LUDIC LOG

Hello! My name is Billy. I used to be new in the neighborhood too, and it can be kind of scary. Will you be my friend? It's good to have FRIENDS. I made a new friend when I moved here, and he helped me get used to things, so it wasn't so scary. I like my friend. Let me show you around!

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This is my house. It's where I go after school and where I spend most of my time. Sometimes it's not so much fun to be at home because of the TELEVISION. The television isn't really a friend; it's just a thing. But it acts like it's my friend. It tells me what it thinks I should do, and tries to get me to trust it, and that's supposed to be what friends do. But I don't know if it has my best interests at heart. Sometimes I think about taking my red sledgehammer and caving in the television. Do you ever think about that? It's fun to daydream.

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This is a bank. It's just down the street from my house. People come to the bank all day to get money, and to give money to the bank. It's funny, because I keep my toys in a toy chest, but the toy chest doesn't charge me. I guess the bank does something magical with the money and that's why they have such nice carpets. Anyway, my dad doesn't like the bank. I don't know what the word "usurious" means. Once he drank a bottle of butterscotch and said that he'd like to rob the bank. It sounded very exciting! Do you like things that are exciting?

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This is where I go to school. I guess this fall you'll be going here too! It will be nice to have a new friend at school. I like going to school, even though it sometimes is boring, pointless and degrading. Everyone says how important it is to stay in school, though, so it must be true, because everyone wouldn't say it if it was all a lie. The other kids at school are nice, at least most of the time, and there's a few teachers who encourage my interests instead of giving me busywork. Maybe you'll get lucky and wind up with them. I hear that some bad kids bring guns to school and shoot the place up, like it was one big video game! I like video games.

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This is where my mommy works. It's a financial consulting firm. She's the receptionist. That means that she answers the phone, and is always nice and pleasant and happy, even though people call up and yell at her sometimes. She also writes letters to people because the boss is too "busy" and "important" to do it himself. My mommy is very crucial to the running of the firm, because she writes almost all the letters, takes care of contracts, organizes all the communications, and makes sure the correspondence doesn't have bad mistakes in it. But for some reason, she makes less money than everyone else, and the people who make the most money spend all their time golfing and talking on the phone. Once someone wrote a swear word in the paint of the boss' car with a key. It's not nice to swear, but his face turned all sorts of funny colors. So I hear.

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This is where my daddy works. It's a factory. My daddy is a union representative. He says that the owners don't like the union because the union won't let them have two new cars a year or something. The owners want to move the factory to Mexico and get people to do the noisy repetitive dangerous work for even less money than they pay now. I hope they don't go, because I don't want my daddy to go to Mexico! I like it here. If the factory burned down in the middle of the night with all the owners locked inside, maybe that would solve all kinds of problems. But what are the odds of that happening?

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That's my neighborhood! It's a fun place to live and play. I'm glad you moved here! We will be good friends and have all sorts of good times together. Before you go home, try one of these! They're special pills that I take every day, even though I don't want one right now. They'll help you sleep and forget bad things that you might say to someone who would misunderstand. Misunderstanding and confusion is bad. The pills are very tasty, aren't they? Now relax...and listen carefully to the sound of my voice.