I'm not your friend anymore. You're not my friend, you're my cousin. Okay, I'm not your cousin anymore. You can't quit being my cousin, you'll always be my cousin. --Noah and Aiden having an argument. Bella Rum commented that I should write a snappy letter to the editor, seeing as how I have so many great opinions and all. Or maybe she just figured it would keep me from blogging about my complaints. I quit writing those letters years ago because (a) no one cares, and (b) sometimes you hear from the a-holes that you write about. Case in point. Many years ago, a fellow on the Hooterville city council got himself in a jam because when he took out of town trips on city business, he treated himself like a rock star. He spent the city's money like it was going out of style. He did all the things he always wanted to do, but that his civilian lifestyle, one fueled by his piss-ant teacher's salary, otherwise precluded. To make matters worse, he was found to be charging his expense to his City credit card and then also submitting the same expenses to the City for reimbursement. Eventually, someone in government tipped off the Hooterville Daily Dish about his antics and they took him to task, front page style. His response was to claim that there was no written guidance to help him in making these hard spending choices, so he just spent whatever occurred to him. Not exactly his words, but his meaning. This caused yours truly to fire off a letter to editor, in which I recalled an incident where my mom sent me to the grocery store for something and I decided to spend her change on candy. After that, she sent me with exact change. I wondered in my letter if the City might not want to consider giving Mr. Important City Council Guy exact change on future trips. I was quite pleased with myself. The day after the letter appeared, Mrs. Sneed called me at work to say that Mr. Important City Council Guy had called our house in an agitated state demanding to speak with me and making vague threats. In the course of his conversation with Mrs. Sneed, he demanded to know where I worked and to be given my work number. She refused to give him the number but did tell him I worked at Tedious Systems. So I called the City Council office and asked to speak to him. He wasn't available, so I left a message asking him to call me on my direct line. Within a few minutes Mr. Important City Council Guy called me back. I asked him where the hell he got off calling my house and harassing Mrs. Sneed. He denied calling, but said, "I have some pretty rough friends, it was probably one of them." Nice. We had a short discussion about the letter and his attempts to justify his misbehavior. He said to me, and I will never forget this moment, "You work at Tedious Systems, you know how tricky expenses can get." "Excuse me? I didn't tell you I worked at Tedious Systems?" "Yes, you did." "No I didn't, but my wife did when you called our house. Maybe I will call the newspaper and tell them about this whole business." He told me to call if I wanted to and hanged up. I thought about calling the paper or the mayor or someone, but he did in fact have rough friends. Discretion being the better part of valor and all. Things in this blog represented to be fact, may or may not actually be true. The writer is frequently wrong, sometimes just full of it, but always judgmental and cranky