I was on Bainbridge last weekend, meditating, with a beer in my hand. You see, my parents were visiting, and I was doing two-pronged stress-reduction. The visit went well. Thank you for your concern.

My go-to comparison of the two islands is that Vashon was settled by the native people of Eugene and Bainbridge by the natives of La Jolla. Even without that joke, when I say that my parents came to visit, but went to Bainbridge, everyone on Vashon knows that’s funny.

It got me thinking: What do we think or assume belongs on Vashon?

My beer meditation was disrupted by the barking of the dog, whom my parents were watching, with the help of the eccentric, exorbitantly expensive professional dog-walker who lived across the fence, the same dog whose occasional barks have caused the neurotic neighbor across the other fence to keep a tidy log of the minutes barked, and report it to the police, who have kindly informed him several times that he doesn’t have a case.

That kind of doggy doo doesn’t fly, or belong, on Vashon, I’ll tell you what. But there’s more, and at the very real risk of slaughtering various sacred cows, I must speak!

Remember the recent dust-up about the guy with the Obama-as-Hitler poster in front of the post office? Totally doesn’t belong! Why? I read his material, and the syntax was deplorable! There was no sense of grammar, style or coherence at all. I was offended by the example his “writing” set for our community — and not just for the children, but for all of us. Take your horrible sentence structure elsewhere!

OK, breathe. Moving on, I’m just going to say it: Why was there a Costco booth at Strawberry Festival? Not that we don’t want their booth fee, but what are they doing? For 15 minutes I watched from a safe distance the utter lack of booth traffic suffered upon the two young employees and wondered if it wasn’t some kind of retail missionary work for new hires?

I love Costco, love the new exit off the West Seattle bridge, love everything they’ve done to make booze available in laundromats. But why do they come to us? Are they testing the local market to possibly build a store, then a bridge, then a stadium? Call me crazy!

Here’s a bigger one: I wonder if government belongs here. I mean government of any kind. We cannot for the life of us seem to get it right. There’s something in the water that makes us unruly and ungovernable.

So let’s just call a spade a spade, and secede — from the county, the state and the country. Imagine the laws we could make if left to ourselves! Bring back the stockades! Publicly humiliate anyone who tries to pass on the merge up ferry dock hill! Talk about creating a sense of community.

For anyone still reading — hello, head lice have no place on Vashon! I mean they do, currently, and you may be scratching your head wondering where? Without a shred of political correctness, I say, kill them all. They’re disgusting and we hate them.

So, here’s what we do: huge public lye vats for periodic, voluntary self-dipping. Unless children won’t do it voluntarily, in which case we create a pool of money from a small community tax and pay them, on a sliding scale. We offer $1, and if they refuse, we’ll go up to $5; after that, we dunk them.

The technology does exist to keep Vashon free of lice. I’m thinking, and I know you are too, of the ticket scanners used by the ferry workers. Modify them to scan for head lice! We have smart people here, and the need is real. Yes, it may take a little more time, and yes, some people will miss their boat.

We know what belongs here, and we are willing to continue to sacrifice any sense of being normal to keep Vashon Vashon. Vashon. I just had to say it again, I love it so.

— Kevin Joyce is a writer, father, dog-owner and humorist.