Ballard Street by Jerry Van Amerongen for October 23, 2018

C’mon, Stew. Pull your own weight.

He’d better write fast, Shirley is about to take off with is desk.

Shirley is a saint. He even has a customized wagon-desk that she pulls for him. But does he have her birthday written down somewhere? Her Christmas list? Probably, but the data retrieval system is weak.

Sometimes good ideas are fleeting. One can always throw ’em away later.

Why is Sheila pulling the wagon? You know what.. somebody has been complaining to the Ballard City Council and Little League Coach ( we only have one) about trash cans out an hour after pickup, hedges an inch too high, porch railings in need of repair etc. I’ll bet thats what he is doing.

If it’s not written down, it never happened.

What kind of things?

He thinks on his feet

He has C.R.S. too?

He wanted to start a little business …

Zooming (so to speak) to wherever you might be, to take copious notes on things like bumper-thumpers in the parking lot,

the price of zucchini at two different markets…

the little note you wanted taken to your mother in law, faster than you could mail it.

He bought himself one of them new-fangled cellular flip-phones…. set up his speedy note table…

Then he spent too much time thinking of catchy names…

like “Be Write There,” or “Write Away!”…

He didn’t notice that other people already had smart phones, tablets and laptop computers…. with e-mail and built-in cameras…

And nobody needed his old fashioned notes on lined paper.

Now, he has nothing better to do than scribble endless notes about the neighborhood.

I hope he’s writing to GoComics, to tell them that justifying all the lines by letter count…

ie, breaking all the words however they fit, without word wrap or hyphens…

is driving all the citizens crazy!

And thus the re-invention of cursive.

Shirley never did like being his PDA.

Good morning, Sheriff.

How those travel guides started.

Me too. I have little notes all over the place.

Bad news, Stew. The great American novel, “On the Road”, has already been written…

Chariot and King & Queen of the Sword,