Friend or foe?

So, at the corner of East Avenue and Lisbon Street in Lewiston stands a rather affable wacky waving inflatable arm-flailing tube man who gets really animated in the spring winds. I don’t know how they did it, but one of his hands in particular flaps up and down with notable enthusiasm like he’s saying hello to every harried soul that drives by. Me, I passed him on a fast errand the other day and, God help me, I found myself waving right back. Did it without irony, too. I thought we were going to be buds for life, but on the drive back home, instead of waving, that overinflated hooligan flipped me an obscene gesture, instead. And like that, I now have a new mortal enemy toward which to focus all my inner rage. Stand by for the time and place of our first brawl.

Trip to the PD

I had to go to the Lewiston Police Department on personal business the other day and, what do you know? I started driving to 171 Park St. instead of their new location in the hard-to-find bowels of the downtown. I swear there is an unseen groove in the earth that connects me to the old cop shop on Park Street and I’ll never be able to escape its pull. Unfortunately, that building is mostly occupied by rats these days and they were completely unwilling to handle the business I had come for.

Bet you’re wondering…

About the nature of that “personal business” I had at the police station, aren’t you? Was I clearing up a warrant? Renegotiating a restraining order? Getting that uncomfortable tracker removed from my ankle? Nosey Nate, you. How could you even think such things of me after all we’ve been through?

Boil order

I was in the White Mountains when I heard about the massive water main break that submerged so many of my neighbors back in Lewiston. I felt bad for them at the time, of course, but I mustered even more sympathy when I came across the map and impacted street list issued by the city. The street list was apparently offered in Aramaic in some kind of backward alphabetical order and the map looked like something that might track the mating habits of Cape buffalo on the great Serengeti of Northern Tanzania. But other than that, I guess everything looked great.

Don’t you hate it…

When you come back from a mountain-climbing vacation and hurry to write your Sunday column before deadline and then discover that you’re still, like, 100 words short of the required length? And then you just sit there staring at the screen, willing words to come but instead of writing you start thinking about that old episode of M.A.S.H. where Trapper and Hawkeye dress up in gorilla outfits and you start giggling helplessly for a half hour? Anyway, it happened to a guy I know.