ISawArkansas

Profiling is a tool for law enforcement, tax agents and flight attendants, but papergirls? Profiling, as we understand it, is anticipating someone’s behavior based on their job, neighborhood, religion, etc. Sometimes it probably works, but so? Isn’t part of our human enhancement changing our minds?

Profiling is saying something like, “Poor people will never be rich and rich people will never write, compose or create anything worthwhile.” It might be true, but it’s not absolute.

This is an interesting community in that there are a lot of artists, but it’s not really an arts town. It’s a tourist town. There are excellent restaurants, beautiful inns, spectacular occurrences, very fresh air, and times of absolute quiet.

Last Wednesday a downtown shopkeeper saw Perlinda and me delivering Independents. I’ve known the woman for years. She said, “Wow, you’ve been reduced to delivering papers?”

And it wasn’t that long ago that Beau Satori stopped us at the post office and said, “We were talking about you last night and how it’s sad that you have to deliver papers.”

Both times we – here’s a word we’ve never used in real life – guffawed.

If two people in this town really think we’re being punished by delivering our own paper, they might want to consider some bullet points: we’ve had 5 or 6 guys try to do it; people apply for our delivery jobs all the time; no one dusts the tops of the boxes, restocks and tidies like we do; no one sings along to car music the way we do; no one screams as loud as we do when we think a big truck is going to kill us; no one goes to the nursing home where a patient will say, “Who are you and why are you here?” We tell them and they say, “Good, that’s fine.”

No one gets five Harts checkers to look them in the eye and smile every single week; no one else waves at every tram; no one else gets great gossip like we do, but that’s because people know we won’t remember anything; no one else gets a beer bought for them when delivering at beer places.

This is leading up to telling you that we are taking a week off. No paper. No phone. No open. Just delightful vacation starting September 27 and lasting until October 7.

If we profiled you, we would say, “Our readers are so smart! They will read this and remember it!”

It’s true and it’s absolute. Right, Beau?