Background: In my distant youth there existed a northern California spot named Graton. It was a joke made manifest -slipped into conversations and quips as a guaranteed laugh- consisting of ten shacks in the middle of nowhere and a Mexican bar which staged cockfights and stabbings, all planted along a road leading the hell past it as fast as possible; for the town had sprouted up around a rotten-apple-processing plant that constantly belched a stench as thick as paste. Really, a smell so bad people held their breaths or died as they tried to escape. Many decades later, someone from that county forwarded me an “article” from what I was astounded to see was the online Graton newspaper. Indiscrimate and increasing population being what it is, the town had been invaded by wealth and good vibes. Gentrified, inflated, yuppified and bursting with New Age cant, Graton had gone from being an infernal applesauce miasma to being coddled with fruity respect. It was irresistable, so, via my friend’s subscription to this community yap, I managed to sneak in a couple of curveballs before someone there twigged and put a stop to the terror. That’s the only thing that accounts for this and its subsequent article.¹

SYMPATHY ON THE DOUBLE

c 2011 Tristan Winter

The minotaurs of annihilation are chasing the Greek nation, and the European Central Bank, aligned with the IMF, have been huddled in a sweat lodge trying to envision a way to save the continental banks from losing the money they loan-sharked to the birthplace (and I mean that in a complimentary way) of democracy.

But money is losing its moral value every minute we waste writing, and now the bankers must reign in even the farthest reaches of the globe. As a stop-gap measure (width: 3cm), the European Parliament has appointed emergency pleniopenitentiaries to outlying districts in the economic world, somehow hoping to stench the flow of monetary miscreants. As an upstanding European mongrel, I was lucky enough to be such an appointee.

Seniors and Seneurisms, I am your new Representative to Graton. I once passed out there from the smell of sulfur. And, years later, I cheered and vomited on what I think was a woman after she had sold me thirty-five houses in one afternoon. I haven’t been back to America since. But I know we can all work together on this. I think I loved her.

I have already made the hilariously inutile Northern California town of Graton a sister-city of Pyongyang, which qualifies you for a carnival act. I have studied assiduously your previous representatives’ efforts to displace the odoriferous poor and erect a wall of enlightened greed around your compounds, and I want you all to rest assured that I am only half a world away from your needs. I urge you to to urge.

I have forgotten so much of Graton that it will take me a few unpaid columns in this site to balance our wishes with yours. Yet the eyes and noses of Europe are pressed against you. We will give you money and promise your spawn lawn sprinklers and our new program: education on a stick, which is like your carnival-with-Pyongyang corndogs, except it must be consumed daily instead of reaching a danger threshold at more than twice per year. We will make sure your men wear red pants one week out of every month, and a steaming brown helmet year round, and your women vice versa.

Hand in hand with our own ambitions to be the best E.U. Graton appointee in history we will bring you fellow Gratonucks forwards into the new world century (width 3cm) .

Non Pasafanculo !

-Tristan Winter

Graton Gauleiter, BMMD