Ankle Bombs in Galesville 5/09/07

Every year I like to go somewhere I've never been for a few days just to change what I'm looking at and give myself a break. There's never any money for these little ventures so usually I just throw Squarepig in the truck and pick a town and drive to it. When we get there, we park the truck somewhere, and just start walking through a neighborhood and let whatever happen. Last month I went to Galesville on a sunny tuesday morning and started walking with Squarepig. It's a funny little town. There's one street that dead-ends down at the water with side streets branching off. There's only a few little businesses and they're all on this main road, with a couple of little churches. We turned down one of the little side streets and walked for about 10 minutes before we saw Mr. Simms sitting on his front porch. He waved and shouted something about Squarepig being a handsome animal. I just laughed and shouted "You don't look blind, but you must need your eyes checked something awful". He replied that his cataracts were like lookin' through jellyfish, but he knew a handsome animal when he saw one. He invited us up on his porch and we accepted. Squarepig knows that the best way to make a new friend is to present your back to them for a good scratching and Mr. Simms did not disappoint. His hands were all wrenched into festive shapes thanks to arthritis but they still knew their job. We sat and talked for an hour or so about things like fishing worms, the way things smell when the breeze blows in off the water and how they smell when it blows from the other way and his neighbors septic field isn't workin' right.
We talked for a long time, and about lunchtime, Mr. Simms told me to help myself to whatever was in the kitchen. I went inside and looked in his refrigerator for something tasty.
There was a open can of black olives with rust around the bottom, an open beer, a saucepan full of beans and something in a back corner that looked like all furry. Not moldy, real fur. As my stomach alternated between growling and rolling I remembered I had some leftover Twizzlers from breakfast. I like Twizzlers. They have a hole in them and you can sometimes use them like a straw. I went back out and sat with Mr. Simms.
"What are your neighbors like", I asked him. "There's an old woman on the right side that I visit every now and then, and a man on the left that I've never met but I've only seen him come out of his house a couple of times. I think he's got something wrong with his leg. He wears a black thing around his ankle that must me somethin' medical."
I knew it wasn't somethin' medical. Mr. Simms had a bad guy livin' next to him and that black thing was there to tell the police where he was all the time. I didn't tell that to Mr. Simms. His blood pressure would have blown his cataracts out. What I really didn't want to tell him was that for really bad guys those things are ankle bombs. And when the police need to stop a bad guy from doing something bad that detonate it. The groovy think is that they can control the splosion and just have it be like a fire cracker, or blow his ankle out, or blow his whole leg off depending on what he's gettin' ready to do. Like if he just went out into the street and started walking they'd hit him with a firecracker. But if he grabbed somebody or started hittin' Mr. Simms or somehtin, they'd toast his ankle. Anything worse than that just turns into a mess.
Here's a big idea. Most people we vote for to be President or whatnot, senators and such turn into bad guys. That's what you call a "historically accurate statement". I think when you become President or Mayor or whatnot you should be fitted with a ankle bomb. Now here's the cool part. The bomb would be controlled by a computer thing that had all the political promises this new public servant made fed into it's software. And when he did something that was contrary to a promise, or to something he promised not to do, the computer would ankle-bomb him. Say he promised not to leave any child behind, and make sure he funded school systems and whatnot. If he signed some bill that took away money from a school, he'd get fire-crackered until he picked up his pen and signed a check. Or if he started a war when he said he wouldn't unless he had to to protect the country, the computer would probably blow his ankle out. The computer would analyze statements for lies and whatnot, and everytime the public servant told one, well...ankle-bomb time. I think it's a really BIG IDEA.
The result would be that pretty quick politicians would stop making promises which is a stupid a thing for them to do since they hardly ever can control whether or not they can keep them. Then the computer would just be programmed to figure out whether the dude (or dudette) was doing a "good job", based on what we wanted out of them. I think there'd be a huge new market for ankle replacements. That would create a whole new medical industry factories for it and the economy would boom.
I don't mean to take this BIG IDEA too far, but there'd also be a huge market for home versions. If you fitted a child with one at the age of 5 or 6 you could control things like cussin' or havin' bad thoughts and lyin' . Then maybe when he was grown up he might run for President or King or whatnot and not even need an ankle-bomb.
I didn't tell Mr. Simms all this. He just wanted to have a nice day on his porch talkin' about the weather and the squirrels and such. I stayed there until the Twizzlers wore off and I was hungry again, and Squarepig and I made our goodbyes and went on down the street to continue our vacation