INTERGALACTIC PLANETARY EL-ZZUP

PUTTING TOGETHER A PUZZLE IN ZERO GRAVITY MUST BE A CONSIDERABLE PAIN IN THE ARSE, THOUGH I HAVE NOT TRIED IT YET.

SHOOTING THE PUZZLE

SHADOWS ON THE COUCH

X-MAS AT THE RIVER: A Running Diary

What follows is a running account of a day as a basket check at the fabulous Sunday River South Ridge Lodge.

7:19 am: Dixfield, ME, Christmas morning and Dixfield is a ghost town. No muffins or donuts to be found anywhere. The two convenient stores are conveniently closed, but since it is Christmas Day they get a free pass, I suppose. So this is what nuclear fall out looks like in Dixfield. It has to be a special day if you can’t walk into Ellis’ variety and buy smokes and pepperoni during daylight hours.

8:15 am: Arrival (late) at South Ridge Lodge at Sunday River. Windy, blustery and damn cold, it is. This is not a good thing for tips. The last thing you feel like doing after freezing and sliding on icy trails is throwing more money at the already lavish mountain–even if it goes to an upstanding starving artist like myself.

8:32 am: All’s quiet in the lodge. I wonder what today will bring. Yesterday I looked after a tropical lizard that a man brought in.. He told me that the lizard is cold and angry, possibly because he’s a tropical lizard bound in a frozen mountain climate or maybe he’s like that from hanging out with irritable, wealthy skiers. Not long into his stay the lizard nearly meets his end. I tipped over a space heater that landed a few inches from his cage. Being crushed by a space heater can’t be high on anyone’s ‘way to go’ list.

9:00 am: Gradually people start milling. One of my favorite parts of ski mountain culture is the phrases given to shaky conditions. Freezing-ass cold turns into ‘brisk’ very quickly when someone inquires about the weather. It’s never windy, just ’slightly breezy on top’. Long lift lines translates to ‘people are very excited to ski today.”

* Side note: As I wrote this last passage a fellow from France asked me if it was windy. Can you guess my reply?

10:20 am: A twenty dollar tip! That translates to ‘damn right!’ in mountain speak.

10:30 am: At my counter there is a candy jar. Reese’s peanut butter cups. I might set a new record for peanut butter cups consumed in a six-hour time period.

11:00 am: Slowing down a bit. I did learn how to say ‘hello’ in Russian. So, yeah, pretty slow right now.

11:39 am: Did I mention it was slow?

11:43 am: Refilled the candy jar.

12:20 pm: I just finished a drawing in my sketch book. I drew the door here in my office with the space around the door featuring an early 80’s van driving through a shattering brick wall. Perhaps this is a subconscious call for some action here at the fabulous South Ridge Lodge.

12:25 pm: Still no lizards or animals checked in or any type of unique item of note. The most exotic item in my basket check right now is a small cooler. Slow day on the hill.

12:32 pm: I wonder how the FDA approves the good people at Reeses’s and their practice of injecting pure heroin into each peanut butter cup. That is the only explanation for how addicting the things are.

12:45 pm: Time to feed. I’m about to try a mysterious concoction I made up the other night that I mixed with some pasta. I used a cook book my folks gave me for Christmas and made this Chinese-esque sauce with peanut butter (I definitely have a problem), soy sauce, vinegar, oil, garlic and a host of other ingredients. We’ll see how this goes…

1:10 pm: Chinese sauce experiment successful. A nice break from the chocolate/peanut butter/opiates (I’m convinced) combo of the peanut butter cups.

2:05 pm: Action! No vans cruising through walls or even anything close to that intriguing but action just the same. I went on a delivery mission to a few places and organized the baskets for tomorrow’s big rush we’re expected to have. Now I am settled back unwinding after my wave of activity. If there is a big rush tomorrow I’m thinking about putting out a tip jar. Maybe even conjure up some Tom Cruise-like behind the bar moves a la the movie ‘Cocktails’. If I can spin a metal basket holding someone’s personal items and toss them without looking around my back onto the counter for them think of the tips that will bring in.

2:23 pm: Mmmmmmmm. More crack…um, I mean uh, peanut butter cups.

3:10 pm: Pretty steady flow of people returning for their stuff. The overall impression I got from people is that the conditions, save for the wind, weren’t bad.

I am surprised at the number of people from different countries here. In two days I’ve met people from Argentina, Brasil, Russia, France, Israel, Greece, England, as well as multiple Asian countries. That is one difference between Sugarloaf and Sunday River I’ve noticed. Most tourists won’t trek that extra hour and a half to Sugarloaf from wherever they are coming from. I love seeing so many cultures represented and so many languages spoken in passing, which is not a characteristic Maine can boast too often.

3:40 pm: Got the word that we are out at 4:00.

4:02 pm: Waiting for the stragglers.

4:10 pm: Done.

BALLS OF JOY THIS SEASON….

My friend Seth and I were headed north to Sugarloaf for an afternoon of snowboarding when we both saw something pass on the side of the road. Both of us witnessed it but surely it couldn’t be real. We exchanged a look that essentially said: “we need to turn the damn car around and check this out.”

I swung the car around in a frantic u-turn and headed back up the road, repeating the wild reverse of direction once we had returned to the roadside wonder and parked the car on the shoulder. Sure enough. There it was. It was real. A 6′x6′ plywood sign adorned with bold. black letters exclaiming:

KISSING BALLS!

It also had an arrow pointing in the direction a side street. It was not an oasis, some mid-winter ‘what the hell was in my hot cocoa” halluciantion. But real wood, real paint, and real letters forming the words KISSING and BALLS in succession, while also suggesting the direction in which anyone searching for kissing balls may find them.

Naturally, Seth and I took the obligatory photos posing with the sign to the amusement of passing cars. As we sped off towards Sugarloaf again we couldn’t wonder what would provoke someone to place a huge kissing ball sign by the highway.

First: Kissing balls? Assuming this isn’t a random lewd sign posted by bored teenagers testing how long it could stay up along the busy route 2, what the hell is a kissing ball? My assumption is some kind of mistle-toe object you hang to induce someone into kissing during the holidays. So, if that is the case why not write: Mistle-toe balls, or holiday balls? The least they could have done is make a small picture of a kissing ball on the sign to clarify.

My advanced and mature outlook on this notwithstanding, it is interesting the psychology surrounding advertising. It is interesting that annually billions of dollars are dumped into advertising worldwide in all forms of media. Plywood with paint is one of those mediums, and I think it’s quite an appropriate medium for such a product as a kissing ball. I wonder how a ‘kissing balls’ commercial would look on television. Certainly you’d have to include a picture of a kissing ball and an thorough description, otherwise you’d end up with a target audience of two dramatically contrasting demographics.

Regardless, I hope the local kissing ball vendor can claim robust sales on his/her product for the holidays. A spin-off marketing idea would be charging for photos with the sign, maybe with even a little booth nearby selling cocoa and disposable cameras. Of course, this is all hinging on the hopes that I wasn’t the only person with the mindset to take a picture of a wooden sign on the side of the highway that says KISSING BALLS.

Please tell me I am n not alone…