Neighbor Day is 3/11

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYpS9bLdb5I

No guarantees, because they things often don’t work out, but I believe we may soon receive a recorded message from Dr. Cassandra St. Clair regarding this fiasco with Rick Yukon. And not an actress that we may or may not have hired to impersonate Dr. St. Clair, but the actual Dr. St. Clair herself. If this actually happens, I do believe I will personally tell that damned lawyer who’s threatening us that he can “suck it.”

The amount of stress over this has been kind of untenable for me. And now with this whole Coronavirus scare, we have received contact from a small number of publications who have requested to reprint some of Rick Yukon’s original memoirs on the CoViB-7 scare.

Here’s the deal with that … we don’t own these interviews, we were granted permission from Dr. St. Clair to transcribe and print them. She did not authorize any permissions to us beyond that. Depending on her recorded statement to this effect, we will abide by her wishes. If she wants us to take down the interviews, we will, if she allows us to share them, we’ll consider it. Cassandra St. Clair literally risked her own career and possibly even her life to save these tapes from being confiscated in the first set of Space Force 7 raids. She wanted the truth to be told, and we believe that we are honoring her and Ricky Ukon with that truth.

I would like to add one other thing … back when Rick used to stop by Spheric Newspaper in NYC back in the 1990s, he once mentioned something odd to me, and I might not have even remembered it if not for this new Coronavirus scare. Robbie and I and Xavy and Matt and Fred and Sheri and Anna and Steve and Ian and that guy who used to be afraid of vampires but got a date with that tall woman in the computer lab were all there. Rick said “I used to worry about things like this. I used to care about things like popcorn, and television shows, and relationships and booze. I used to be interested in art and culture and literature. But then two things changed in my life. I founded Neighbor Day and got a snowmobile. Now I don’t care about the rest of that stuff anymore.”

After publishing our recorded interview from Rick Yukon, we are now the proud recipients of a cease-and-desist request from someone who supposedly represents Rick Yukon. (Though in the letter, it was spelled Ricky Ukon.) We have been asked to remove this interview.

We have permission from the owner of the tapes to publish these transcripts and I have no intention to take them down.

(Editor’s Note, this message has been reprinted from Rick Yukon’s posthumous archives with permission of the Late Colonel Yukon’s partner Cassandra St. Clair, we thank Dr. St. Clair for her generosity in allowing us to reprint this. This article was transcribed by Neighbor Day staff directly from the recorded interview for this special Neighbor Day blog post. The recording was originally made on a micro cassette tape and player with limited audio fidelity. Unfortunately the years in storage have further degraded the tape’s dynamic range, there are parts of the interview that were difficult to transcribe. Thus Colonel Yukon’s words as recorded in this interview may differ slightly from earlier interviews transcripts of this same interview. To our knowledge, this is the first time that Kentucky Colonel Yukon’s words from his capstone interview have been reproduced in their entirety from his mention of Neighbor Day through to his discussion of his work on CoViB-7.)

Neighbor Day came at a strange time for me back then. We knew that as as the very first Neighbor Day, we had to put a large marketing effort into the launch. And at the time, President Carter’s Good Neighbor Day was getting a lot of the press. But Ronzoni and I knew that we needed to have Neighbor Day at a time of year when there was spring renewal, the first shoots of grass after a long hard winter, that kind of thing. By the time July 4 gets here, the summer is in full swing, and we wanted a marketable holiday that could accentuate that whole spring renewal thing. In that way, we didn’t really have a lot of competition in this space for the outdoor barbecue market. At the time, the market was strongly centered around summer activities. Part of what we did for that industry with Neighbor Day was get customers to think about using their outdoor grills all year. And we had a lot of backers in that industry consortium, everything from a manufacturer of kosher all-beef hot dogs, to condiment producers, charcoal and propane distribution, a few major beef, pork and chicken packing houses and geekers. We went into Neighbor Day with the industry ties in place. And the industry desperately needed that shot in the arm. Obviously the food providers sold their product all year, but the specialty manufacturers were the ones who were literally starving to death. I remember one guy, nice kid, he had a business manufacturing “snow coolers.” At some point when the consortium decided to table our launch of Neighbor Day due to the CoViB-7 scare, that young man camped himself in front of my lawyer’s office over on 53th Street, he knew I would have to show up a meeting there for my Space Force 7 case, and sure enough I did show up there that afternoon. We had met some years earlier when I was in prison for the October 0.9c launch. He had started that business on a shoestring, and Neighbor Day was going to be a big part of his own product launch plans. I explained to him that I had a meeting and didn’t have the time to speak with him at that moment, but if he would continue to wait until I was done with the meeting, then we could have a cigarette together and discuss what he needed. That was the Seagram Building, my lawyer was an oddball who liked that damned building for some reason. All of his associates at the time were in the Chrysler Building, and for some reason he had to be in the Seagram Building. I never did understand that guy. But back in those days, there was no real need to smoke in front of a building like we do now, people smoked at their desks, smoking in front of the building while not actually walking anywhere was for hobos and vagrants. That young man was dressed well enough, but of course I looked like a bum, just the same brown Brooks Brothers I always wore, I think I must have had ten of that same suit, but I always wore the same one because I was raised very poor, and I didn’t want to over-use my other good suits. I looked like a hobo myself back in those days because that was just the way that men of honor looked in my time. We were proud that our suits had worn spots and maybe a bit of dirt, because we did what men did when they walk through this wide world that we share. And I still have a photo of my grandfather wearing a similar brown suit in front of a mine in Colorado where he first worked as a miner, and then later worked as a union shop steward. In the first photo, his face was cleaned somewhat, but still had traces of coal dust, however I could see that his suit coat was noticeably cleaner than his pants. He clearly had taken to removing his coat when he went into the mine. So I remember to this day, I stood in front of the Seagram Building talking to this young man about his product and his “snow cooler” device, and I had taken off my hat, even though I was outdoors, which was unusual for me. I had removed it because I needed that young man to know that I wasn’t trying to hoodwink him, but that both the consortium and I were just too busy to launch Neighbor Day in time for our planned marketing efforts. I believe I mentioned that I was deep in my work with CoViB-7. Many of those nights, we were up until three o’clock in the morning, I was tired. But as I stood there in front of this young man, my hat literally in hand, a well-off gentleman strode past us, then backed up a few steps, and addressed the young man, he said something to the effect of “it’s easier to just give them a quarter and get on with your day.” And then this son-of-a-bitch through a quarter into my upturned hat! The Snow Cooler guy didn’t know what to do! I could see that he wanted to laugh, but he was a good and respectful kid, taught not to laugh when the leader of multinational industrial consortium is mistaken for a hobo!

That was something that I remembered, and I wanted to share it with you. That’s a small tape recorder, I didn’t know they made them that small. (Inaudible words by interviewer.)

Back to the Snow Cooler guy, he tells me that he stuck his last dime into this one product, and it looks like he’s about to cry, he’s giving me this whole sob story about how his future is in peril, and he just lost his family to a divorce while he tried to get that business off the ground. Same old song and dance, right? Usually in such a case, I would never come in the way of a good business failure, because the failures are where we learn, the failures are ultimately far more valuable and treasured than the successes, because they demonstrated the limit of our abilities. Obviously, I had no problem with this kid failing, and his schtick was as phony as a three dollar bill, but there was something about the young man’s simplicity that really grabbed me. And I also sensed that he just wasn’t tough enough to handle the failure of that product. For a brief moment of my short existence, I tried to remember what it was like when I was in his shoes, and nobody helped me and let my products fail because that’s what products do. And I said to this kid, this young punk, I said to him “fuck it, let’s do Neighbor Day.” And then I said to him “You know that it’s going to be a lot of work, right?” At that moment, I knew I screwed up. His whole face changed, he had won, he had me. He didn’t plan on doing any more work than absolutely necessary to sell his product. But I couldn’t change my mind, we had each smoked the other’s cigarettes. It was the Cherokee Initiation peace pipe ceremony that had taken place in front of the Seagram Building fercrissakes!

I went back up to my lawyers office, I guess about 15 minutes had passed, about the length of an unfiltered cigarette in those days, they seemed to burn a good bit slower back then. I told him that he’s going to have to handle a good bit more of the Space Force 7 defense than I had retained him, so I wrote him a check right there, and I told him “Jimmy, you’re going to have to do that work for me, I have a national holiday to launch.” And it was a bear of a job to get the consortium back on board, a few of them were already in the process of changing out their tooling for the regular brand flow. But I had a good bit of resources at my command back then, so I took care of it for them. And of course, we hit a home run with the First National Neighbor Day, as history now shows. Ronzoni was actually the one who came up with the “shirt off my back” promotion. I tell you this history because the truth is important. It’s important to know that the “Neighbor Day is three eleven” campaign didn’t come out of lofty goals to help our neighbors and make friends with our neighbors, but rather it was a commercial holiday, designed from inception to move product. I’m not particularly proud of that, but I’m not embarrassed about that either, it’s not a truth that I wish to hide. I helped an industry sell more product, and that isn’t necessarily something to crow about, but in helping that industry sell more product we made Neighbor Day a reality. And now all of those people who get together on Neighbor Day and share food, beer, stories, soft drinks, hot dogs off the now year-round grill, they create a happiness for which I am very proud. We helped bring a little more peace to the world, a little less sadness, and by any metric I’ve developed in my career, I would call that good work. We did well, and we did good. I can see you’re about to ask me about the young man with the Snow Cooler, so I’ll cut to the chase for you. His idea was that barbecues in the colder months didn’t need regular ice-filled coolers, and that there should be an open-topped, folding cooler that could be filled with a few shovels of snow and then used as a serving spot for the canned and bottled beverages. All of that drama in front of the Seagram Building, his big idea was just a little folding plastic sled so that these winter alcoholics could drag their coolers behind them in the snow as they roamed around their mountains and frozen lakes and snowy streets with a cooler filled with beer and drinks. Fool me once, if I had know what a degenerate that young punk was, I would have never shared that cigarette with him. But then fool me twice, even after I figured out what that idiot was up to with that dumb-ass snow cooler, I could have kicked his ass easy. I should have kicked his ass for degrading our society to the point that even wandering around the backcountry, these people need to drag a nightlcub behind them. But a few years later, I saw some people with his product out on the beach, by that time he had branded it a “Gear Sled” for year-round use. They were happy, and then I saw that his little invention was just a fun tool for kids to have fun. You know, not everyone is an angry old judgemental man like me, there are some younger people on this planet who want to enjoy a few moment of their lives, right?

And during all of this, somehow, we had engineered CoViB-7. I don’t know how I was so effective back then. I was an effective employee, and I earned my pay. I was effective because my employers had given me the means to be effective. They allowed me to work. But CoViB-7 was not too well explored back then. You need to understand, that after my work for Space Force 7 landed me in prison, I had a good bit of time to think. But I also had a good bit of time to learn a new trade, in that case it was floor stripping. It’s not really as simple as some people think. But of the job with floor stripping is to protect an expensive floor, but do it in such a way as to minimize the chance that someone will slip and sue the property owner. A clean floor drives business. When that CEO steps through the lobby of the Metropolitan Life building, he wants to see a clean floor. Depending on the office building, that clean floor was often on a weekly and monthly wax-strip cycle. We would strip the old wax off that floor at the end of every month, and then we would apply fresh wax with each week, sometimes twice a week depending on the traffic. In between waxes, we used oil-mops to pick up dust and lint and dirt. Stripping required a good bit of muscle, and I was in good shape back then from my boxing career, so that was something to which I gravitated in the prison training program. After I got out I did floor stripping for a few office buildings, notably the Metropolitan Life North Building, as I mentioned. By the way, that’s a fascinating story about that building, please remind me to tell you something about that building after I answer your questions about the CoViB-7 work. I was doing to general floor maintenance in the lobby of that building, and it’s like a cave in there with all those elevator shafts, because that building was originally planned to be the tallest in the world, but the economy killed that plan, and they just capped it where it was. There is a photo in the basement of the original building design, and you can’t imagine how beautiful that building would have become if finished. A hundred stories with some of the most beautiful neo-gothic architecture you could imagine, it would have made the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building and the Woolworth Buildings look the way I looked on that sidewalk when that asshole threw a quarter into my hat. Because there are so many unused elevator shafts in that building, the floor needs a good bit of hand work in digging out extra floor wax from the many corners and crevices. I was down in the lobby on my hands and knees, and I was already kind of an older guy by that point, I had already done all of my time for the Space Force 7 debacle. This one hospital CEO used to regularly work until midnight or so, he had an office in that building, I’m not sure if his company was connected to Metropolitan Life, or if he just rented that space as an office to have in the city for his pharmaceutical work. But this fellow gets off the elevator, we talked now and then, usually about the Mets or the Rangers, he seemed to like hockey, though he clearly had a Southern accent, so I’m not sure why he liked hockey. I didn’t mind talking because I could scrape up the gunk in the crevices while we talked. And by that time, there was no more smoking inside the lobby of that building, but he had a bottle of Coca Cola, and he was pacing around with that. I asked him how everything is going, and before I could get out another word, he’s off on a rant about how the regulations have made his job more difficult than it needs to be. I usually don’t pay much attention to thing like that, but then he said something that really grabbed my attention. He told me that there are laws that prevent the business side of the hospital from sharing data with the medical side of the hospital and vice-versa. That made sense to me in a way, I wouldn’t want decisions about care to be determined by the cold eye of profitability, but what he actually wanted to do was share some of his data with the medical scientists. Naturally, this guy was straight-arrow, as ethical as ethical can be, you didn’t work with a company like Met-Life and not have some impeccable moral standards, they take that stuff seriously there. But he hands me a little hand-drawn graph, just the shape of a line, and he asks me “does this look like an exponential curve to you?”

He hands me this flimsy little cocktail napkin with a little hand-drawn graph, and the first thing I think is “holy shit, is this guy a complete idiot, I mean, what the fuck is wrong with him?” That’s what I thought anyway, but what I said was “nope, looks like a logarithmic curve to me, it seems to be heading to some kind of asymptote.” I apparently said the wrong thing to him, because then he looked a little more emotional than before. He then pulls out a sheet from his briefcase, and he folds the top and bottom over so that I can’t see what the titles are, he just shows me the graph. “What about this one?” These curves they’re often hard to really characterize, it’s a bit of an art, but I’ve been doing it a while, so I know when to look at the detail and when to look at the bigger shape of the curve, what I can visually ignore as noise and what I can see as a trend. “Same thing, there seems to be an asymptote in there. Did you really need that to be an exponential?” He told me that he doesn’t know enough about math to make heads or tails of it. I have no idea how these companies can hire a CEO and not give him the resources to interpret a graph, to the point that he’s in the lobby of his building asking the opinion of an ex-con floor stripper. I obviously knew what I was looking at, I’m not an idiot, but he keeps asking me these vague and ambiguous questions about the line shapes. Finally, I said to him something like “you can stop with the theatrics, it’s obvious those are infection and mortality rate graphs, I’m not innumerate like you are.” I remember I said exactly those words, “I’m not innumerate like you are.” It was rude of me to say that, but it was true. This guy was making millions of dollar per year, and he was worth tens of millions and he couldn’t read a damned line shape. That first night was the start of my work on CoViB-7. The next two nights, he came down and asked me similar questions, but I had to work on the floors, that was my job. I told him, “if you want me to work for you, hire me to do your floors, but I don’t work for you, and you’ve taken enough of my time.” The next day I come into work, I go into the basement lockers, look at the original architectural drawing of the originally-planned 100 story building, and my supervisor tells me “you’re upstairs today, I got you doing the floors for that guy you told me about that keeps talking to you at midnight.” Apparently I had been hired to do their floors! I grab some basic stuff, and I head up to his office, I get off the elevator, and the receptionist there immediately brings me into a conference room. The table is filled with sandwiches, a platter of fruit, sparkling water, they clearly figured they would be in there a while. The table was filled with employees, and I’m an asshole, you put a plate of my favorite sandwiches in front of me, and I’m going to eat them. That motherfucker CEO had remembered a little conversation we had months earlier how I like baguettes with fresh mozzarella, sun dried tomatoes, fresh tomatoes, balsamic vinaigrette, a little olive oil, sea salt and basil. Sure enough, what’s on the table? Three platters with nothing but that exact sandwich! I think I inhaled at least two of those sandwiches before I got out my first word. By the time I was on my third, I noticed that everyone else had one too. The best laid plans of mice and men go oft awry apparently, because whatever they had brought me up there to discuss was now lost in the blur of those sandwiches. To this day, I can’t remember a single person at that table who didn’t enjoy those sandwiches. There was a look at peace on them, eating those sandwiches, and I made it happen because I described them exactly the way they should be made to my CEO friend, and he must have written it down. It was like a little Neighbor Day, that moment with all of us eating those sandwiches. The people in that room were happy. Then I look at the papers in front of me, and I start analyzing the data they had.

Remember what I said earlier, that the business side of these hospitals didn’t generally share data with the medical side, and vice-versa. At the time, they didn’t commonly call those infections by their scientific names, they just used the word “infection.” But the general scientific literacy of people had come up sufficiently that they were comfortable with differentiating different infections by the characteristic microscopy and I assume genetics, of the virus itself. That was a Coronavirus, they had dubbed it a “B” variant, and it was number 7 of the identified variants. I didn’t know much about medicine back then, and I still don’t know much about medicine now, but I knew enough about the shape of a curve to know what I was looking at. So I just spent the next few hours telling them what I saw in their data. I wasn’t particularly intelligent then, and I’m not particularly intelligent now, but I was just the floor stripper, I was able to look at their business data but with a scientific eye.

What I saw in that data was a highly virulent infection of some kind, one that spread quickly, but one that didn’t seem to be all that dangerous based on the mortality rates I was looking at. There was no long-term stability in the numbers they gave me. I saw that the mortality rates were converging on the same asymptote on which any regular Coronavirus converged about 0.1% or so. At the time, I was looking at 12% mortality in their data, but they also showed the infection rates that they had inferred from their supplies ordering. You see, a business has access to data that the medical side does not. They can see trends that the clinicians can’t. The clinicians are interested in one patient at a time, the business doesn’t have time to drill that deep into the data. By that point, there were a few sandwiches left, but none of us wanted any more of them. I remember seeing the CEO pick away at the one sandwich he took off the platter. It was still in front of him, he was removing little balls from the bread and eating them, each little bread ball was the size of a ball bearing. It was fascinating to watch him. And then I looked over at this guy, and I for a moment I felt something odd. Did you ever read 1984 by George Orwell? There was a moment in the book when Winston Smith realized that he had fallen in love with tormentor, this torturer in O’Brien, and as this guy is torturing him, he realizes they are actually both part of the same machine. That’s the feeling I suddenly had for this hospital CEO, sitting at the head of the table, picking at his bread like a budgie. The moment I felt that, I dropped the bomb right on his fucking head.

I said to him something about being a kid in Colorado when the weatherman on 9-News would warn us about a big upcoming blizzard, and the kids would get excited that school was about to be cancelled, the parents would run to King Soopers to buy bread and milk and then we would go to sleep for the night and see what happened overnight. Sometimes, the weatherman would come through, and there would be a couple feet of drifted snow, and the kids were out like a shot, the beach delivered to the front door our homes. The radio announcer on KVOD read the school closures one by one, and when I heard the name of my school, it was the closest feeling to ejaculation that I would feel until I was a young man and met that lovely young single mother who worked at The Magic Pan on Larimer. I think that our 0.9c Space Force 7 misadventure didn’t move as fast as I did after I heard my school’s name read by that announcer, I was out that door and into my winter wonderland. Every kid had something they liked to do. Some kids like snowballs, some kids liked to do the snow angels ad infinitum, some did snowmen when the snow was sufficiently wet, some sledded. I loved it all. I did it all. Yeah, getting hit in the face with a ball of ice wasn’t something I enjoyed, but I did it all. But for me, the true king of winter adventures was tunneling through the snow drifts and building an elaborate system of caves and forts. It was construction on a kid-sized scale. And then sometimes, 9-News was wrong, and the blizzard turned into a bust. “But,” I told him this, “while it’s still snowing, it’s often hard to tell if the blizzard is going to be a boom or a bust.” I think that’s because we get emotionally connected with the sight of the snow falling from the heaven, and we just can’t think clearly enough to discern the shape of the curve. I said to him “sometimes, you need to adjust your course when you see that your data doesn’t agree with your prediction.” And then he looked up from his papers and he said “yeah.”

And that’s why he was worth that golden parachute they eventually gave him when he left, that’s why he was worth every dollar of that $42 million. It wasn’t that he was smart, he wasn’t. It wasn’t that he was a good leader, he wasn’t that either. It wasn’t that he was a good strategist, he wasn’t. What made him worth that money was that he picked at that sandwich like a budgie. While the rest of us were chewing and spitting and throwing as much as we could into that air, he sat there, absorbing. I explained the basics of graph theory to him, in my ham-handed way. I calculated some hypotheticals for him to show him what the shapes of those graphs should look if the infection actually had the mortality that the early data suggested.

And then he understood. He thanked me, and asked me directly to leave the room due to “sensitive” information. That bastard actually had the cujones to pick my brain for the price of a few sandwiches. And I let him, because I’m a scientist and a Kentucky Colonel, and that’s just what we do … duty before honor. But this is where it gets weird. I step outside the room, the door shuts behind me, and sure enough, I see a lot of wax buildup along the corners of the door frames, so I get out my scraper and I get to work. In full view of everyone outside that office, I’m just the floor-stripper doing his job, but I could hear every word of what happened inside that boardroom.

I would like to say that the room was filled with evil people, or uncaring people, but that room was filled with people who had just been handed a log of shit on a paper plate. They knew it was going to get messy, and their main goal was to minimize the risk of having that log of crap roll off the flimsy plate while they tried to get it to the wasp-covered trash can. It could have been a party game, walk the log of shit across the park without letting it fall off the paper plate. The people in that room made a decision to continue forward with CoViB-7 as they had before I walked in that room. The consensus seemed to have been that they needed to better stay safe than sorry, and that as the global pandemic turned out to be no more dangerous in mortality than any other coronavirus infection, that they wrote the equivalent of a “doctor’s sick note” for the kid to stay home from school. Through that door, I heard the conversation gradually settle on the idea that people were just tired and they needed time off from work, and time off from school, and they would react really well to an international directive telling them to stay in their homes and just rest and stay healthy. And “after that” the CEO’s voice came out of the fray a bit and everyone else shut up, “after that, we’re going to need people to work, because my own bosses are getting back to me about these large public health costs of people doing nothing. They’re complaining to me about employees wasting time watching videos, reading magazines, drinking coffee after coffee and generally finding every reason to work three point five hours out of every eight.” I’m paraphrasing there, but I remember him saying that thing about workers only putting in “three point five hours out of eight.”

It was like that Roger Waters song, “when cowboys and Arabs draw down on each other at noon, in the cool dusty air of the city board room, will you stand by a passive spectator?” I was that guy, that wax-scraping waiter outside the door, I was the guy who showed them what the data really meant, and history has shown my interpretation to be correct. But when I had my opportunity to fuck with their shit, to spearhead the truth, I did fuck-all. I let them get away with it, not because I knew I couldn’t do anything to fight it. I did fuck-all because I just didn’t care. So what if the world shut down colleges and businesses and cost billions of dollars in profits. I agreed with the CEO in that room, we did need a break from our productivity. For all I know, that whole thing was engineered by the Chinese or the Russians to drain our economy in the same way the 9/11 terrorists drained our economy from the fear of box-cutters, only this time is was fear of some microbes. But I didn’t care, I was as tired then as I am now. And ultimately, I was just a floor stripper. My opinion meant nothing more than any other floor stripper, regardless that a gaggle of useful idiots chose to seek my analysis. Do you want to know the funniest thing though? That whole thing, it happened on 3/11. And 3/11 is Neighbor Day.

All the regular stuff

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Help and visit my favorite elderly neighbor

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Try to get some neighbors to come over for some Tecate Lights

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Clean out the culverts and pick up trash near my house

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Neighbor Day 2020

I’m not going to do a bunch of research on this. I think that Good Neighbor Day was the brainchild of President Jimmy Carter. President Carter was the first President of whom I was genuinely aware of as President. I remember Ford and Nixon, but they were just some abstract politicians. And I once dressed up as Lyndon Johnson for the third grade play at school, a cowboy hat on a third grader will bring down the house every time. Standing O brothers and sisters. I was up there with kids dressed like George Washington and Warren Harding, how was I not going to slay dressed like Lyndon “Drive Your Amphicar Into a Lake” Johnson?

For the younger readers, here’s what President Carter was like … imagine that a team of black-clad commandos dropped down from helicopters into a suburban school somewhere in Dayton Ohio, and then run silently through the halls giving hand signals to each other with military precision to head to “Point Tango” which turned out to be the fifth grade social studies room. They then throw a black hood over the teacher, run her back to the helicopter and take off. A beat later, they’re at the Ace-Hi Tavern with a bunch of cowboys, bikers, oil men, ranchers and narco traffickers, milling around on the street outside. The lead commando throws a shot of tequila into her face, shakes her shoulders, and screams “You got this lady! You got this!” They open the door and shove her into the crowd. ” Go git ’em!” She’s left there, with the new mission to teach this block party about the nuances of social studies.

So Carter somehow got the holiday “Good Neighbor Day” onto the calendar, and it’s been there ever since. Is it a good holiday? Is it at a time of the year when we really need holidays to cheer us up? Does it encourage neighbors to clean out litter from culverts and do yard chores for their neighbors who need extra help? Does it encourage things like barbecues, pickup football games or garden parties?

Neighbor Day encourages all of these things. And it encourages the lovely garden parties to open their doors to the barbecues, and the pickup football gamers to invite the neighborhood metalheads and stoners to have some fun too. Neighbor Day isn’t adulthood, it’s third grade, back when all the kids from the neighborhood played together because we had a lot more in common with being kids than we had things that made us different. And Jimmy Carter was onto that reality I think, he genuinely wanted to people to find a way to make friends and be happy, he was the third grade social studies teacher who remembered what it was like to be in third grade. (Our current administration is kind of the other side of that spectrum, more like a fight behind the dumpsters, with the bully who leads a bunch of secretly-soft fellow bullies against the secretly-hard high school chess club.)

I think that President Carter would enjoy Neighbor Day just as much as Good Neighbor Day. So President Carter, while you’re still alive, would you do us a big favor and give a shout-out to Neighbor Day? It would help us a lot, because look at the mountain of difficulty we face with getting this holiday into widespread love and acceptance … I mean, you were the friggen President of an economic juggernaut and you couldn’t get people to even remember what the fuck “Good Neighbor Day” even is, what chance do you think we have to get Neighbor Day off the ground? All due respect Mr. President, but if I had a shot of tequila in my hand, and you and I were drinking at the Ace-Hi Tavern, I would have to splash your face with the heavenly elixir and shake your shoulders and say “you got this man!” And then you and I would look out at the armies of cowboys and deadheads on Washington Street, and you would say “I think I need another one of those first.” Then I would say “good idea, Jim.” And then The President would say “Fuck this shit, I can’t teach all those people anything about social studies, let’s just go have a smoke in Miners Alley. I’m out, do you have any ciggerbuddies?”

“I sure do Mr. President. I’ll trade you one unfiltered Seneca for a shout-out to Neighbor Day.”

Actually, I didn’t, but in my mind, I looked at my calendar, at all those different holidays, and I thought to myself “maybe if I write it in myself this year, someday it will be printed with the calendar, and someday Neighbor Day will be every bit as famous as Pizza Day, or as the National Calcium Miners Day of Recognition.

Robbie named Neighbor Day, as he names most good things of clear value. He wanted a day in February, and I was good with it, but the opportunity to tie Neighbor Day into the 311 phone service seemed like a good opportunity. Ultimately, the phone is the simplest kind of computer, and a three-digit phone number is only exceeded in simplicity by dialing ‘O’ for the Operator, even though the ‘O’ was actually the zero in the number pad. Close enough.

And now it’s 2020, and every person who is in a 311 area, can use those three digits to get help for everything from information about city services, to see if there is a volunteer in his or her neighborhood who will help her bring her trash can to the street, because at 90 years old, it’s just getting a little hard to manage the trash can. And there are lots, and lots and lots and lots of lots of lots of people out there who need this service.

But you know what 311 doesn’t have? It doesn’t have the names of volunteers who are willing to help out their neighbors. Not only do they not have the names of volunteers, but they don’t have the funding to keep names of volunteers.

But y’know what? That’s cool, because we still have the oldest way known that us neighbors can volunteer. We don’t need telephones, or Internet, or 2-meter packet radio, or semaphore flags. We just need to have a beer or a smoke or a smoothie or a chai tea or a coffee or a sugary carbonated beverage and just walk around the block and see what needs to be done. Yeah, some of the older folks might tell to get lost. But most of them are happy to talk. And when you offer to take care of shoveling snow for them, or clearing out branches, or mowing their grass, or whatever, they’ll offer you money. And most of the time, you’ll refuse, but sometimes if you take a couple bucks from them, you might help them feel a little better about using your labor to help them.

And a whole bunch of people you help may not actually need the help. But so what? That beer, that smoke, that chai tea or that smoothie, you didn’t need that either. You wanted it because it makes life better lots of time. And that person may not have really needed your help, but it was their high, to interact with you while you did the work. And some people might take advantage of you. People do that. That’s a good time to start talking about some weird disease that you just made up for the occasion.

I digress … Robbie and I made this holiday up because we both found out how much fun it is to help neighbors, and then get drink and smoke and barbecue and smoothetize with said neighbors.

It’s a good holiday, dammit!

Many young people want to help their neighbors, but often grew up with lots of social media, and not a lot of neighborhood connection. On the other hand, many elderly people can really use some help around the yard, and they are happy to work with a neighbor, but they would prefer not to accept social services.

And do we really need an excuse to have a barbecue, games, sports or beverages with our neighbors?

Neighbor Day is a great day to have fun and help out.

The Planet Earth’s first ever annual Neighbor Day is on 3/11/2020.

There are two things to do each Neighbor Day:
1. Help out a neighbor, or accept help from a neighbor.
2. Party with your neighbors.

Neighbor Day’s unique two-pronged approach allows every neighbor to do something nice for their neighbor, like clean out their rain gutters, throw out some trash, bake an apple pie, or hem a garment. And then you’ll barbecues, or have your neighbors over for a game, or get trashed in the ditch behind the houses. Some neighbors like alcohol, smoke and unhealthy food, some like to take a different path. Some like to debate politics and religion, but still hug each other afterward, and some like to pitch horseshoes, ride dirt bikes, snowmobiles or play sports.

Question: “What if I hate one of my neighbors?”

Answer: Find a way to bury the hatchet and make peace for Neighbor Day. On 3/11 of every year, you get to knock on your hated neighbor’s door and say “we have to be friends today, it’s the law.”