[Blog Title Redacted] - 2/7/12

Pursuant to Article 267.89 of the Mike Baxter Blog Ordinances, in order to read the text (hereinafter referred to as “words”) contained within this blog entry (hereinafter referred to as “post”), one must first click on the link for this post on the preceding page. Judging by the fact that you are here reading these words, you have indeed clicked the link for said post and have therefore satisfied the first requirement and are hereby approved to look at these words.

Gee, isn’t that just a powerfully written bit of prose? When our civilization is in ruins years from now, after pigs have flown, hell is frozen, and Mandy gets a job, all the aliens are going to find is a ball of red tape the size of Pluto and 32,000,000,000 massive tomes that contain regulations for everything from our federal government to homeowners’ associations to minutes from the National Symposium on How to Comb Your Damn Hair. They’re going to assume we had no imagination. But the truth is that we were too busy reading all these dang regulations to ever leave the house.
 
The best part about being alive is having a place you feel safe -- a home -- and to be able to do whatever the heck you want there. (Except paint it pink. Still looking at you, Ted and Lisa Hatteberg.) Also high on that list is being able to not have some dorky bureaucrat personally rip your favorite tree out of the ground and smash it through your window while your horrified daughters wilt in fear. (That’s pretty much what happened.)

But I guess “You can’t fight City Hall” isn’t just something that people say, like “Don’t let the bedbugs bite” or “You’ll never make that jump, Mike Baxter!” Because you really can’t. Try being reasonable, and you get “I’m sorry, sir, but my form is already filled out,” like those notes are carved into stone tablets. You wanna try using logic on ’em? You might as well be speaking Esperanto, because bureaucrats ne parol la logic. And when you finally bend to their will and fill out all the paperwork and show up to every meeting, at the end, they just do what they want anyway.
 
Come to think of it, they’re a lot like daughters.