Life in a small town…

Actually, who am I kidding?  It’s more like life on the outskirts of a small town, but somehow you still get swept up into the small townishness, at least Spouse is now that he has gone into business for himself and is making lots of local connections.  (Me, I still just hang out here all day with the chickens, pecking away on my keyboard while they’re pecking away at the ground.)

At the moment, our iconoclast neighbor and her husband are away for the week.  They love any excuse to hop in their WoMo (which is shorthand for motor home in German) and spend a week or two socializing at a campground somewhere.  The iconoclast is also a kind soul, so every ten months or so, they offer to go camping in Bavaria as an excuse to drive down the couple who used to live in our house down to see their daughter, son-in-law, and their not yet year old baby.  The iconoclast knows that the two of them are not keen on such long distance driving, but the iconoclast’s husband is a driving machine (seriously, he used to be a bus driver).

So, while they are away, Spouse has been granted reading rights to their daily local paper, provided that he folds it back up nicely afterwards so the husband can flip through them all when he comes back home at the end of the week.

After working a crazy day today (still for not any pay, because the business is still in its infancy), Spouse was settling down with a beer and decided to catch up on the local news from the papers from yesterday and today.  And he just started laughing.  Like crazy.

Our next door neighbor from the last house we lived in, about ten miles from here, in a little miniature suburbia, made the front page of the really local section of the local news two days in a row, and not in a good way.

We hadn’t known it, but as of yesterday, at least, our former neighbor was the leader of the Green Party for the little suburb we used to live in.  But, alas, cutting edge investigative reporting by the local paper revealed he’d been writing in to that very same local paper using several different totally fake names to complain about, drop gossip on, smear, and criticize local politicians from the other political parties.  Worse, he’d been doing it in co-ordination with another local politician, and, although I don’t know if they have laws against criminal conspiracies here, but back home, I’m pretty sure that would make it a criminal conspiracy.

But, hah, as one of those local smeared politicians from one of the other political parties was quoted as saying: Never in the entire history of {that suburb}, has local politics been so depraved.

I find the whole thing hilarious, mostly because I lived next door to the depraved politician for two years. Given that, for me, somehow the only surprising thing here was that the guy had clawed his way to the local top of the Green Party.  I only knew him as a practicing child psychologist (with a bafflingly erratic schedule) who was clearly the German version of the stereotypical clueless guidance counselor scoffed at by kids.  Also, for psychologists, he and his wife (also a psychologist) sure yelled at their youngest of six or seven children a lot.  And by a lot, I mean endlessly.  If someone was at home, somebody was yelling at the little guy because there didn’t seem to be any end to his mischief and insubordination.  And, sitting there in my house (which had TRIPLE GLAZED WINDOWS), I always shook my head and thought to myself, well, what the hell did these child psychologists expect, naming him Loki?