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Saturday, April 21, 2012

What Ails Manitou

A common problemHaving been invited to contribute to the new citizen journalism venture you see here, I feel an obligation of sorts to come clean on my reasons—by which I mean agenda—for agreeing to such a thing in the first place. Ordinarily, receiving an invitation indicates a certain commonality of goals; it's tempting to assume that I'm sympathetic to the cause.

I am not. I don’t even live there. In fact, I avoid Manitou like the plague, having seen The Shining and one or two other films that made me laugh and cry at the same time. A long time ago, I got a typewriter because that's what Stephen King was using, but when I saw what happened to Jack Nicholson's character I decided to go back to the computer instead. It isn't smart to retype the same line over and over. That's what copy and paste is for.

Anyway, after reviewing the concerns and solutions outlined on the virtual pages here, I'm left with the same sense of déjà vu I experienced the second time I read this stuff, which may say something about memory loss, though I'm not exactly sure what because my hearing isn't what it used to be either. This brings me back to the point I was trying to make before, which was that hippies have taken over the town. As I recall, the same thing happened in the late sixties, the early seventies, and during the eighties-nineties timeframe, so it isn't difficult to imagine what might have allowed them to gain a foothold during the so-called double-zip-to-zip-eleven period, which may have set the stage for the current rash of sightings in the downtown area.

To be fair, hippies aren't the only problem facing the town right now, which is why everyone in Manitou Springs should be guillotined. This would not only avoid the political suicide that so often results from the appearance of favoritism, but would give Manitou the opportunity to start over with a fresh crop of eight-, six-, and four-legged inhabitants, none of whom would be likely to allow things to get out of control a second time.

5 comments:

  1. As a longtime resident of Manitou Springs, I'd like to express my profound appreciation to you, that you "avoid Manitou Springs like the plague." Please continue doing that. It vastly improves our environment.

    Of course, that more or less demolishes any borderline credibility you might have had as a writer for something called "Manitou Springs Street News", if that entity had any credibility to begin with, which of course it didn't. We of Manitou Springs are proud of our resident maniacs, but a basic requirement for a resident maniac is that s/he be, well, resident.

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    1. I hear you, Jim. Keep Manitou weird is our motto. Always has been. I moved to Manitou over 20 years ago, for that very reason.

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    2. Editor's note: Don't take it too seriously, guys. This is a humor column. The writer of this column actually grew up in Manitou Springs, and he's just taking the perspective of a rude asshole here.

      You still see him around all the time.

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    3. Good to know that. You got me. Lol!

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