The item pictured at right is:
a) More dynamic and exciting than Ben Affleck in Gigli
b) My particular rock off the coast of Maine
c) Microscopic and crawling on you right now
d) What you’re supposed to be neverminding while paying attention to the Sex Pistols
e) Other
As always, answers accepted in the comments.
I’ll never understand why so many people think Maine is a bizarre backwards state, forever destined to the rear corners of American minds along with Wyoming, Idaho, and the like.
We have modern amenities such as broadband Internet access and hot water (agua caliente for our Spanish-speaking readers — ¡Saludos amigos!). There are places where one can play bocce under pretty trees while enjoying a crisp alcoholic beverage. Our instititutions of higher learning perform groundbreaking research involving putting blueberries into hamburgers. And the artistic and literary acheivements of many residents are…wait a second, putting blueberries into hamburgers?
Forget everything I’ve just said. This place is more backwards than Jim Marshall driving a car in reverse on Opposite Day.
ROCK OFF COAST OF MAINE (MG) — Tensions remain high along the DMZ as a soldier from the People’s Union of Chicken examines two Republic of Duck sentries leaving their guardhouse. Several skirmishes involving kitchen scraps and feed pellets have exploded over recent weeks.
What this world really needs is a bagel that’s easily converted into a hand grenade, so that when you are in the middle of eating it on your drive to work and you are cut off by a cell-phone-gabbing lunatic, it’s no trouble to sidle up next to him in the breakdown lane, lob your breakfast ordnance through the open window of his Ford Intrusion, and blissfully speed ahead as an explosion sends the guy to Bad Driving Tourist hell.
No one’s invented this yet, though, so I had to settle for throwing my regular ol’ bagel at the guy.
If anyone sees a large black Ford SUV with Ohio plates in the region, please stop the driver and ask “if he’d like more cream cheese with that.”
According to the National Park Service, Acadia National Park receives over three million visitors each year.
According to me, most of those visitors are crossing the street directly in front of me anytime I drive through Bar Harbor.
And oh goodness me, what a special brand of tourist I attract to my proximity, like I’m a putrefying elk carcass on wheels driving down the main street of Bottle Fly City. Crowding the street and crossing in unexpected places is fine with me — I came here from Boston, where the cops view you as suspicious if you actually use a crosswalk. But our visiting pedestrians here share the same short attention span as a kitten in an open box of styrofoam packing peanuts, which makes them stop in the middle of the street to decide where they want to go next. Thank God they didn’t make a decision before stepping off the curb!
Maine, lefty pinko liberal state that it is, has passed legislation making it illegal to run down stationary pedestrians — and can’t I call them something else since they’re not moving? Obstructrians, or some such? — so I have to remain red-faced and still while the Rotarians from Muncie, Indiana decide if they feel like having another soft-serve cone, or perhaps buying an oversized stuffed lobster for their 13-year-old nephew who will hate it of course, or they’re feeling a little hot from walking a few blocks so maybe a new T-shirt that says “I Got Scrod In Bar Harbor Maine” that has just enough double meaning but not so much that the folks at church will be offended, but Raymond we’re not moving from this spot in the middle of Main Street until we know for sure where we’re going next because I’d hate to have to cross the street again. Like a newly-introduced bill in Congress, I’m not moving anywhere until a large number of people I don’t know have figured out what unrelated things they want first.
I have often wondered: do certain shops and restaurants reveal themselves only when viewed from the midst of a busy thoroughfare, like some odd back corner of Diagon Alley? Otherwise, if these visitors have enough mental capacity to either find Bar Harbor by car or not fall into the ocean while disembarking the cruise ship, why do they turn into armadillos as soon as they set foot upon our asphalt?
Visitors to my island, I humbly beseech you: ask not what Bar Harbor can do for you, ask what you can do for Bar Harbor. And let me give you the answer while I’m at it: get the holy hell out of the road. You’re wearing out my brakes and my patience, and neither one of those are good things for me to lose when stopping my car is necessary for your very survival.
Welcome to ye newly arrived visitors from this Portland Phoenix article about likely transsexual libertarians people with Internet-type Web thingees in this grand state of Vacationland. Readers of an “alternative” newspaper will be pleased to find that this site also offers an alternative — an alternative to compelling writing.
But you’re here, so why not make the best of it with these classic favorites, as I:
Like the Phoenix, this site reads like it’s written by twelve-year-olds, so you will not need to adjust your expectations before proceeding.
Thanks to Laura for alerting me to the Phoenix piece.
I drove into town for lunch, windows down, listening to the kind of music that makes you wonder why no one has yet developed a car with a snare drum for a steering wheel. I tapped my fingers along the side of the car, instantly attracting the lusty gazes of the beautiful young women who have come here for the summer in search of good jobs and thirty-two-year-old fathers of four who know what to drop in the CD player on a sunny day.
I’m so used to the attention, I don’t even look their way in acknowledgement anymore — why encourage their pursuit of that which they cannot have? It hurts them, my dismissal does, but they’d never be able to keep up with the jetset lifestyle I’ve cultivated. Better for the attention of the young lovelies to be maintained upon the scraggly boys in their young twenties who would hacky-sack and/or frisbee their way into the female heart.
Some of the more persistent ladies kept after me, though, sprinting after my vehicle as I passed. Women in the heat of unrequited desire can run like cheetahs, and I quickly turned desperate for escape. I pulled a skid U-turn in front of the post office; my rear bumper clipped a postal carrier, sending a cloud of undelivered mail into the air. The pursuers became lost and disoriented in the postal smokescreen, and I continued unmolested to pick up my sandwich.
Ladies: I know you love me, but you’ve forced me to injure a quasi-federal employee just so I can enjoy my lunch without your collective pawing at me. “Control,” as Janet Jackson so eloquently sang, although Janet hasn’t been leaving me alone lately either.
And it’s only going to get worse for me. Soon I will complete publication of a secret project which shall supplant this book as the defining literary work of our time, and the groupies will erupt from the ground like fire ants. By then I’ll have a little less hair, slightly bigger pants, and (if current performance rates are continued) a few extra children, but this will only drive the female legions madder and madder. What will be the cost to mankind when all its women desire only me, me, me?
Maybe it’s better that I’m so remotely located, so that the damage is limited to Maine and the Canadian maritime provinces. For the sake of the species, I promise to never leave.
My four-year-old wants to play chess every night before reading bedtime stories. It’s so adorable, I have no choice but to accomodate his wishes.
And I beat him every time!
These punk kids today think they know everything. Let me tell you something, kids: us old folks can do everything better than you. Especially you four-year-olds.
We’re old! We’re bold! Get used to us!
Like my mini-bio on the left side of this page states, I work for a secret laboratory full of supergeniuses who not only have developed cures for every disease known to man (we like to release them slowly, to keep expectations high), but spend their off-hours breeding mice with advanced musical ability and quantitative reasoning. Today, I thought you would enjoy reading about some of my favorite strains of these Frankenmice:
The deer have been outside my office window all day. They know I can’t shoot them — there’s a hunting ban on Mt. Desert Island — so they think nothing of loitering about in plain view. No, let me be more specific: maliciously loitering. Like surly teenagers outside a retirement home, this small pack of ruminant ruffians tromp about — on National Park land, no less, land made for you and me! — and destroy it with their “feeding” and “surviving.” Every few seconds, they flick up their little white tails, providing a horrific glance at the source of the billions of deer pellets that litter the land like cigarette butts.
Cocky sons of bitches, these deer. Next time I watch Bambi, I’m going to cheer during the forest fire scenes.
Even these hoodlum skinny cows can’t keep my mind off the change of season, however. Yesterday was filled with strange rays from a fiery ball in the sky that provided what I’m told is “warmth.” It was a strange, exotic feeling, like the way I felt the first time I dreamed of Margaret Thatcher. What’s even better: mad scientists called “meteorologists” have told me that this warmth thing is actually just starting. I’m not quite sure what spending all day studying meteors has to do with making the cold go away, but I’m sure it has something to do with the same power that makes Scientologists know so much about science (look at the word: “Scient” + “ology” = “the science of science,” and hell people can’t just lie about that, can they?).