Credit union blues

Tough times for a Lewiston credit union last week as remote services went down for three days straight. I only learned about this fiasco after witnessing a whole bunch of random people swearing at their phones as they stood in line at various grocery stores. I had no idea so many people do their banking just before they line up to pay for their groceries. I shouldn’t be surprised, though. With grocery prices being what they are ($12.99 for chuck steak!) a lot of folks probably have to take out personal loans every time they go to pick up vittles.

No peeping zone

Oh, heeeere we go. The return of foliage season, a time during which otherwise perfectly sane people will violently slam on their brakes on a 70-mph stretch of blacktop, throwing all passengers violently into the dashboard, just to look at a bunch of dying leaves. “Look how pretty that tree is!” they will exclaim, with almost a religious fervor, as they casually peel the windshield visor off their foreheads. Meanwhile, other drivers will slow to 10 mph on that same stretch of road to take in the same dead leaves while long-suffering, seasonally disordered folks like myself pound our steering wheels and wait for opportunities to pass. You leaf peepers are nuts.

The rules of pumpkining

And what’s the deal with pumpkin flavored everything? I love pumpkins as much as the next guy — I even rode one to an elegant ball that one time — but I never felt the need to use one to flavor beer, coffee or cookies. That’s gross, man. You open them up, fry up the seeds and then carve terrifying faces into their shells and that’s the extent of it, unless you also want to fling handfuls of mushy pumpkin pulp at your kid sister. That’s appropriate pumpkin use, as well. But be advised that none of this should take place before the month of October begins. Displaying pumpkins while it’s still summer on the calendar is just obscene!

It’s beginning to look a lot like corporate shananigans

Not that you’ll have to worry about premature Halloween in the big stores. Nossir. These days, those corporate weasels seem to go straight from the Fourth of July to Christmas, and to hell with everything in between. Ain’t nothing as dreary as seeing a motion-activated Santa and Missus Claus when you’re out shopping for a mesh tank top and window fan.

Scream queen

And speaking of girlish screams fit for a Halloween-themed movie, we’re coming up on the two-year anniversary of that time I rode away on my motorcycle with a gigantic spider hiding in my goggles. To verify myself as the least cool rider out there, I not only screamed but crashed into a fire hydrant, as well. What’s ironic is that the spider and I would later become great friends. How we now laugh over our pumpkin-flavored brandy every time we recount the tale.

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.