Uff Duh!
Week after week, month after month, I’ve watched the little Scandihoovian burg on the other side of the bridge to the island, grow smaller and smaller down on the sewage flats of the floodplain. The bookstore just closed after three decades, a couple of taverns that were there when I came here are shuttered and up for sale, the empty storefronts are mounting up. Down at the Viking Village even the Dollar Store went under and you know and I know, when the Dollar Stores go belly up, we got troubles, capital T, right here in River City. And they don’t rhyme with pool. The Viking Village megaplex still sports the ever popular Uff-Da Shoppe with its witty collection of coffee mug Norwegian jokes, plus the barber shop and the laundromat and the Duck Inn café. Anchoring the other side of the dead Dollar store is the headquarters of the GOP. To say the place is as bustling as a morgue is optimistic hyperbole.
The Fresh Alternative Medicine Dispensary, the medical marijuana retail shop next to the police station, is the latest in a string of businesses dead on arrival now that the City Council voted to rescind its permits. State law now requires pot permits for both recreational and medical. We want those taxes on medical we didn’t get previously and the legislature finally figured out that the best way to do that was combine the two and tax it all. Duh. Pot outlets opened up on the island, in nearby Conway, up in Mt. Vernon, over in Arlington, down in sleepy little Silvana. Prohibition, needless to say, is over.
Well, not quite, not in Stanwoodopolis, not with the City Council that can’t in good conscience, so they plead, sanction recreational drugs in their fair city. They have to protect the kids. As if the kids aren’t buying everything from beer to heroin from their friends and the pushers who ply the parking lots and parks. The mayor estimates that hundreds of thousands of dollars of tax revenue are going to be lost to all those surrounding areas that accepted the will of the voter to legalize marijuana. Arlington makes $400,000 a year already.
Take a little stroll down the streets of town with me. Cupcake shop, check, antique store, check many times, pizza delivery shop, check, boutique consignment shop, check, bar and grill,, check twice, Chinese restaurant, yup, co-op art gallery, check. Empty storefronts, plenty of those…. Ghost towns start this way and with the coming flood insurance increases, their best hope is to breach the sewer lagoon and bring in gondolas with singing Norwegians to ply the canals of the sunken city. Some towns get exactly what they deserve. Uff Duh!
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