Ok, here’s a small sample. It’s not that funny as I’m trying to develop some story arc to wrap up some characters that might stay in, but maybe not.
Friday’s were a pretty big deal at city hall. It was the day for planning meetings and there were quite a few people in town that liked to come down and speak their minds, even if some of them were out of their minds. The big deal lately was the news that a native son that had gone out to make his million was back to freshen up the old town and get everybody back in the swing of things. The rumor mill was operating on overdrive ever since he had purchased the old movie theater, the run down motel and three vacant lots, all adjacent to each other in downtown Aberdeen.
Just to buy an entire city block was something of a feat in this town. The family that ran the old, local supermarket chain either bought up entire blocks, or small parcels of vacant blocks to prevent anyone else from being able to build a new store that might compete with their stores. Now Jay Simpson had waltzed right in with some real estate wizardry and purchased five city blocks before anyone knew what was going on. No one knew how much of his nest egg he was willing to throw at this endeavor, but if it was than the cost of a chain link fence and spray paint job, it was more than anyone else had pulled off in the crusty downtown core.
Joe Cross knew that having someone injected money into downtown Aberdeen would only help his cause. He had big plans for his little building and he was only a block from the old movie theatre that Jay Simpson had promised would be the new jewel of the city. So Joe made it a point to attend all the Friday planning meetings at city hall, even if he just kept hearing the same crazy ideas over and over again.
“How about if we go back to wooden sidewalks and streets? Look at what they did in Winthrop! Tourists flock there in the summer to see their wooden sidewalks. If we did sidewalks and streets, imagine the crowds!”, shouted one civic booster almost every meeting.
The little town of Winthrop, Washington had reached an economic nadir, much as Aberdeen had, so the local chamber of commerce turned the town into a strange old west highway stop, complete with wooden sidewalks and false fronts on the buildings. Given the state of the sidewalks that floated around on the waterlogged ground in the harbor, switching back to wooden sidewalks might actually be an improvement. There were often calls to rebuild the cement sidewalks that went this way and that, but the city council wouldn’t hear of it.
“We need more antique stores! People love to shop at antique stores! Think about all the tourists that would walk the streets, window shopping for that perfect knick knack, stopping by on the way to the beaches!”, yelled another chamber of commerce member.
Although antique stores do seem to draw a certain crowd to out of the way places, the current crop of ‘antique shops’ in town weren’t of a certain class or calibre to attract more than a good layer of dust or mildew. Next week’s new arrivals at the local junk shops were often items that were for sale at the Salvation Army this week. Fortunately for all the would be antique shop entrepreneurs the local real estate market was so depressed that it only took about five hundred dollars to secure a shop space for the first month, then just barely hold on to try to make the rent while the landlord went through the eviction process if their selection wasn’t up to snuff.
“When I was a kid, there was money to be made gamblin’ and whorin’!”, yelled old Jack Smithson, another fixture at the city council meetings.
