Do you know what happens when Wolf has had no coffee and has watched a lot of Netflix Comedy Specials? She decides she's actually funny, then a chapter like this happens.

I think I've spoke about where I live before... but never in such a way that it'll take me a bit to write this.

You see, I live in a small fishing village, and tourist season is coming up. Salmon. We get people from all over for Salmon.

There's this one bridge in town, when you're leaving the main part and heading into the newer part. During shit storm season, people line up on this bridge to fish, and watch people fish.

That's right. Fishing's a fucking spectator sport now.

Then there's these stone steps that lead down to the water, and that's crowded beyond belief.

It's insane.

There practically seems to be an unspoken rule about business and they're relationship to fishing here.

You sell tackle and all sorts of other fishing stuff, you're probably going to survive.

If not, you are either the Chinese Food place, the home town diner, or the small sub shop. Anything else and there's a high chance of death.

In the Main Street of town, with all the old brick buildings with white trim, there are several places where you can see this in action.

Exhibit a) The Collectables Store:

This place was empty for the longest time. Then I think it was some sort of store. Then it was an Italian deli, for, I'm not joking, probably a month. After that is was a bakery.

I don't think I ever saw a single customer there.

Now it's a comic book store.

Exhibit B) Some restaurant:

This thing has been closed and reopened so many times it's not even funny. However every restaurant opened in this spot for the past few years has followed a similar trend.

They're a bar and probably serve Mexican food.

There's just something about this place that murders businesses.

There are obviously exceptions, the bars (we have two. A nice one on the water, and a scummy sports bar), the hair dresser, the mattress store for some reason and the jewelers. Let's not forgery the drug stores.

After all, when some stupid fucking redneck teenage girl needs a pregnancy test, she's not driving out of town.

Actually, I'm being harsh. When hormonal woman need candy, or when men what some cheap beer, they don't want to drive out of town. That's closer to the truth.

Now small towns have interesting folk. And some funny stores.

Lemme tell you about the tree.

You see, there used to be this really cranky old guy who used to live on our street. He's dead now.

Well there's this one giant tree on his property that sheds its bark like crazy. He petitioned the town to have it cut.

They couldn't because wait for it...

*dramatic drumroll*

It's the oldest tree in town.

I'm surprised it doesn't have a plaque.

Oldest tree in town. Aren't we special for having one?

No Jerry, we're not special. It's dumb.

But let's talking about everyone's favorite stereotype. No, not the old man who sits on his porch in his underwear or the lady who knows everyone. The drunk.

One of our drunks lives near my street. He is the husband of a former high school librarian, and every day our bus drives past his house.

Picture this.

A white house with a high peaked gable roof. The paints peeling, and there's an attempt at a small garden. There are small lawn chairs in a semi-circle on the lawn, each filled with a stuffed animal.

Then there's a scruffy, weaslish man, with a terrible slouch, a long peppered beard and hair wearing a hat you'd see a high ranking navy member wear in the movies. He's most likely holding a can of beer. There's a good chance it's Bud Light.

As the bus rumbles by, he waves with a weird smile.

I have meet this man before, and he is weird. My mother and I are friends with his wife, and we avoid her house because of him.

The other day, the bus was driving through, and I see him watering some bushes. Not his bushes. Someone else's.

You may think, oh how nice.

But there were two thoughts running through my head. One, who the fuck trusts this guy enough to let him water there bushes. I wouldn't trust him to look after my pet rock.

And two, well he could just be being nice and watering it for them, but I feel like he may just end up killing that bush.

There are people who will help you out. Our neighbor will sometimes plow our sidewalk in the winter. Then we bring him Christmas Cookies.

It's all quite nice.

But that drunk, I would not trust.

Now the town has a volunteer fire station, and we've called them twice in our time dwelling here.

One was about our cat.

Actually I shouldn't even say we. It was my mother.

Before he ran off, we had a cat named Sheldon. (Update, it's eight o'clock st night, and Wolf just got her first cup of coffee all day).

Anyway, our cat got stuck in the basement, under the stairwell in a crawl space. We couldn't get to him, so my mother decided to call the firemen to rescue her cat.

Now this was her exact train of thought. "Well firefighter save cats from trees, why can't they save cats from basements."

I present to you my mother, a one time published author, someone who helped run (well she helped take questions for the man on the panel) a panel at ITVfest for Stage 32, and someone who currently has someone interested in a TV script she wrote and a screen play.

Sorry, I never talk about why my mother does for a living, now you know.

My mother is actually quite intelligent, but like me, we do foolish things. Like the one time she stole our neighbors cat.

Sheldon ran away, and our neighbors have a cat who is his spitting image. So she sees the cat, thinks it's ours and gets him inside, overjoyed because Sheldon's been missing for a few weeks.

Well he hides behind my bed.

A few days later it's Thanksgiving, and we see a missing poster for a cat. My mother makes a remark about how it's sad and how we were lucky to find ours. Then she looks st the poster.

It's our neighbors address, and a few things click.

That day she walked up to their porch, knocked on their door, and said she accidentally stole their cat.

By the way, they're friends now.

Back to small town people.

We have a school, and I have maybe 80 kids in my graduating class. I can name them all on a good day.

In school we have your groups, and in the popular girl group, is the daughter of an officer. He's not a sheriff or anything special, just an officer.

She never shuts about about him.

"My dad's an officer" "My dad said this" "My dad said that".

 If I had a penny for every time she talked about her father, I'd be the richest person in the world, and would be sitting inside my reading room with a view of my pool reading original manuscripts of books while my French butler Jacques brings me tea and coffee made from only the best beans along with fresh croissants on a daily basis.

 The people in small towns though, they are just so interesting. And where I live, you don't know everyone, but you know a lot of people. And it seems like everyone is related... because they pretty much are.

 There is one more story I have to tell you about a small town person. We're going to call her, Susan Shitbird. 

 I don't think she goes to my school any longer, but if she doesn't, that's probably a good thing.

 Susan Shitbird, on the last week of school did something very stupid. You see, she was one of those girls who always wanted to be popular, but the fact that she didn't look like these girls or that she was about as interesting as a box of rocks held her back.

 Not gonna lie, the popular girls at my school have semi-interesting personalities.

 Well Susan was prone to lying to get people to like her... and that's why Wolf was never friends with her, or liked her. In fact she had very few friends.

 And she got very little attention.

 So why not go out in the final blaze of glory? That literally no one remembers now? Sure you were the talk of the school for the last week of class, but was it really worth staining the rest of your life with this, and having collages look at you and say "No, we won't accept you".

 WE are talking about a girl, who hasn't looked at what is going on in our nation and thought, Shit, this is horrible. No, we're talking about a girl who though this would give her ample attention, not caring about the repercussions of her actions.

 Miss. Shitbird went on to her Snapchat one night, and posted something she shouldn't have. 

 She posted a bomb threat. 

 I want that to sink in. 

 This girl went to those lengths for attention. It wasn't real, she didn't have one by the way.

 Now for the punchline.... her grandfathers a judge,

 Okay. I mentioned we're a tourist town. We don't have souvenir shops, we just get really busy. 

 Town is a shitstorm during this season. It's nearly impossible to get into the diner, and everything is filled with tourists.

 Now there are some really nice fishermen, polite. Then there are the one's I thankfully never have to deal with... the weirdos.

 However, living in a tourist town means your town relies on that season economically, so no matter how much you hate the asshole tourists and the fact that your usually quite town is now filled with drunk rednecks moreso than usual, you have to put up with it.

 And on a side note, fishermen, you should have enough common sense so businesses don't have to put up signs that say No Corkers by the door. 

 Aside from the madness that is silly season, there's summer.

 The sounds of summer... wear on you after a while.

 I just want to sit in peace at some point, and maybe hear the occasional bird whistle a jaunty tune. 

 No. All you hear is kids screaming. 

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH! Like that.

 And screaming. And screaming. 

 Maybe a bit of crying. Then the bitchy teenage popular girl wanna be who lives across the street gets into a screaming match with her mother. 

 After a day, you just want peace.

 Every other time of year, it's so quite. The quite is occasionally broken by a dog barking in the distance, a teenager driving by with his music turned up so loud you can hear it from inside the house, or this one guy in town who has no regard for the speed limit who really needs his muffler checked as he zooms by.

 That's why I could never live in a city, the sounds would kill me.

 There are several downsides to living in a small town. Lack of a Starbucks, a book store, a decently stocked library. You know, the essentials. But the biggest one is the stores.

 Not what they sell, or that we lack them. It's the people.

 You know so many people, you slightly fear meeting someone in the store. 

 I'll just be walking along, and then I hear, "Hey Wolf!"

 It might be a teacher, and then I have to register that, remember their name, and also register how to respond in an out of school setting. 

 Then you meet that one person you were once friends with, but your parents don't know you can no longer stand this person, so you have to act friendly.

 Then there are the church goers.

 For a year of Wolf's life, she sat in an uncomfortable wooden pew, listen to some old dude preach about God, and then put some money in a little golden plate.

 I was fine with that then. I didn't have the opinions I have now. I didn't mind most of the people, they were nice.

 Anyway we stopped going. There's this one lady who asks my mother about it whenever she see's her. Thankfully we don't see her regularly, but the conversations...

 We got caught by her as we were entering the grocery store, and we did the mandatory hello. Then she trapped by mother... and keep in mind we're in the area where all of the carts are, so we're in peoples way.

 "Oh are you going to come back to the church,"

 "It just wasn't for us".

 Then this lady gabs about church. 

 We get it, you are religious and like to be told how to practice your religion, and how you think going to church is the only way to do it. But there are some Harvest Snaps calling my name, and we aren't getting any younger.

 I have nothing against people going to church, but don't tell us we have to or should. 

 I'm going to shut up, because I can go on and on about this topic. I really can. My opinions on organized religion is why my Global teacher has called me Karl Marx in the past.

 There's also the people who know the cashier, and you have to wait in line for ten minuets as Martha tells Sue about her grandkids and how little Billy is in Little League now... not actual examples, but you get the point.

 It's six forty at night and we're grabbing porkchops for dinner, and we all have to be up early tomorrow, we don't want to wait ten minuets. Thank you.

 Where I live isn't a particularly nice place, but it's not terrible either. There are nice parts, but we are just falling behind on the pleasant small town feel.

 Don't you love it when you drive through a town and you see some lovely looking flowers in hanging planters. Maybe they're purple, and you just think, oh isn't this town just lovely, I feel an uncontrollable urge to move into a small house here, get married and have kids you regret having and have a soul sucking nine to five.

 Well, where I am every thing is quite gray. Apparently we had flowers at some point, but the town didn't want to pay for them.

 Just because fishermen are the only people that come here, doesn't mean we can't spruce the place up a little. Show those city folk we aren't savages.

 I've told this story before, but I'm going to tell it again. There was a lawyer who was assigned to a case regarding child abuse. He was the defense attorney.

 The child who was the victim, had been forced to walk in front of her parents truck, with rocks on her back, and if she stopped, her parents would bump her with the truck.

 Here's what Mr. McFucktard said in their defense when interviewed, this isn't word for word, but I'm not changing anything to make him sound bad:

 "Parent's have to punish their kids differently around here. In other places they can just take away their cellphones"

 *Wolf pulls out her cellphone. The rich kids pull out their cellphones. The rest of the student body pulls out their cellphones*

 You were saying?

 That conversation at dinner about this man was just a laugh fest. My father made the following remark, "All those people up in ____ Must be confused. Like, they catch their diner?"

 That's the background for the savage joke by the way. And no not savage as in cool... I forget that the meaning has changed...

 Now I can't be the only small town person here, if you live in one, I wanna hear your stories. 

 I still have some more tales.

 Well... One more... for now. 

 There are places here you should just stay away from, is you want to al least be considered an upstanding citizen. You know, places where drug addicts usually go.

 One of these places is a set of apartments.

 We were talking about places like this in English one year, and how the kids who went to the apartments usually the druggies and how it was a bad place to be in general. 

 I decided to tell the story about the time I was up there. 

 After my teacher made a joke about how that was probably the reason I knew what a certain word meant (we were working with prefixes), I told this tale, and the funny part registered with very few people.

 When our cat Sheldon went missing, besides walking around town with a bag of Temptations and calling his name in the middle of the night looking like fools, my mother dragged me along with her asking people.

 One time she decided to grab some posters and ask some people in some apartments if they'd seen our cat.

 So there's the druggie apartments, and she asks about. Please keep in mind, that we were asking people whole lived in apartments above the Chinese Food restaurant  if they'd seen our cat, and everyone who lived there was Asian.

 Imma gonna let that sink in...

 Well, there's me trying to be funny. I just wanted to talk about my town. There's more I could talk about. I skipped out on the Amish, how we don't say our towns name correctly, the alleged local haunting, and just so much more. I didn't even talk about the Spirit Salmon!

 Long story...

 So 1 to 10, how funny was I. I wrote this to help myself improve my humor in my writing, and just writing in general. It was probably quite boring for you. 

 And I kinda wanna write more. Because the second I get into school culture here, we get interesting. I'll leave out some of the drama, but some of it is just too funny.

 The cheese plate getting her just deserts, the fight that got people who didn't fight suspended, the insect rumors, the town "Royalty" (certain popular kids). Whooooboooy...

 So much I didn't cover... so much. God... I have to do another chapter...

 I'm just going to ask for feedback on the humor right now though... so maybe the next chapter will be much more interesting,

 Adios amigos.