CD: Nine Inch Nails, "The Fragile"

I live in a small hick village with lots of average white people. My house lies inbetween two trailer parks and is surrounded by a power station, a hardware store, a funeral parlor, an abandoned railroad track turned bike path, and a couple empty plots of land. None of this, however, compares to the even smaller hick village of Blasdell, New York, home of my good friend Dave and also a very polite man named Officer McCormick. It was the latter that caught me running a red light and gave me the opportunity to revisit what looks like Colonial Williamsburg, had Colonial Williamsburg been set in 1983.

There were two things I especially noticed during my court appearance. One was the Seal of the Village of Blasdell that hangs ominously over the presiding judge. What looks like an X intersection separates the seal into four unequal sections, which I pointed out to Dave after I gave his town $120. He had never noticed his village's seal before.

"See, on the top section there's the date the village was founded. Then there's a red house, and then a tree. Pretty good, because no other towns have founding dates, houses, or trees."

Dave: "I never noticed that!"

"But the best part is the left-hand side, where they drew a big metal bucket spilling out a bunch of molten steel."

Dave: "Yep, that's Blasdell!"

The other thing one notices in the village court/police dept./fire dept./meeting hall/teen center is the rotary pay phone at the front door. After several attempts to operate the phone using a calling card, the computerized operator said (this, unlike Dave's mutterings above, are a direct quote):

"Let's try this another way. Why don't you SPEAK your card number into the phone instead."

"I still don't understand you. Please speak your card number into the phone, sounding out each number separately."

Boss Hogg and Roscoe P. Coltrane would have been very comfortable here. I felt somewhat embarrassed that I dressed up and wore khakis to the hearing.