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Hello Everyone!

Island Life

Our greatest fear should not be of failure, but of succeeding at something that doesn’t really matter. D.L.Moody
 
These days, whenever I see an email with the subject line that is the title of this particular bit of indulgence, I make a check mark in the box next to it and hit delete. I also perform this same operation on anything pertaining to saving polar bears, signing up for "fun" runs where you wind up getting covered in mud, foam or an array of colored chalk dust, political proselytizing by Harry Reid or Nancy Pelosi, or anything related to a once relevant 9/11 truth movement which is now populated by paranoid whack jobs and people who don’t know when something is done and pointless. I then don’t really have much reading left to do there and move on to other things that seem to matter, although it’s sometimes hard to tell about even that. There- just now I was checking on an anticipated other email message and found two more of the above mentioned Re:’s- check, check- delete.
 
For those of us who have not indulged in the now over 200 "messages" in this particular string contained in the facebook’s VashonAll page, it involves a supposed Hollywood scout who came here to look for Vashon’s Archie Bunker so someone could make another so-called "reality" show about him and how he finds redemption and change amongst the myriad of glutenless, liberal denizens of this hallowed isle. What puzzled me from the start was what exactly might be the catalyst of change that would turn Archie into a born again tree-hugger during the run of the show, having not succumbed to radical personality metamorphosis as of yet in the duration of his cranky, unenlightened Island existence. Perhaps they were counting on the fact that change doesn’t come easy, but with a little luck- and maybe a secretly scripted plot twist here and there- our resident curmudgeon would perhaps come around, in five or six years, to the eagerly awaited personality correction, once the realization had hit home that the show had long ago run out of jokes about ferries, bikes in trees, carved wooden sentinels and just what today’s special is. I mean, did this scout not include the demise of the Church of Great Rain in his pre-visit research?
 
The reason I stopped reading these quips and snarks after comment number 50 or so was because they pretty much are saying the same thing over and over again. We don’t want the increased population on the Island that this recognition will spark. It will bring badly needed jobs to the Island. And my favorite- the grand and glorious magic counting and accounting of residency years that entitles one to honorary residenthood and coveted Islander status. As one looks at the polarization that these subjects generate, the base premise guiding this proposed show seems less a subtle twist of contrived irony than a rather obvious, self-destructing hope beyond hopes. The fear of change behind this Hello! string is being morphed and amplified by the lost perspective of what really might matter to the well being of this Island beyond something someone somewhere might choose (or not) to create and/or watch in the space between the commercials on TV.
 
That is at least a part of the reason why I don’t read this string, along with other things. Having avoided plodding through all the repetitive Island crap, I can then do things like go on walks and visit new Island residents, like the bug covered, mobile crapper that is now parked up at the VES fields- come on now, you knew I would get around to this subject at some point. Some have called it the Million Dollar Restroom- others have described it in terms that probably shouldn’t be fully spelled out here. But there it was over in the carefully scraped and graded bare dirt, gleaming in the noon day sun. After all the build up, I expected something bigger, something like what is described on the Premier Executive Trailer pages on the internets. Now here are portable toilet setups that would meet and exceed what Bill Ameling would like to call modular. There is the Advantage, the Luxury Liner 20, the Executive 24 and the Porta Lisa. All seem to have real porcelain fixtures - some have wood floors and stall doors. The claim on the Luxury Liner 30 is that it can "comfortably accommodate 400-500 guests at a six hour event." All of this is something I’d expect of a million dollar pooper (MDP), but that’s not really what I saw up at VES at the turning point of my amble from home.
 
At the moment the MDP is resting from it’s long overland trek from Indiana- I assume that’s what it’s doing since it isn’t hooked up to anything, and it certainly isn’t open for public inspection beyond the once around the outside I gave it. There didn’t seem to be anything that looked like a concession stand window, although there was a fold down platform that might serve as a prominent place for judicial stump speeches like in the presidential railway whistlestop campaigning of yesteryear. There were a