Subdued

Wow. As I pull up my Firefox, my home page tells of a shooting near Pittsburgh, a city where I spent ten years of this life. But there hasn't been a good shooting spree in this country in a while, which is odd because of everyone in this country being so uptight with the economy and everything in the crapper, as well as the passing of Michael Jackson. Things are bad, I tell ya. For some reason, there will probably be a few more shortly.

But this web log is frequently read by people searching Bellingham and gangs (Blogger.com has some neat analytic tools to play around with). Now I'm sure that there are guns and drugs and wannabe ganstas here in The 'Ham, and maybe a few fringe groups that I've been told about down in Happy Valley, and possibly off Northwest or Alabama. But the view from the 4,000 square feet of grounds of my estate where my 800 square foot manor over here in Sunnyland is that any town will have bad people, but I see little evidence of anything of substance regarding gangs. People still sleep with doors and windows wide open here. And shootings are rare. Maybe the gangs too are subdued here in this City of Subdued Excitement.

And speaking of subdued, the Subdued Stringband Jamboree is coming up. There are way too few weekends left in this summer and I am panicking when I think of things I'd still like to do. But the jamboree might be a weekend to camp somewhere up Mount Baker way on Thursday and come back to the festival on Friday. And I think I can do most of it by bus. (Okay, and a mile or two by thumbing past Glacier.)