Please Don't Tell The Chamber Of Commerce

The tides in Bar Harbor are quite striking, with over a ten foot difference in sea level between high and low tides. During low tides, a natural land bridge — the actual "bar" in "Bar Harbor" — appears in the middle of the harbor that connects the town to Bar Island, and for about three hours during each cycle one can walk or drive across it. If you don't pay attention to the time, you'll find yourself swimming back to your hotel or waiting about eleven hours for the bar to reappear.

Now, many things in my life have changed since my move here from Boston, but the glee I derive from messing with the minds of tourists is not one of them. And one of these days during the height of tourist season, as some of the roughly four million annual visitors descend on the town, I'll be standing on Bridge Street waving to them.

And I'll be waving an orange flag toward the bar, while standing next to my "ALL-DAY PARKING ONLY $3" sign.

Words Will Never Hurt Me, Though They May Hurt You

In an attempt to cheer myself up, I dug out some old college writing notebooks today. I get a kick out of seeing how my writing skills have...well I don't think advanced is the proper term. Maybe "not gotten completely suckier" is more accurate.

Anyway, the stuff inside is mostly tripe, suitable only for burning to keep one warm. There are a few bits that I enjoyed seeing again, like this sentence describing a lack of focus:

I hold onto thoughts like handless people hold on to boiling-hot potatoes.

For every nugget like that, however, there are thirty things that would have been better off left inside the Bic:

Stripes! Wonderful, outrageous stripes! They're on shirts and sweaters! They're painted on athletic fields! A movie was named after them! Find them on tigers, raccoons, and prisoners! Hey Hamburglar, you're covered in them, too! Off-air television stations broadcast them in the wee hours of the morning, while you're up drinking scotch instead of getting those precious few hours of sleep that will help you function through your tiresome, meaningless day! Mr. Music Man loves stripes, and places notes atop them! Old Glory wouldn't be a grand old flag, a high-flying flag, without them! You may never have heard of striping data to hard disks, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist! Why can't I escape the stripes? Why do they mock me with their omnipresence?

Although I shudder in embarrassed fear at knowing I'm responsible for such literary travesty, I'm happy that I have never inflicted these beasts upon the public (a mistake that some people are all too happy to make). But in the spirit of one man's garbage being another man's treasure, I'm offering all interested parties a chance to own some of the most self-indulgent nonsense that I have created. Fire off an email to the contact address on the left side of this page, and I will deliver these ill-begotten words to you, freshly ripped from the finest spiral notebooks that I could sneak out of office supply closets. You may receive a few sentences or several paragraphs, depending on how much torture I feel you deserve.