The newspapers are beginning to write about city council candidates and what issues are important to those who live in Asheville. This angers me more and more as the years go on.

First and foremost, I’m not running because I’ve never won a personality contest; in fact, I’ve always placed last. I even lost a talent contest when I entered twice as the only competitor. The second reason is I can’t afford the filing fee. A third is I can’t fathom how all these people working three jobs, 24-7-365, forging new dimensions of innovation along 26 state-of-the-art modalities with continual improvement – if we are to believe the resumes submitted to the city by applicants for boards and commissions represent the norm – have time to answer hundreds of emails, talk to hundreds of citizens, go to hundreds of meetings, and do due diligence on matters they must assess on committees and in general council. Beyond that, my IQ is well below 180. I’ve forgotten all my vector calculus, and I have no kind of degrees in physiology, environmental systems, and business. To sit on city council:

  • One needs the perspicacity to discern the marginal advantages of a shift of 25 feet in elevation of viewshed disruption on community health, and do so with a straight face. I err always on the side of property rights.
  • One must be able to know to the penny the amount of economic development benefits that will strike a balance in keeping a multinational corporation alive while optimizing indirect and induced economic multipliers. I want businesses that can’t stay in business to fail.
  • One must be able to detect and map the ppm of atmospheric sulfur particulates and project the impact twenty years from now, after the compounds have worked their way through the respiratory system of children. I say the problem is too big and the consequences too negligible for me or the infants in question to rightly care.
  • One must understand the physiology of every constituent better than all doctors combined in order to proscribe the best Food Policy and greenway routes to fight diabetes and obesity. A good city council person would know exactly how many locally-grown organic baby carrots each child should consume in the name of food choice, and the exact angles and distance of sidewalk meanders. I’m overweight and I eat candy.
  • One must be able to measure the gauss coming off electrical transmission devices better than any instrumentation known to men and have access to testing devices superior to anything owned and used by the EPA. One must also be able to infer all errors in method committed from a single-page report with vague numbers with neither units nor definitions. Then, one must calculate the entirety of epidemiological consequences on every single citizen – including the voiceless animals, trees, and rocks. I reserve the right to practice science in my own way, on my own time. I respectfully ask you tolerate my victimless diversity.
  • One must understand the only reason Communism has never worked is because a it isn’t green enough. I’ve never smoked pot, so I don’t know the feeling.
  • One must ignore erosion on the margins caused by taxing property owners more to subsidize free housing for others. I didn’t take enough graduate-level math at a publicly-funded university.
  • One must believe economies are the brainchildren of suits sitting around a table making plans, all of which derail the worker bees from constructive industrial endeavors with paperwork for compliance and downtime for community visioning. Me wants to work!
  • One must disdain the productive for trading their inventions. People should not give their money to rich people and expect things in return. People must give their money to government so it can, with its sparkly magic fingers, give the money to the rich people with nothing coming back to the people but an empty promise of economic multipliers that the same stinkin’ money can’t produce without government’s sparkly magic fingers getting a piece of the pie. This is called “fair,” “economic justice,” and “economic development.” I do my math in three-space without wormholes.
  • One must view a net job loss as job creation and perform other mathemagic because subtraction is not permissible. It’s so negative. I, on the other hand, find it so much easier to navigate reality when I don’t pretend.
  • After one exhausts his friends to support his habits beyond his own means, one must panhandle and call it partnering. I obey bumper stickers and think globally.
  • One must spend first and worry about the supply side later. That never works when I try it.
  • One must obsess over x-rated parts of the anatomy and which ones couples are using in x-rated actions, as it is well known that homosexual activity is good for the environment and the economy. It is as if putting certain body parts together works like a cooling rod for runaway economic destruction. We speak profanity under safe names like “lesbian” and “gay,” as if two ladies can’t share lunch or a walk in the park without a marriage license. We must talk about this openly and all the time, visualize it, and rub children’s noses in it because love is more about public spectacle and demonstration for prime-time TV than something intimate shared with a special someone. I think in pictures, and I like to keep the mind G-rated.
  • One must worry more about children of unemployed parents being stigmatized with $80 – instead of $100 – tennis shoes, than that the working poor’s children are scrounging Cheerios off the moldy floorboards for dinner. One should tax the working poor more. I say hammocks squelch innovation. Even if somebody has a good work ethic, they probably have a dad like mine who keeps begging them to increase their earnings by going on welfare.
  • One must serve women by increasing access to abortion. The ancients oppressed women by assuming they were more than abortion mills. I’m an ancient.
  • One must speak a strange language with no negatives and no conventional terminology for anything indicative of spending money. I have enough problems with English.
  • One must enjoy making rules because they can, and then defend in the court of public opinion why front setbacks can’t be four inches more. One must also love the urban feel of buildings pressed so tightly against sidewalks, the only form of public assembly they admit is single-file. Oh, give me some trees on Merrimon Avenue.
  • One must think everything is “exciting.” Zzzzzzzzzzz.
  • One must enjoy telling others what to do. I cannot even control myself.
  • The only criterion working in my favor is I have the ability to continue to remain full of myself when everybody else is telling me I’m a total jerk.

That is only the beginning. In short, I need the fatal conceit to believe I can convince an informed populace to cooperate as I GREAT ME regulates them into needing I GREAT ME to rescue them from that which I wrought.