affair with the bug was finally over. Bugs had finally worn out their welcome and gotten stomped on once and for all.

And then, just when bug lovers everywhere were about to despair and turn to quilting or collecting 15th century sports memorabilia, the bedbugs arrived on the scene, years late, to be sure, but still incredibly welcome, nevertheless. They are everywhere now; even the New York Public Library has bedbugs the size of the Cat in the Hat in all of its branch libraries, and the Met, the Met, and the Mets, have bedbugs piled up to a second violin’s knees. There are some holdouts—the Yankees will not abandon spiders and neither will the city’s Department of Corrections; the inmates on Riker’s Island apparently love their spiders more than life itself—but every other major institution in the city is laden with bedbugs and more than happy to let you know about it.

But the Yankees and the inmates will eventually surrender; the wave of bedbug mania seems too strong for any institution to stand in its way for very long. I’ve seen a good many bug crazes come and go, and to date I’ve never seen one with this kind of staying power. Of course, if DDT makes a comeback this craze will disappear almost immediately, but DDT is on the environmental movement’s list of seven deadly sins, which is good news if you’re a bedbug, but not if you’re a spider-loving Yankee fan. Now if the Yankees could find a bedbug with a great slider and willing to pitch middle relief, well, that would change everything, wouldn’t it? The Yankee management couldn’t let the little bug sign with the Red Sox, could they? No, they couldn’t: that would be stupid.

JUST A THOUGHT: There’s no long piece attached, just an observation here. I ate my lunch about half an hour ago down the street in my favorite deli, a nice place that offers quality sandwiches, air conditioning, and, even more important, distance from the egregious mold pit wherein I labor for my daily bread, enough distance so that the importuning masses who plague my existence during working hours will not follow me hither and yon demanding that I solve their problems for them, as opposed to solving them themselves and leaving me alone. I know that that’s too much to hope for, I know, and I suppose if these people could solve their problems themselves they would, which would put me out of a job, but it’s still annoying, no matter how you look at it. So there I was, consuming my chicken cutlet sandwich and looking out the window at the traffic, vehicular and pedestrian, passing down our happy little burg’s main thoroughfare, when I saw a man parking his car on the other side of the street. He was careful not to park in the handicapped spot, something that clearly marked him as an out of towner, since no one who actually lives here pays the slightest bit of attention to those handicapped zone signs, a basic lack of respect that flows inevitably from the ease with which you can get a handicapped sticker for your car in this neck of the woods. I think at this point damn near everyone in town has a handicapped sticker somewhere either on or in their automobile; even I have one and there’s not a damn thing wrong with me that kicking a small child in the shins and then lying about it with a straight face wouldn’t cure in a New York minute. So our careful parker makes sure that he is in his carefully allotted slot and then rolls his windows up, which brings me, at last, to the point of this screed. I am not sure I fully understand the logic behind driving a convertible with the top down, parking said vehicle, and then rolling up the windows without putting the top up. Rolling up the windows in such a vehicle will stop a potential car thief for less time than it takes a Democratic politician to propose a tax increase and thus has little or no deterrent effect on the criminal classes. Nor will rolling up the windows and keeping the top down prevent sun, rain, wind, or the occasional incontinent bird from soiling your nice new leather seats. There must be a point to performing such an action, but clearly I am not grasping the Aristotelian depths of the logic involved and no one wants to explain it to me. I also find it impossible to detect the difference between minutes in New York and minutes in any other state, but I usually ascribe my ignorance to my limited knowledge of Einstein’s theory of general relativity, which can, no doubt, explain all the mysteries of the universe, except, probably, why a man in a convertible would roll his windows up while leaving his top down. Some things are just beyond the wisdom of men and this is one of them.

VACATIONS, OR HOW NOT TO ENJOY YOURSELF IN ONE EASY LESSON: Here’s the thing: I don’t do vacation well. This is a terrible thing to have to admit about yourself, and I realize that most people might find this particular form of anhedonia a bit mystifying. To the vast majority of people, vacation, especially paid vacation, is something one cherishes, plans for, and enjoys for every second it’s worth before the inevitable return to the quotidian world of work that makes those few precious weeks of vacation possible. Everyone loves vacations; people write books about where to go on vacation and what to do when you get there, the Go-Go’s sang a really catchy tune about vacations, there are entire countries, in fact, dedicated to getting you to spend your precious vacation dollars in their particular neck of the woods. And then there’s me.

I am not sure when my antipathy towards vacations began. I never liked summer vacations when I was a kid, a fact I kept to myself lest some vacation-worshipping bully decided to beat the crap out of me for being such a damn weirdo. Summer vacations meant the annual migration out of the mean streets of the city for the bucolic lanes of our happy little burg. In those days our happy little burg was much more bucolic than it is these days, when the prevailing mood is one of a small corner of the Rust Belt giving way to creeping suburbia. Back then you could still catch the occasional deer wandering up and down Main Street in the middle of the night like some nocturnal country cousin, stopping every so often to take a wide-eyed yokel’s look in some store window. That doesn’t happen much anymore. But I wasn’t thinking about that as I sat in the back seat of the car wishing I was dead; I was thinking about all the fun my friends were going to have pulling false alarms, shoplifting, and setting the winos in the park on fire, whereas I would spend my summer playing baseball, riding my bike, and being bored completely out of my mind. It was enough to make anyone wish that summer vacation only lasted a week and I often did. I even wished it upon a star once, just like in the Disney song, but the star must have been in his dressing room not taking calls or on strike for shorter light years or fighting with his agent because nothing ever came of the wish—summer was still two stultifying months long, whether I wanted it or not.

After I left school and entered the poison ivy clad halls of the civil service things were pretty much the same. I don’t see the point of taking a vacation when the whole point of having a civil service job is to do as little as possible most of the time for as long as possible; there does seem something counterintuitive, at least to me, about doing nothing on my own time. Some years I just skip vacation altogether, not, as I tell my colleagues, because I don’t have the money to go anywhere, but rather because I don’t want to be bothered thinking about vacationing; it’s just easier to go to work. This attitude invariably raises the hackles of the people I work with. They find the idea that anyone would willingly skip vacations more than a little disquieting and the annual end of the year recounting of just how much vacation time I am losing and my general indifference to the loss causes a general increase in hypertension, frustration, and personal aggravation amongst the confreres. They try to reason my dislike of vacations away, but, as I’ve mentioned above, I don’t see the point of going somewhere to do nothing when I can go to work and do nothing.

And so we come, at long last and after much literary preambling, to paraphrase Kerouac, to the point of the exercise, which is that for most of the past month and a half I have been on vacation whether I want to be or not, and, as you might imagine, I am definitely in the not category. The leadership of the egregious mold pit decided—I am not sure when, but then no one tells me anything—in its collective and near divine wisdom—yes, near divine, people; these clowns pay my salary and in return they expect a certain amount of doglike devotion from us drones—to renovate this mycological breeding pit from the floor on up. In order to implement this miraculous metamorphosis, the powers that be told the staff to get lost and stay lost until we got the call to come back. In a gaggle of carpenters, painters, carpet layers, and other technically competent people all rushing back and forth in the midst of their renovatory labors, the real employees are redundant, if not actually obstacles to that labor, and so we are now on a strange sort of vacation. The vacation does not count as a vacation in the strange calculus of our happy little burg’s civil service department, and yet here I am, on vacation and slowly going out of my mind.

The first few days were not so bad; they were sort of like a very long long weekend, but after the fourth or fifth day of this apparently endless weekend, I began to experience withdrawal symptoms. Since the beginning of this nightmare, I have gone to the great metropolis twice, there to document, in digital color and on black and white film, the strange customs of the indigenous inhabitants in their colorful native costumes, and I’ve driven up to the county seat on a similar mission, but left when I realized that most of the county seat’s inhabitants are lawyers and congenital idiots, who live near each other so that they can support each other’s campaigns for the county legislature, and therefore we should not, simply as a matter of good manners, exploit these poor wretches photographically. Trips to the great metropolis also give me an opportunity to indulge my love of dirty water dogs and huge pretzels with way too much salt on them, and to do so in a spirit of rebellion against the depredations of the nanny state. That’s right, Mr. Mayor, I read the obligatory health information on the hot dog stands, I can see how bad all of this stuff is for me, and guess what, I don’t give a rat’s ass! Take that, smart guy!

But man does not live by pretzels alone, and it is a good thing too, given the thirty or so bucks it takes to get from here to there, or else man would die of starvation or scurvy or something equally loathsome. So, with my finances barring a constant back and forth to Mencken’s second rate Babylon, I resolved to photograph nature in all of its splendor. This was vaulting ambition at its most revaulting, to be sure, especially since I do not vault nor do I have any ambition to do so; I was never a track and field kind of guy, and I don’t have much patience with nature, anyway. In my experience, nature is one of those phenomena that looks better on television than it does in real life, and is, therefore, something one should pass through as quickly as possible on one’s way to anyplace with central heating. But at the time I did not take counsel of my fears, however well thought out they were; instead, I invoked the words of that great American, Horace Greeley, to go west, young man, and grow up with the country.

With these stirring words in mind, I packed up my cameras and set forth for the wide open spaces of the American West. Just as an aside here, I did not grow up with the country and no, I am not young anymore—such, after all, is life—and after a right turn off the interstate, I wasn’t heading west anymore, either; I was heading north, north to Canada, north towards Alaska, the last frontier, north towards the Pole Star.

I did not reach Alaska, Canada, or the North Star, in that or any other order. I did reach, through traffic permutations too numerous and Byzantine to recount here, the Catskills, or a reasonably decent facsimile thereof. The Catskills are a mountain chain, for those of you who do not know, although I have heard that the Catskills are not really mountains at all, but rather a gigantic eroded plateau pretending to be a mountain chain in order to hide from an ex-wife and her process servers. Whatever the geological truth of the matter might be, the Catskills are sufficiently high to cause the empty Diet Pepsi bottles that carpet the back seat of my car to pop and crack like a nervous DWI suspect's knuckles as the dope sits pulling his fingers in the county jail’s drunk tank awaiting his turn before the judge.

I stopped at various places to admire the view and to listen to the truck drivers scream obscenities at me for stopping on such a narrow road. Ordinarily I would have agreed with them, but I was there to capture nature in the raw, which would make manipulating the images later on my computer that much easier, and so had no time for such petty concerns. Fortified by my belief in my photographic mission, I advanced to the guardrail, cameras around my neck, there to view the valley below from this commanding height and to document its beauty, and then promptly began to scream, sweat, feel my throat constrict as my gorge rose, and needed to perform an excretory function, all at the same time. Yes, there I stood, either on a mountain or the side of an incredibly eroded ancient plateau, take your pick, looking down on the verdant and sun-dappled valley below, with my morbid fear of heights more or less (more, actually) intact and completely oblivious to the geological category this particular Catskill belonged to. Now terrified out of my mind, I slunk away from the guardrail and crossed the road to get to the other side, there to relieve nature’s sudden summons and to wait for breakfast to return to my stomach.

Now completely aware that I WAS VERY HIGH UP, I made way down the mountain/plateau/whatever you want to call it as swiftly as the circumstances allowed, which, in retrospect, was not very swiftly at all. I did not want to destroy my brakes or pull the steering wheel off its column, despite the best efforts of that guy in the Wal-Mart truck to get me to do those things and hurry the hell up. Once I got down to the valley floor, I accommodated the lousy bum, after giving him the finger, but I must admit it was touch and go there for a while. Still, I was down at sea level where I belonged, needing gasoline in the quiet town of Kunisha Lake, a town whose existence I was completely unaware the day before. I was so unaware of the town’s existence that if you’d asked me about it the day before, I would have told you that Kanisha Lake was the name of a retro porn star. In Kunisha Lake, I am happy to report, people from the Indian subcontinent own all the gas stations, just as they do everywhere else in this our Great Republic, and that the Mexicans are perplexed most of the time; nothing in their much-thumbed copies of Ingles para dummies prepared them for the large numbers of signs in Yiddish.

So, having arrived in Kunisha Lake, I took in the local sights, or, to be truthful, the local sight: the eponymous lake. The town does, in fact, border a large body of fresh water completely surrounded by land. You have, I should point out here, just read everything of interest about Kunisha Lake. I stood on the shore of this not vast nor not terribly interesting body of water, my arms set akimbo, like mighty Caesar surveying Gaul, thrice divided into plain, sausage, and anchovy, and like mighty Caesar I proclaimed so that all of Rome could hear me, I came, I saw, I said what the hell am I doing here, for chrissakes, and promptly left. I am at home now, where I belong, wondering what am I going to do with myself until the mold pit reopens. The one thing I am sure of is this: Horace Greeley was a putz, no two ways about it. Go west, my ass, and tell Tchaikovsky the news. Vacations suck, no two ways about it, but you can go have one, if you want to. I’m not close-minded about other people’s enjoying them, you know.

A DISTURBANCE ON THE CHAMBER FLOOR: Well, it was nice while it lasted, boys and girls, no two ways about it, but all good things must come to an end and I fear that our good thing is gone as well. For as long as living memory serves, we, the suffering citizenry of the Vampire State, have endured the rule of the three men in a room. For almost a month, we did not suffer from this particular ailment, as one branch of the state government had to disengage itself from their habitual gorging on the public trough long enough to figure out who the third man in the room ought to be. This is not a minor or an academic question hereabouts, indeed it is not, because I can best describe the government of this state as a three-legged stool; should any one of the three legs falter or fail, the whole malfeasant edifice becomes instantly unstable, quickly dumping the dumbass who tries to sit on said stool on his dumb ass.

How, you may be asking yourself, did things ever come to such an ignoble pass here in what used to be the most important state of all the states comprising this our Great Republic? This is an excellent question, filled with chills, spills, and adventure enough for the entire family, and one for which most of here don’t have a damn clue. I shall, however, attempt to provide some insights into the matter, as my not having a clue has never stopped me from having an opinion before and I see no reason why it should stop me now.

For many years now, for decades, in fact, the two major political parties have shared power in the state legislature: malfeasant Democratic peculators dominated the lower house, the Assembly, whilst grafting Republican boodlers ran the upper house, the Senate. The governor, of course, could be of either political persuasion; no one much cared what party he belonged to so long as the gravy train ran on time and everyone could go back for seconds, thirds, or as many ordinal numbers as they felt they could handle without a grand jury noticing. This bicameral arrangement of official goniffdom reflects the political geography of the Vampire State. The Democrats’ control of the big cities has given them the majority in the Assembly ever since Grover Cleveland hung his first villain, but as you venture away from the metropolis and the various micropoli along the river, the political naïf wanders into that strange land known as Upstate, where even the mice are Republicans, a situation that leads to the GOP’s control of the Senate. And so we all lived in a state of happy dysfunction for ages and ages. The state’s three men in a room was complete: the governor, the Senate majority leader, and the speaker of the Assembly ran the state while the members of the two houses voted the way their leadership told them to vote in exchange for the right to loot the public treasury on a regular basis. Only the bills the speaker and the majority leader wanted to pass ever came up for a vote and all a state legislator needed to do was vote yes. In the Assembly, the leadership brought this process to its logical conclusion: all assemblymen voted yes on every bill unless they were physically present to vote no. Since their actual presence was unnecessary, if not downright distracting to the Assembly staff, assemblymen could spend their time in more worthwhile pursuits, such as learning to play badminton or operating auto repair shops on the side while they waited the next election cycle. In 2006, however, this happy state of affairs came to an abrupt end. The Democrats, for reasons best known to the voters of the state, took a two-seat majority in the Senate. This means that all three men in the metaphorical room are Democrats, a state of affairs that hasn’t existed for a while here, and what’s worse, it means that all three men in the room are from…THE CITY!

It would be difficult, at best, to describe the depth of the loathing that many Upstaters have for The City and no upstate politician has ever lost votes denouncing The City as a prodigal Sodom and Gomorrah that wastes the money hard-working Upstaters earn on fiscal fripperies. Some Upstaters, lost in the fever swamps of their loathing for all things concerning The City, have even been known to voice a favorable, if sotto voce, opinion of the Boston Red Sox on occasion, as difficult as you may find that to believe.

In any case, since the beginning of the year the state capitol has resounded with the disconsolate cries of Republicans bewailing their lost power and influence, and the shrieks of paranoid Upstaters convinced that The City and all of its minions were going to spend the state into bankruptcy and not share the graft while they did so. What to do, what to do, has been the plaintive wail from the state legislature for the past few months, a cry that is now, frankly, annoying in the extreme and makes us, the inhabitants of this fun dystopia, want to smack these guys across the face a couple of times and tell them to pull themselves together, for crying out loud. And then, it happened.

No one is sure why it happened; the astrologically inclined say that Jupiter and the moon were in the right alignment, while a good many Marxists say that this affair was the product of a classic rift in the ruling classes, or they would if there were a good many Marxists around still calling themselves Marxists, and then there are the cynics, a plentiful tribe here in the Vampire State, who know that the whole thing was little more than a case of thieves falling out. What did happen, in whatever manner you choose to describe the reasons, was that two Democratic state senators, one a man with residency issues—he apparently doesn’t live in the district that he represents—and the other a man accused of allegedly beating his girl friend, announced that henceforth they would be voting with the Republicans, thereby giving the Republicans control of the state Senate, in response to which event the Democrats closed the Senate chamber down and hid the keys so the Republicans couldn’t get inside (this, strictly speaking, is illegal, but what’s a little illegality between friends?). The Democrats threatened to sue, declaring the coup illegal, and the Republicans threatened to counter-sue, demanding the recognition of the new majority and the legislative session continue. And so the nastiness continued unabated for weeks at a time, the crisis only solvable in either one of two ways—the rebels either stayed with the GOP or returned to the Democratic fold—but this being the Vampire State, where deviousness and rank stupidity form the basis of our political culture, our dogged crew of solons found a third way to solve the problem, which, of course, did not solve the problem and only made things worse than they already were, if you can imagine such a thing. I know I couldn’t, but then, I lack imaginative facility.

Now, the Democrats did not submit meekly to the will of the new majority, but then you already knew that, didn’t you? No indeed, the Democrats has waited for decades for Senatorial perks, privileges, and pelf, and they were not going back to the bad old minoritarian days without a fight. They went after their two Judases, promising them the entire world right up to the state line if only they would return home. After a couple of weeks of this, one of the senators, the one with the residency problem, announced that he would return to the Democrats forthwith, the better to figure out just where he was coming from; the other distinguished gentleman, on the other hand, refused to return, leaving the Senate in deadlock, with each party having 31 votes.

In ordinary times, this would not pose any sort of a problem. In such cases, the state’s lieutenant governor would cast the tie-breaking vote and ensure one party’s misrule over the other’s. These, however, are not ordinary times hereabouts. The Vampire State is, at this juncture, singularly lacking a lieutenant governor. As you may recall, the Federal authorities found the previous governor of this state with his socks on and his pants off in a hotel room discussing civil service reform with a young woman hired for the occasion. The first instance of said reform being the previous governor’s resignation, the then lieutenant governor became the governor, leaving his previous sinecure unoccupied. Unlike the Federal constitution, which goes into great detail about the hows and whys of presidential succession, the state constitution makes no provision for electing, appointing, or looking through the want ads for a new lieutenant governor, or, at least, this is what the Attorney General of the state says, a man who is himself angling to replace the current governor just as soon as the next election cycle comes rolling around. Why he wants to be governor is anybody’s guess; it is certainly beyond my poor powers of comprehension.

And so it went for almost a month. The governor, understandably upset that no one was going about the state business of spending money faster than a full keg disappears at a frat party, threatened to call a special session of the legislature and to keep everyone in the capital through the summer months and to dock the senators’ paychecks until both sides ended the stalemate, but neither threat worked. Modern air conditioning plants have made the capital a barely tolerable place, even in the summer, and I am fairly certain that the good senators have other sources of income available to them, he said with a completely straight face.

In the end, all good things must come to an end, and the senatorial stasis was no exception to the rule. Our alleged girl friend beating senator went to the mountaintop and communed with the spirit of Andrew Jackson, and then in a blaze of remorse and publicity returned to the Party of the People. That his confreres immediately raised their prodigal son to the dignity of deputy majority leader caused some cynics, including the governor, no less, to conclude that the whole affair reeked of illegality and quid pro quo, a charge the Democratic leadership angrily denied. The governor’s response was curious, though; after a lifetime spent in the noisome pit of illegality and quid pro quo that constitutes the political life of this state, you think he’d have gotten used to the reek by now. The rest of us have, unfortunately.