Come closer for it is only a tiny memory

The dead are awake and let anyone who doubts, have no doubt....quassita sho hanne hatsipa ebitsch...

Travel to the ether

Been away, looking forward to return sometime by popular demand....

Sea Trials

So the four of us, some of the best and brightest in this little harbor town, a town a travel writer might call a real "pocket of authenticity," decide to drive to a nearby cove, take along a few cold cans of ocean-going beer and an essential item, a newly purchased inflatable boat...it was overcast that summer day but the water welcomed us with open arms and instantly a sense of adventure carried us from shore...best friends out for an adventure...it is pretty easy to loft an inflatable boat over your heads and since it was up there why not have it carry all the beer...Me, G, C and A were psyched...some of us dove overboard to get a further taste of the sea while others cracked open beers and swilled them down all the while bobbing...bobbing at one point even turned to raucousity as A began to laugh and rock the boat all the while laughing like there was no tomorrow...all the while we were never more than 100 yards from shore...pretty good considering that our craft had been found at a School Street yardsale for the princely sum of $15, a value that most likely had not been seen in these parts since Champlain traded with the locals 400 years ago...I had my cell phone in a Pelican case just in case, our truck keys, and oh yes, there was also a rolled-up cigarette in there that to some might have looked slightly illegal...it started to rain, really rain, and yes, we had to head back to shore, under paddle power and our desire to get into dry clothes...I'm not certain but I think it was A who once again who rocked the boat, laughing uproariously of course (she does have the best laugh)...when we finally got to shore we were all laughing about everything when I suddenly smartly blurted out "She's always been such a sweet little bitch." Never have I seen anyone laugh harder than us that day and all the while dripping wet in our shorts, attempting to dress in clothes left behind that were almost as wet...Ok, inflatable is hoisted and off we trek to the truck with our remaining beers and empties securely lodged in the now airborne inflatable...Ut, oh, trouble looming ahead as we spy park rangers waiting for us near the truck...cool as the proverbial cucumber we keep the boat held high, slide in onto the truck rack and turn to chat with our new friends...seems there was a lot of empties in the back of the truck from previous adventures and they wanted to make sure we were fine to drive, which we were, but then when asked to produce the truck keys from my Pelican case, I remembered that it also contained a rolled cigarette which could have delayed our departure...C is a very clever guy and managed to distract the rangers while I pretended to fumble before finally producing the keys without anyone seeing the "perfectly legal" cigarette that has taken its fitting place in the annals of maritime tales as far as we are concerned...about the only reminder of the beers which might have caused us some legal problems was the occasional clanging of metal as they danced around in the inflatable every time the truck came to a bump in the road...

Bocce Heads

So this year I am trying to organize a bocce tournament at the Lompoc...very simple, very simple, sign up give me $10 for each two-person team and it's Balls to the Walls, the working title for the tournament right now...designated times, set aside for entrants, what could be more straight-forward?...Sign-up sheet is behind the bar, just sign, pay and play, except for one small necessary detail: contact info for players...Tried passing around such a sign-up sheet a few days and of course, almost all the dicks who signed up decided to use my email address as their own, with even a few variations found very laughable by them...Bocce is not a game to be laughed at...there are people all over the world who would love to be in BTTW this year, and I'm hoping at some point those in Bar Harbor realize how lucky they are...although I cannot remind them because they are email zeroed out...

Smokin' Bowl

There are some things in life that just come along, times that you never forget...In the summer of 1971, the Grateful Dead performed at the Yale Bowl to a capacity crowd...you can still listen to the concert on InternetArchive.org, infamous because the curtain closed on rock concerts at the Bowl after that night...storming the fences to get in were hundreds of Dead fans who were thwarted by tear gas and the cops, but that didn't cause the band to skip even half a beat as far as I could tell...I am pretty sure this was the first performance to feature Sugaree but all of it was amazing...I was wearing a Buck knife on my belt that night...I always wore one in Maine, why not New Haven? As we went in, one of the cops grabbed it off my belt and refused to give it back, apparently because I just looked too dangerous and a guy who could not be trusted, you know, like all the other Deadheads...after arguing to no avail, I slipped the sheath off my belt and handed it to the guy saying they needed to stay together...not at all inclined to give it back, even after the concert...going to be thrown in the harbor, he told me...
...I have it today, it took six months of waiting after an intermediary in New Haven talked the cops into returning it to me and it arrived in my mailbox in a pretty nondescript looking package...the way I look at it that cop probably had to go diving in the harbor and sort through a lot of bottom shit before finally, with about 20 seconds of air left, find it and break for the surface...

Tales from the crypt

So I'm sitting at one of the town's more respectable bars last week, bookended by two couples I did not know (or so I thought) with a hunger and a thirst that I've usually taken care of by 8:30 any evening of the week...on my left a social worker and a teacher from Massachusetts, on my right a somewhat inebriated couple all hugged up as we say and talking pretty loudly...I'm just about halfway through my appetizer and Oban, after finishing giving the couple to the left my almost most knowledgeable tips about where to hike and climb on the island, when I freeze-frame after hearing guy to the right say to the woman on my right that although he is in Maine, he has yet to run into his old girlfriend from years past...to my everlasting credit I didn't let on that his old girlfriend was, or is, my ex-wife...WOW!, here's something that's right up there on my Richter Scale, a scale I had to take to the shop for repairs after hearing this guy speak...the guy was a real name-dropper: he mentioned my ex-wive and David Rockefeller only about five minutes apart...I guess now comes the question to my legion of readers: do I say anything to this guy if I see him somewhere, do I warn my ex that this guy did eventually return from England, or do I simply put this down as a write-off on my social tax return? The phones are open, I'm taking calls and in a subsequent blog, I will provide survey results...this could be fun!

48 Hours to London

To be in Guards Chapel at midnight on Christmas Eve for an American is an illuminating experience, particularly for an American from New England...at the rear of the chapel remained half gone walls from a World War II bombing, walls that although no longer served their intended purpose, had been incorporated into the present day...even I, enobled by the faces of old veterans wearing their medals, managed to more or less keep in tune with the hymns that resounded into the next day...
Flying PanAm from Boston to Heathrow had been our intended route without interruption but as it turned out London was in the midst of a snowstorm and that meant flying off to Brussels where PanAm gave us the choice of staying the night or taking a coach to Zeebrugge and catching a Thompson-Thorsen ferry to Dover...with three young boys voting to keep moving we plunged on, boarding busses that carried us to Zeebrugge's ferry terminal and a chance to cross the Channel by boat...we were in Zeebrugge by 6 pm and the TT ferry collected us and the other 400 passengers at about 11 for the 7 hour cross...In its haste to accommodate everyone, PanAm handed out blank vouchers that we were to present for anything along the way apparently...to some of my fellow Americans that meant a trip to the ferry's gift shop and loading up on Christmas presents, gratis PanAm (I've always believed this present-grab at their expense drove them into bankruptcy, right at that moment)...my oldest son, Eachan, spent the entire time making friends with another boy, occupied by the on-board gambling machines...only time in my life when I've witnessed 8-year-olds actually gambling (and even winning)...Deborah and I were keeping company with Ben and Will, Eachan's brothers, mildly uneventful for the remainder of the voyage...At one point Deborah told me to look up and there before me and the rest of the 400, were the White Cliffs of Dover, this now being approximately 6 in the morning...on shore, luggage had mysteriously not made it in time (held hostage by PanAm because of those thieving gift-grabbers) we headed for London on more motor coaches, fortunately without gift shops...we were into our second day and the Station Master at the Brussels airport, a man by the name of Poirot (true) had come aboard the plane to tell my family that there had been some sort of official requests from London regarding our whereabouts and could he do anything...
My grandparents were all dead by the time I came along, so I have always been fascinated that my children could experience that thrill...Kingman (Grumpy) and Mary Louise (Granny Flip) were amazing people, the kind of grandparents who dreamed up outings that their grandchildren would actually enjoy...I miss them for all their kindnesses...and for their wonderful martinis!
UPDATE Hope the Obamas enjoyed Winfield House as much as we did!!

Tales from the Hood

If I were to ever be asked if I had shot someone, I would probably blurt out "Yes" with only a slight hesitation...as a teen I had a fascination with all things explosive and my marble cannon was my prize piece of field artillery...when word got around that I had made this marble cannon, on wheels no less, I went from being a non-com to a field-commissioned officer in my neighborhood...the cannon very effective, perhaps some might say too effective and I only took it up because I was frustrated how my home-made solid rocket fuel kept blowing up at the wrong time...prep work for rocket fuel was a nuisance too, because I had to board a downtown bus, walk to the chemical supply house and wait while they measured out my warhead materiel, placed it in paper bags and thanked me for my continued business...with the marble cannon, however, I could get everything close by, at the hardware store and from my cache of cherry bombs or M-80s, for they were the propellant and boy did they work...we had a sizable backyard with a fence separating us from other houses, a fence that was capable of keeping just about everything but fired marbles out...and so, one fine Fourth of July, I set up the marble cannon so my friends could see it shooting marbles right to their targets...first test fire perfect, but on the second one, for some unknown reason (to this day) the damn cannon jumped sideways and instead of shooting the marble at the neighbor's chicken coop next door, it flew toward a house directly behind our house, about three hundred feet away...I, and my friends, watched as the marble flew toward the wooden sided two-story home where as luck would have it, the woman of the house was out tending to her flower garden along the back edge of said house...my god, the marble hit the house about six feet directly above her head and then headed downward where the woman was, bent over in a flowery sun dress, the kind that had a lot of her skin showing on her back...the marble, heated during the cherry-bomb propelled flight landed squarely on her upper torso and then proceeded to disappear into her sun dress...my friends had already hopped on their bikes and squealed outta there but I clearly saw her rise into the air, arms stretched toward the heavens and yell at the top of her lungs...Jesus, I mean Jesus, what is a kid to do? However, it wasn't too long before her husband was out the back door and directing me in a very intimidating voice to show myself...I stood terrified, expecting someone from my own home to show up shortly, but I guess they were so used to bellowing in the neighborhood that they stayed put...the husband finally calmed down and assured me his wife was very much alive, but if I ever fired that damn cannon again, he would have me jailed...normally this would be the end but there was another neighbor who got wind of all this and thought it was hilarious and apparently thought I musta had some set of balls...well, anyway, I get a call across the yard a few weeks later and it's the other neighbor telling me to come right over...okay, I like the guy, he had spent a lot of time teaching me about photography and secondly, he longed to have a son and had failed in his attempt to turn his one child, a daughter, into a tomboy...the guy handed me a medium-sized paper bag and when I looked inside it was full of cherry bombs...one of two bags holding cherry bombs, as he was holding one too...he told me he was going to stand some distance away and that we would take turns chucking the c-bombs at one another until we got tired of dodging them and that would conclude our fun...man, this was incredible, throwing those things, lit of course, close but no too close to each other...I must tell you that this guy was one tough character, because according to my parents, he had lopped off his large toe mowing his lawn barefoot and told the hospital to simply stitch it back on, which they apparently did, and I say apparently because he never mowed barefoot again...things were going quite well, the bombs were lighting up and we were playing it safe when all of a sudden the guy slipped, straddled one of the cherry bombs which of course exploded and took most of his pant leg with it and I was thinking, I hope not his balls...this concluded our afternoon, apparently no one was bothered long-term by my shooting them with marbles or the inevitability of my blowing off their pant legs...

Letters from Panama

For some unknown reason, my great uncle Jose Maldonado could really make my mother laugh, I mean uproariously laugh, from thousands of miles away no less in letters written in Spanish that only she could read and comprehend...it was one of many unknowns my mother employed to go into her own secret world, and it drove my father to distraction, these letters...Uncle Jose, brother to my grandmother, did not follow her to America from Madrid, instead curving south and ending up in Panama...so the story goes, and from what little information my mother imparted, Jose had a dual career in Panama as owner of a chain of barber shops and as a professor of Romance Languages at the university...my mother spoke fluent Spanish, although not too often...my father, the baritoned attorney, spoke English and a smattering of some Indian tongue which usually was employed to rouse me from a deep sleep...I know my mother's father had served in the Spanish-American War, although other than a medical field surgery kit and a commendation from the US Surgeon General, little was known other than malaria was years later said to have done him in...my parents were just not too forthcoming about their parents, I guess it was just that way then and rarely was Spanish ever spoken in the house unless Mom was reciting something from Uncle Jose's letters...probably the most dramatic use of her Spanish occurred in Mexico on a family vacation while we were traveling on a bus south of the border...I think I was about 11 or 12 and standing in the rear of the crowded bus when said bus lurched and a rather large Mexican woman slammed into me knocking me to the floor of the bus...the large Mexican woman and her friend seemed to think this was hilarious until Mom sprang into action and unleashed a torrent of Spanish that I did not realize she was so capable of...she got everyone's attention, most obviously my assailant, who suddenly looked as if she was about to cry and bowed her head for the rest of the journey...my mother had obliterated a stranger before my eyes and in Spanish...she told my father later this incident would not have happened if we had simply driven the car over the border...this really got my father, who spoke no Spanish and whose family had not emigrated from Madrid...he knew better than to drive over the border, he said, since Mexican drivers were waiting to crash into you and collect damages on the spot, or else...we never visited Uncle Jose, never had the pleasure of his visit, and therefore he has drifted into obscurity and for all I know I could have passed him on the street somewhere in the world...we just weren't destined to meet and talk about those letters to my mother...

Who was Louis De Servi?

Louis De Servi, the name has stayed with me for years...as a kid, the De Servis would stop off at the house on their way west to another exciting vacation that I could only imagine...Louis and Mrs. De Servi (I don't know if I ever knew her name other than Mrs. De Servi) were exciting and kinda flashy people who smiled a lot, drove really big cars and never overstayed their welcome, which often happened with others less flashy...I seem to vaguely recall they might have been from New York and eventually settled in California...they sure looked like people who would have settled in California, at least to me...there was always family talk about visiting the De Servis in California, but it never happened...my father had begun lawyer life in San Francisco before Chicago and never seemed interested in any return there...he once told me how dangerous it could be as a criminal lawyer if you didn't get the guilty man sprung...threatened a time or two, he would add...Louis De Servi could have been a lawyer, we had a lot of them coming and going through the house in those days (particularly on Poker Night when the US Marshal and a Supreme Court judge would sit in and feed me shots of beer to slow down my 5-year-old outloud observations of the cards they were holding)...just don't know...I did find on FamilySearch.org a Louis De Servi who died in San Leandro, California, in 1994, but other than that, he has disappeared, except in my memory...

The Bright Lights of San Francisco

After college and in the middle of winter, two of my friends and I decided we would drive from Aspen to San Francisco for a change of scenery and who knows what else...that what else was something else as it turned out...Nick, I and Meredith took turns driving Meredith's convertible and headed for Utah, Nevada and California...of course, there was something lurking in every state just waiting for the three innocents to appear...in Utah, we got pulled over for speeding about 90 on sheer ice (hey, it was a smooth icy highway until the state police pulled us over)...we had to appear before a territorial judge at 3 in the morning and fork over a lot of money unless we wanted to go into the jail cells which were conveniently in the next room...we paid up and left, happy we had not had to leave collateral behind, such as our skis on the car rack...whew! Outta there, ready for adventure number two, waiting for us in Winnemucca Flats, Nevada...stopped at a diner/truck stop and with the three of us sitting at the bar, a guy to my left, a dissolute version of Grizzley Adams, after getting an eyeful of the very attractive Meredith, asked how much it was gonna cost him to have a few minutes with her...neither Meredith nor Nick were privy to this exchange and I knew they weren't listening so I told the menacing Grizz to meet us down the road to the east in 30 minutes...it felt a little awkward to be selling Meredith to what could have been white slavers, but you gotta do the best you can in that situation...we left with me saying not to look back and to just drive, making sure it was west...
Nothing but partying in SF, I mean, after all, what we had been through...however, being the sensitive poet type I had to fall and it had to come in Chinatown when I had my first and only photoelectric seizure of my life...saw Chinese laundry lights leave electric sign and head for me and when they got close, out I went...tried to tell cop my name and age and didn't work out...ended up at now-extinct Harbor Emergency Hospital where the white jackets only let me out after I agreed to down some Thorazine and check into Sf General...checked in, checked out and in between docs tried to find needle marks believing I was a junkie and disbelieving that I wasn't...no, no, no, my parents were traveling in Europe and unavailable for consultation...
In the years that have gone by I have lived in the snowbelt and seen many flashing lights from snowplow trucks in the winter...there is never one that I see that I am not reminded of San Francisco, ah those lights...

Watching The Clouds

Everyone is gone right now but the flickering signs of a new spring are struggling to maintain my sanity as well as well as friends and family whether they be in New York, California, other ports of the Americas or even as far away as India...in my dreams I am riding a bicycle in Russia or clipping down a chute with both skis and my head still attached but always holding within me my deepest secrets from the past...secrets I never bring up in conversation because who really wants to see me break down crying like a child, the child in me who refuses to move past certain specific times in my life when I believed no one could be more happy or more at peace with himself...alas, so foolish to believe that can last forever, but a the same time strong indelible memories flash out of the past like the Northern Lights from so far away...so far away they are mesmerizing and taunting...("Sure, try and catch me another night if you're busy now, but I make no promises)...does anyone really know what their own memory is capable of?...is there is a circuit breaker that protects us from those memories that are too painful?...does talking about it or writing about it even make a difference?...
To be somewhere safe, to have someone care, is not a lot to ask of friends, but then again, who really has the nerve to ask?

Heart-shaped Hole

Yesterday, it was Valentine's Day, a fine opportunity for a peaceful day to pass in Bar Harbor, with any thoughts of misdirected malice to be shelved until the next day...and that's the way it was until about two hours before midnight, that 2200 hrs to some, when kaboom, a rumbling on the street, a sound of a motor being pushed to its limit and then, bam, an SUV races across Cottage Street, leaps over curb and snow, scrapes betwixt two trees and rams into the facade of what was once the lively and notorious Nakorn Thai restaurant, but now empty for the past year...(I once worked with a guy who showed up late for work explaining that he missed a curve in the road and hit a house. Upon being asked how that came to be, he said "Sonnabitch, I honked but the house wouldn't move!")...Well, this building didn't move either last night, but the driver and his/her SUV got the hell outta there in a hurry. Today the building's heart-shaped hole is adorned with a Maine state icon--a flashy blue tarp...if any of you reading this happen to see what was reported to be a 90's maroon-and-grey Chevy Suburban with recent front-end damage, please send a note and I will forward it on to the proper authorities...elsewhere across town I recently encountered a woman returning from the ER with her right arm wrapped in bandages and held immobile by a splint...I asked if she had fallen on our present visiting natural resource--ice--but no, it was due to slicing up apples for Jojo, her parrot...seems she got a little dizzy while holding the knife and well, the rest involved the ER...I suggested she talk this over with Jojo so he would understand and she looked at me rather surprised and said "How'd you know his name?" I told her she had told me at which point I began to feel a little like a parrot...all of this is enough to make anyone dizzy...

Family history

Several years ago, my father and a close friend were bird-hunting when my father was shot by his friend. Both lawyers, my father had been turned down for service in World War II while his friend had gained an officer's commission and had only just been discharged from the Army.
I was not quite four. My father would go into surgery, lose the sight in his right eye and by some miracle keep his left eye intact. He was hospitalized at the same hospital where I had been born and he would remain there for the next year.
My mother lacked a driver's license so she quickly mobilized and was driving soon. I was terrified of the visiting nurse who seemed to be inside our home for an eternity. I can remember her shooing me away from the room in much the same manner as a prison guard might. Ironically, during the long spell that my father was hospitalized, friendly nurses actually brought me to his room through what seemed like a secret passage. He was always lying on his back and was told not to move around much, he said. We tried to communicate, the son and the bandaged father. I vividly recall one visit when he asked if I wanted to share part of a grapefruit with him. Now, years later, the sight of a grapefruit instantly brings that back. And I do love grapefruit.
My father was leery of drugs due to his younger sisters' involvement with "those jazz musicians and drugs" years earlier. He always maintained that during the landmark surgery to keep his left eye, no drugs were and the surgeons working on him would sometimes tell him to imagine moving an eyeball in an effort to make the surgery a success.
He was a close friend of the surgeon as well, who was heard to remark after the operation that he and all of my father's other friends would long outlive him.
He was wrong. My father had outlived the surgeon and the shooter by at least two decades when he eventually died in 1984. It was the anniversary of D-Day. The surgeon, whose ranch I often visited near as a teenager, would die in Colorado on a bear-hunting trip, found near his car, an apparent suicide. The man who shot my father campaigned for the governership of our state more than once and came within a whisker of winning. He also died from an apparent suicide.
Our families had been close and it was probably a bit surreal for my father that as he was being wheeled into the hospital for his final days, one son of the shooter was leaving in a wheelchair, diagnosed with cancer, I was told. Pushing his wheelchair was another son of the man who had gone hunting with my father on that fateful day. His role, other than that of son and brother, was that he was the doctor in charge of emergency services at the hospital.
While my father was a practicing attorney, he often campaigned for his close friend, stumping for him in remote hamlets, when the candidate himself could not be there. He seemed tireless.
No one could have expected my father to lead a normal life after being shot and blinded in one eye. He was extremely careful never to let his driver's license lapse, lest he have to take an eye exam. Until the day he died, he carried bird shot under the skin of his arms and head. He wore a glass eye and quietly underwrote guide dog training for those who were completely blind and in need of a helping hand.
He had been an avid hunter and sportsman up until the time of the accident. I remember mother telling me how he had subsequently thrown out his guns and all his other sports equipment.
The one part of this account that no one ever seems to believe is how I was often bedded down under his hospital bed after the accident and told not to make a sound. I didn't. I can still remember one of the kind nurses actually opening the window and parking me outside on the fire escape to evade the rounds of a supervisor for a short time. I have no witnesses, I've outlived them all, but after what had happened, after all these years, it remains vivid in my memory....

Only the Strong Survive

Debating whether 2 watch Barfly; it will do one of 2 things: either increase my presence at bar harbour's bars or quell any thirst for being there...it is fukking cold here, and although it could be worse, the ice couldn't be...even the neighborhood ice rink took a hit when some bright light decided to plow it with his pickup and broke through...arrgh!...the silver Subaru I have written abt in a recent blog may finally have met its demise...seems last Friday it was cruising along on I-95 abt 95 when substitute driver swerved hard to avoid a tailgate that had landed in the roadway and the Subaru shot off the road and rolled and rolled...no one hurt, but if this Subaru rises out of this one, then it is one for the ages...thinking abt this makes me wanna have a drink somewhere so until we meet again...

Poof, they're gone!

I dunno know if it is because of the time of the year (winter, below zero) and attendant lack of sunlight, but lately people have been disappearing before my eyes, some of which were not surprises but others, in a word, mysterious...now a friend has left for a visit to that former Danish protectorate, Iceland, and I knew she was going a couple days prior...we actually saw Synecdoche in New York the night before she left and I am left wondering if this is where people who disappear end up: Iceland, I mean...I just don't know...she disappeared for band practice so I wandered off for something to eat and ran into another friend who was also to disappear (for the second time in several weeks) and thought this time, I had better keep both eyes open...to recap, a few weeks back, she swung by in her trusty Subaru and off we went to a local bar...it was incredibly dark in Bar Harbor owing to there being a power outage and when she parked and we got out, POOF, she disappeared...not within sound of my voice, not within range of my limited vision in the black night, I ambled off to the bar thinking she would be there already...no such luck so I felt my way home, grabbed a flashlight and went back to the bar, where I heard her voice ask in the semi-darkness where had I been...she maintained that she had been there all along and what had happened to me, did I get a better deal somewhere down the street...POOF...no amount of explaining could solve the mystery of that lost time...as I said that was several weeks ago and I had almost forgotten about it when POOF, it happened again last night...we grabbed a bite to eat along with several delicious whisky samplers at another local watering hole before heading to the BAR OF THE FIRST DISAPPEARANCE...everything fine, even played a little bar trivia to be a good sport...bear in mind that the temps outside were about 10 below zero...she got up and walked throught the door, leaving her new down parka behind and POOF, she was once again gone...haven't connected with her since, tried reaching her by phone to wish her happy birthday, but as of this moment, POOF!

Far-out west (and south) news

My once-upon-a-time home, Aspen, lost its considerable New Year's Eve celebration income because one guy didn't feel like celebrating...he planned to place 5 bombs around town in out-of-the-way locations like banks and bar and blow the hell outta the town. (An old Aspenite, his friends said he would never have blown up the town, just bitter.) He loved the Old Aspen, things like Ajax chairlift no. 1 and the unpaved roads thru town that disappeared in the 60's, to be replaced by seemingly endless decades of bling...he's gone, he did himself in, and his imagined explosions would have done little to slow the bling...meanwhile in the Mesa County Jail sits an old friend of mind charged with being a courier in quite a large weed-trafficking operation that authorities say stretched from Arizona to Maine...he was quoted at the time of his arrest in early December as saying "Now, this is really going to ruin Christmas for everyone!" I'm rooting for his early release if, in fact, he is ever convicted...
Then, tonight, I have news from the coolest person in the world who has been in a Mexican ritual sauna lodge all day and ready to conquer any obstacles in her path...this is a person who cares more about the state of the world than anyone and, believe it or not, will someday be a great leader of many people...energized by struggles she has witnessed.

Every cloud has a silver Subaru...

A few weeks back I get a cell text that goes something like this: "Dude, a huge tree just crashed down on my car parked across my street." I did what I could to offer help but she was too distraught...when the car came out from under the very tall cedar the next day, it turned out to be still driveable so off she scooted to the 802 (Vermont)...for the holidays. Haven't gotten any distress messages lately from her, only a message asking that I save a copy of the local newspaper that carried a front-page photo and story of her mishap...
Normally, that would be the end of it, but there's more...oh, man...a few weeks back while winging down Cottage Street late afternoon (a lot of traffic) before the tree-meets-car day, a guy on a bike got banged into by a driver who he said kept driving while politely yelling out her car window "I'm sorry," without stopping right away...shaken he goes into the nearest store to call the cops only to learn that his recent history with the cops was not going to get him very far...he had been busted on a Saturday afternoon, sitting in his idling Saab outside one of our two fine laundramats, for drunk driving...cops remembered he had not been especially cooperative and asked him a question that proved to be a deal-breaker for prosecuting Subaru driving: "Did you have a light on your bike (no) because we can summons you to court for that." Wham! Their conversation was ended then and there.
It turns out I know both parties but they had never formally met, and after hearing that he had left a note after finding her parked car downtown later, I ran (no) bumped (no) saw (yes) her outside local bakery and suggested perhaps they should talk..."Is he gonna be mean to me?" she asked...Probably yes if you don't get in touch, I said...Upshot is that she did and she paid for repairs to his classic VERY VALUABLE bike...
A few days go by and she tells me she cannot believe it, but this guy by a stroke of luck lives next door to her now..."Can you fucking believe that?," she posits. "No," I reply, "I cannot fucking believe it." A few more days pass and we are struck by a one of the rain and wind storms that blew a transformer across town, effectively shutting down power everywhere within fives miles...No use sitting in the dark with my emergency lantern, might as well go to a bar and see how the other sufferers are coping...candles, that is how the bar was coping...I had just told a friend of mine who had accompanied me to the bar (and immediately separated from outside due to the incredible darkness) the tree-crash story, when I hear from the other end of the bar, a silhouetted guy telling someone a tree in his yard had crashed down on her car across the street...It was pretty eerie hearing all this in the greatly reduced light at the bar and as I looked down the bar his whole appearance looked a lot like Sweeney Todd...