Yours portly is woefully behind on the blog, dear readers, but regular programming will return soon.
As Trump said upon winning the 2016 election, “Complicated business!” I am dealing with some Town Council business, which had me out late on Sunday after a wonderful weekend with my girls.
But all is well. I am very blessed.
Stay tuned!
—TPP
Yours portly is still playing catch-up from a combination of end-of-the-school-year-busyness and post-vacation-readjustment. I know the blog has been short on substantive content lately; unfortunately, I simply lack the time and energy to put more into it at the moment.
I have a busy weekend of non-blog writing ahead (mostly stuff for the Town of Lamar), and precious little time today to work.
Last night (Thursday, 9 May 2024) the Town’s Police Department hosted an event with SC SLED (basically, the “FBI” for South Carolina) to discuss the implications of our new constitutional carry bill. There is a great deal of handwringing over the idea of hot-headed eighteen-year olds blowing each other way now that they can carry openly, but when I asked the SLED agent if any of the other thirty-four States with constitutional carry had experienced an uptick in these emotional bouts of lethal violence, he waffled, saying that “it varies from State to State.” My entire impression is that this law enforcement officer didn’t really know what he was talking about.
I love the police, but like engineers, they tend to look at an issue from only one angle, usually that of safety. Safety isn’t necessarily the enemy of liberty, but it frequently is. Eighteen-year olds are still going to blow each other away in the heat of the moment; now we can just see the ones stupid enough to display their $500 handgun on their hips. There’s a lot of hysteria over the new law, but not much thoughtful reflection.
Let a thousand handguns bloom.
Last night my little town of Lamar, South Carolina, hosted a candidates forum to give voters an opportunity to learn more about the candidates for Town Council and the Mayor’s race. Our Town employees did an excellent job organizing the event, which was held in the Fire Department’s fire truck bay. I brought some sound equipment and setup a very basic sound system for the candidates.
There are two Council seats up for election, which Councilwoman Mary Mack and myself currently occupy. We’re both running for re-election, so we are officially running unopposed. Residents will have two votes to cast in the Town Council race, one for each position.
As such, Councilwoman Mack and I were invited to tell voters a bit about ourselves and our visions for the town. The main event was the mayoral forum, which was structured in a series of questions (nine or ten) posed to each candidate. The mayoral candidates received their questions in advance, and the audience was not allowed to ask questions (although I think several people did after the forum formally adjourned).
Both candidates acquitted themselves nicely, differing mainly in the margins. Councilwoman Inez Lee focused on cleaning up the town, literally and metaphorically, frequently invoking Franklin Roosevelt’s “First Hundred Days”: we have a number of dilapidated buildings on Main Street that are eyesores. James Howell, a local landscaper, focused on improving the town’s infrastructure and zoning to make the town more attractive to businesses.
All candidates for all offices touted the need to fix Lamar’s water system, so we sell our own water again. We are currently purchasing around four million gallons of water each month from the Darlington County Water and Sewage Authority, paying rates that are onerously high for residents.
Apologies to my regular readers for the very delayed post today. Now that I have a large contingent of British readers, I really like to hit the 6:30 AM EST posting time, which I imagine is around lunchtime for them, so they have something to read over their tea and crumpets while my American readers have something to read over their grits and coffee.
As I’ve alluded to in other posts, the past two weeks or so have been absolutely insane for yours portly. As my school’s music teacher, I’m also the audio-visual wizard on campus. With Homecoming Week last week, it was my responsibility to make sure the sound system at the football field was working properly, and to assist with setup for some of the Homecoming games. I also set up another ad hoc sound system for my High School Music Ensemble to play a couple of songs at a pep rally Friday morning. When most of your musicians play guitar and piano, the logistics of plugging everything in become more daunting when taken outdoors.
Needless to say, all of my planning time was consumed with these activities, and I spent most of my Music classes using student labor to move equipment to and from the football field. That meant more time in the evenings and early mornings working on school-related stuff, and less time to focus on the blog.
In the midst of all of the Homecoming Week wackiness, I’m also running for reelection to Lamar Town Council and practicing and preparing for the 2021 Spooktacular. Tonight I have a candidates forum for the former, and last night my buddy John and I practiced for the latter.
Add to all of that a whopping dollop of after-school music lessons, and you can tell I’ve had precious little time for much else. I had a fun-filled day with my girlfriend on Saturday, then turned around Sunday and immediately set to work finalizing first quarter report card grades.
I’m not complaining—I like being busy—but I hope readers will extend some graciousness and excuse some occasionally late posts. My poor dog has been getting the short end of the bully stick, too, though we both collapsed into a snoring heap on the couch last night after John departed.
Such are the rhythms of life. Here’s hoping things return to a more stately tempo after the frenetic rhythm of the last few weeks. Again, I don’t want to be bored, but having a little more time to focus on writing would be great.
Last Thursday a colleague asked me to give a talk to his Public Speaking class about serving on Lamar Town Council, working as a teacher, and how I balance the two. Below is the written version of that talk, which is adapted in part from my post “Small Pond” (read the full version on SubscribeStar).
At my second Town of Lamar Council Meeting, my colleagues outvoted me 4-1 to renew Lamar’s mask ordinance for another sixty days. They also shot down my proposal that we reopen council meetings to the public, who can currently only attend online via Facebook Live and Zoom.
That’s precisely what I expected to happen, and I appreciate their reasons: concerns about safety, etc. The big, lingering question—one I can’t get out of my mind—is “when does it end?” At what point are we safe “enough” to remove our masks?
Last week was an exceptionally busy one for yours portly, with a number of duties and responsibilities intersecting at once. I’m sure many readers have noticed this phenomenon, but there is a decidedly cyclical nature to workflow; indeed, it’s almost tidal in the manner it ebbs and flows: I can go for two or three weeks enjoying a fairly placid schedule, only to have a couple of weeks of intense activity. Everything seems to come to a head at the same time.
That’s particularly true in education, a field that is structurally cyclical, with regular intervals of heightened activity baked into the calendar. The third quarter ended Friday, marking the beginning of the end of the school year (fourth quarter—that last, mad dash to summer vacation—starts today). That means last week was a flurry of finalizing grades and writing report card comments.
My school requires unique, individualized comments for every student, and though we teach (on average) fewer students than the typical public school teacher, we’re expected to go above and beyond. Because my colleagues and I were scolded as a group for comments deemed inadequate (for the record, I always write exceptional comments), I decided to double-down and write even more ridiculously detailed comments. Our registrar read through them Friday morning (after I worked furiously and late into the night Thursday to finish them before the weekend) and said, “I felt like I was reading a novella.” Mission accomplished.
That’s all to say that I’m very tired, so I thought this Monday would be a good opportunity to offer some brief updates.
I know, I know—everyone wants to read and talk about the storming of our metaphorical Bastille. I’m going to cover that in-depth in this weekend’s SubscribeStar Saturday post, not because I know it is the event of the decade—and will therefore crassly milk it for subscribers—but because my own observations are so tantalizingly spicy, I have to hide them behind a paywall. Believe it or not, $1 is apparently a major hurdle.
Instead, I’m going to focus on a bit local draconianism that I will hopefully soon be able to address head-on: my small town of Lamar has adopted a mask ordinance. Given our current Town Council, I’m surprised it took this long.
The ordinance, dated 14 December 2020 and effective 4 January 2021—but only received in water bills on 7 January 2021—is entitled “REQUIRING INDIVIDUALS TO WEAR FACE COVERINGS IN RETAIL AND FOODSERVICE ESTABLISHMENTS, AND MATTERS RELATED THERETO.” It features a number of “WHEREAS” justifications, mostly the “recommendations of public health experts.” It then lists the “Use of Face Coverings” in Section 1, detailing that face coverings must be worn indoors at stores and restaurants, etc., with plenty of opportunities to not wear a mask listed in Section 2, “Exemptions”—religious reasons, dental cleanings, etc.
The penalties for infractions—detailed in Sections 3 and 4—are $25 for individuals and $100 for businesses that fail to require employees to wear masks. Section 3 seems laughably unenforceable in a town that has maybe three police officers—and just a recipe for another unpleasant interaction between otherwise law-abiding citizens and police. Section 4 is particularly onerous, though, as it forces private companies to force their employees to wear masks, or face daily $100 fines.
Granted, most business establishments have already bent the knee and have bought into the mask hysteria. In my mind, though, that makes the mask mandate even more unnecessary: if Dollar General is making me wear a mask to buy a $1.26 loaf of bread-based loaf product anyway, why does the Town Council need to ladle an extra dollop of self-righteous scolding?
This past Saturday’s SubscribeStar Saturday was delayed, but I got the latest post, “Back in the Arena: Second Lamar Town Council Special Election” posted last night. It’s about the beginning of my second campaign for Lamar Town Council, and my strategy to overcome secret write-in campaigns this time around (basically, get more people to turn out to vote for me—not too complicated!).
It’s available now for $1 and higher subscribers. For full details about subscriber perks, read this morning’s TBT post.
Thanks again for your support!
—TPP
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Yesterday Lamar held a rescheduled special election for a vacant Town Council seat. I was hoping to have the results last night, but when I drove by Lamar Town Hall around 8:30 PM, the results were not posted to the front door.
I spoke with Darlington County Election Commissioner Hoyt Campbell this morning, however, and he gave me the results over the phone. He also said the poll workers might have posted the voting machine receipts to one of the side doors of Town Hall. Sure enough, I drove down there this morning and they were on a side door. That occurred to me last night, but the prospect of lurking around a public building at dusk struck me as a tad sketchy.
The results were surprising—shocking, really. This little off-cycle, middle-of-summer, Age of The Virus election came with an interesting twist.
The Portly Politico 