I learned in this morning’s Fecal Creek Witness that Mayor Skutchinson has issued an executive order establishing a new town motto.  “Fecal Creek – A Place to Live.”  What absolute pedestrian drivel.  This new “motto” is an affront, a limp-wristed platitude so devoid of imagination it could only spring from the dullest crevice of the Mayor’s bureaucratic skull.  A place to live?  Would that not properly apply to literally any municipality?  Is that the best Mr. Mayor’s puny intellect could muster?

To be fair, it’s probably not his fault.  Not entirely, anyway.  I know Skutch.  He lives about 5 houses down from me.  We’ve gotten heroically drunk together; we play the occasional round of golf.  He’s an alright guy, and I’m confident, given the correct circumstances, he could come up with a superior motto, dripping with the sardonic flair our town deserves.  But he’s dealing with constraints, limits only residents of the Creek know about.  Until now.

Here’s the deal: prior to about 1992, Fecal Creek was known as Shotgun Junction.  The town popped up during the Gold Rush as a railroad junction between Sacramento and the gold-filled foothills.  Obviously, with all that gold flowing through it, the town became a target for outlaws, smugglers, Mexicans, and all manner of ne’er-do-wells.  Which led to the over-arming of the residents, and their overwhelming preference for arming themselves quickly became the shotgun.  Thence, obviously, the name.  It was a badass town with a badass name.  But around ’92, the idiocy of political correctness came to town, and those nefarious forces successfully berated the town’s leadership into dropping the “Shotgun” from the name, leaving it known as simply “Junction.”  Far less poetic and badass, but still acceptable to most folks.  Despite the abbreviated name, not much had changed in the town since its founding in 1850.  The population remained below 50K, and virtually everybody worked for the railroad in some capacity, or they worked In services to support the railroad workers.

But big change came in 1994, when the Clinton administration seemed to suddenly take interest in the town.   The exact mechanisms used to implement the administration’s will remain classified and guarded, so we may never know, but what we do know is that almost overnight, the name of the town was arbitrarily and capriciously changed to Fecal Creek.  Just as suddenly, Fecal Creek State Prison was built on the northern outskirts of the town, and then, everybody who lived in the town seemed to work for either the railroad or the corrections department.  Fine.  But the biggest change went unspoken and unnoticed for a couple of years: when the name was changed to Fecal Creek, the town was quietly but officially designated as not only a federal witness protection town, but it was to be the largest federal witness protection town in the country.  In other words, pretty much every federal witness was given a new name and sent to live in Fecal Creek.  The population exploded to well over 100K, most of which were fairly dangerous criminals or at best, vaguely shady characters.  With this influx of basically random shitbags, the town (having graduated to the level of small city), the identity of the place got watered down and muddy.
And now we’re getting shit like this motto: a Place to Live.

I think it’s high time that we return to our wild west roots.  We are and always have been hard-drinking, meat-eating, gun-toting badasses. All of the adults (and many of the children) are drunk and heavily armed.  It’s time we lean into our violent heritage.  I’m considering starting a petition to change the name back to Shotgun Junction.  And I minor alteration to this stupid motto would improve it exponentially: “Shotgun Junction – A Place to Die.”  Fuck yes.  Or something more aggressive, more reflective of popular sentiment in the city.  Yes.  I’ll come up with some suggestions to send to Skutch.

N.P.: “Till the Day I Die” – Halford