It’s that time of year again. Time to pass off already written drivel as fresh tripe. That can only mean one thing: a year-end retrospective of the news from The Meteor.
You’ve never heard of The Meteor? You must be “from away.” My neighbor here in Rumford goes by the name of Aubuchon Connery, and he runs this broadsheet called the Rumford Meteor. Well, technically it’s not a broadsheet, but I did notice a picture of Jenny McCarthy’s breasts right there on the front page.
Aubuchon’s an interesting fellow. He runs the whole newspaper with only one assistant, Rod Pocket, to help him out. Like everyone in Maine, they do the best they can. “They’re doing the best they can” is high praise around here. Whenever anyone sets themselves ablaze while freshening up the woodstove with a little kerosene, or turns turtle in the hammer lane in their wife’s Dodge Neon even though it’s a cloudless night on a deserted highway, everyone just says, “Shucks that’s too bad, but he was doing the best he can. And everyone knows you gotta ride the brake all the way through the spin.”
Anyway, Aubuchon Connery and Rod Pocket are doin’ the best they can with The Meteor all year, and I thought I’d choose one headline from each month of 2015 to give you the local flavah. The newspapers they’re quoting are doing the best they can to get a particular point across, all at once, all in the same way, and then Aubuchon and Rod come along and write different headlines and the stories take on a different sort of theme, like the way stories change under questioning at the police barracks. Most of the time, The Meteor gets the story plain backwards from the meaning the regular newspapers wanted. But we have to make allowances. They’re doing the best they can.
February: After 75-Car Pileup, Emergency Crews Use Jaws of Life to Pry the Cellphones Out of Everyone’s Hands
March: Biddeford Government Brainstorming Session Produces Only Partly Cloudy Ideas
July: South Bristol Centennial Highlights the Town’s Rich History of Totally Not Being Bristol
August: Online Workshops Offer a Free and Convenient Way to Find Additional Online Workshops
September: Goth Couple and Friends Demonstrate Their Non-Conformity by Dressing Alike
October: Wiscasset Jazz Aficionado Hopes the Band Plays “The Girl From Iwo Jima”
November: Public School Administrators Worry Isolated Home School Students Will Be Forced to Bully Themselves
December: President Can Prove He’s an Observant Christian and a Good Golfer
Well, there you go. That’s Maine in 2015 in a nutshell. You’re allowed to laugh at us, of course, as long as you don’t forget we’re doing the best we can.
3 Responses
Heh – my first car was a Dodge Neon. It liked to turn turtle in the middle of intersections, and once on the turnpike with a cliff on one side and speeding semis on the other. Somehow we made it down the hill. Now I drive Hondas.
If Thomas Hart Benton woke up as Henri Matisse, he'd paint that photo as is. My 2 cents: we have that stove around here somewhere. Probably in the back of the garage or else in the Quonset.
There's an analogy in this somewhere, too.
I feel sorry for them home-schoolers forced to bully themselves, not having learned how from professional bullies. But as you say, they'll do the best they can.