The lowly yet scrappy 2nd smallest town in the State (mainly the surrounding area at this point in time!) finally found its true calling when a fussy global cabal of mother-in-laws, busybodies, snoot-bags and prodigious drama-queens unanimously determined that their meager although enthusiastic efforts at mischief-making in their own hometowns did not hold a candle to even the modest, half-hearted endeavors of a rank second-string gossip in the Greater Lamont Metropolitan Area. The town, never accustomed to being first at anything, took the news with surprising nonchalance - like anyone needed to conduct some doggone study or poll or whatever to figure out something so patently obvious! It is almost like doing a study to determine if the Hawaiian Islands are surrounded by shark-infested waters, for crying out loud! "Well, I guess we can make a colossal deal out of even the smallest things' said Ichabod Snopes, an area farm/ranch patriarch who lives 14 miles outside of Lamont. "Very few regions devote the sheer man-hours to finding typos and imperfections and minor although inadvertent inconsistencies than the area that surrounds the town of Lamont! Oh, and that doesn't even cover reading every darn line of the weekly newspaper for errors that we can blame on the person being quoted and not the reporter or chalking it up to basic miscommunication or whatever, of course. But if we didn't have that level of personal unhappiness-driven nastiness focused on others, that would force us, by definition, to examine our own lives, such as they are, and then the Lamont region would either be the drinking and/or the suicide capitol of the whole doggone world! And everyone knows that drinking is a sin, don't they? Mere gossip and backbiting are much more biblically sound (and fun, apparently!) - at least the way me and mine like to worship!" said the tragically lost, biblically confused man. "I mean, what is the fun of living in or around a small town if you don't get to constantly pull the speck out of your neighbor's eye - regardless of the lumber yard in your own!" he stammered, continuing to dig a hole for himself in this world and the next! "Well, I just don't see how that is a bad thing!" said Thelma Festoon, an area farm/ranch wife who has been known to flap her gums (quite literally!!) from time to time! "I view creating a hostile, petty, cliquish, 'Gotcha' oriented community atmosphere as a sacred mission, for crying out loud! If I spent all my time thinking about my good-for-nothing kids or failed to tune out all of those unfortunate noises my husband seems to make on a continual basis I would be a dadburn basket case in under a week! So, on some level this devotion to terrorizing my neighbors and undermining the very fabric of the town's culture itself is, in fact, a survival behavior - and since me and my unhappy friends are the only people who matter in the whole darn world, it just seems like the right thing to do. And it doesn't matter if I have to wait 20+ years to get even with people who by their very nature make me feel inadequate. I have plenty of time to spare - and as they say, revenge is a dish best served cold!" she said from the safe confines of her creepy psychological spider-hole! "Although I don't live within the town limits of Lamont, I just don't know if I would like to be associated with a town that I could not browbeat and run down for no good reason. That just ain't American, if you ask me!" said the poor, lost, bitter shrew of a woman.
(Editorial Note: For the record, this obnoxious historical gossiping, for a variety of reasons (mainly the guilty people moving to other towns or keeping to themselves because no one wants to associate with them now that their true colors are known!) is down by almost 90% in the last several years. (How sweet!) But as with anything that undergoes the principle of diffusion, this positive trend takes longer to work itself into the larger outlying area (Most of the 'outsiders' are good, solid, all-American types - so this does not apply to them, but the others more than take up the slack! What negative energy! What almost super-human focus and organization!) but we have faith that those troublesome laggards will get the message at some point, too - and this little town will naturally grow into the happy little place that it has all the potential to be. (We may be small, but we are cute!) But old habits die hard, especially in some self-righteous circles where self-entitlement and perceived superiority are the artificial 'body armor' employed against a seemingly hostile and threatening world that has 'done them dirty' or whatever and they feel that they need to get even with any and all (except their own!). But good always wins out against nastiness and evil in the long run, so this, too, will pass. But in the meantime, the town of Lamont proper is experiencing a dramatic renaissance of sorts, and is a down-right fun place to live - if you can stay away from certain sour outsiders (and a few insiders who are in the perverse orbit of the meddlesome interlopers, that is!)
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