You’re welcome

As a special late summer gift to my four readers, I’m going to refrain this year from going on my usual rant about how much I hate Back to School posters, Halloween decorations in stores, the arrival of the Balloon Festival and the new edition of the Farmers’ Almanac because all those things remind me that, while summer isn’t all the way dead yet, it’s certainly flopping around on the gurney and getting last rites.

Also pumpkins

Nobody should display a pumpkin before the arrival of October, but you’ll start seeing them soon. Real soon. Plus, advertisements for cider and apple picking at the local orchards. These are all things that I shan’t be ranting about this week in consideration of you fine people. Because I care. Also, I just like saying “shan’t.” Makes me feel all dignified and crap.

la Résistance!

You think I’m lame for hating the end of summer so much, but I should warn you that I’m not alone. Supporting me in this seasonal gloom is a pretty impressive band of fellow winter-haters that includes a piano teacher, an operative in east-central New Hampshire, a dance instructor, a dog groomer, two asparagus farmers, three professional badminton players and a guy who manufactures those plastic things on the end of shoelaces. OK, I’m making SOME of those people up, but not all of them. And you’ll never know which are real and which aren’t because la Résistance is all about secrecy as we go about our important work.

Aglets!

Those things on the end of shoelaces are called aglets. You can finish your crossword puzzle now.

FLOCK this

My colleague Joe Charpentier wrote an interesting piece recently about the dubious use of FLOCK cameras in Lewiston. Frankly, with so many cameras in the world right now, I don’t know how anybody gets away with anything. Wherever you roam in this city, you can be reasonably sure the eye of Big Bro is upon you. I think our path is clear. We must organize a collective mooning of the cameras. Who wants to get us started?

Credit where due

And speaking of Charpentier’s FLOCK story, whomever decided to use the giant, painted eye from downtown Lewiston as story art is a genius. That humungoid eye really brings home the unsettling notion of the blossoming surveillance state. Plus it gave the story a kind of Alan Parsons gravitas.

Nevermind

Nobody is going to get that Alan Parsons reference. Why do I even bother?

More words

I have 38 words to go in order to reach my column limit of 450. Now I have 13 words to go. Now just nine. I think I’m gonna make it! Ah, poo. Now I’ve gone over the limit.

Mark LaFlamme is an award-winning Sun Journal reporter and columnist. He’s covered the nighttime police beat since 1994, which is just grand because he doesn’t like getting out of bed before noon. He is the author of eight published novels and rides a dual sport motorcycle everywhere he goes. Unless it’s winter, in which case he just sulks a lot.