As anyone who's read this blog knows by now, I have to look on the bright side when it comes to my many misadventures, if only to keep from crying over them. So instead of wondering how the heck I went from testing different kinds of gum to being stranded in a kayak somewhere on Puget Sound for three days, I'm going to be glad that I got stranded with my pal Hiro and not some of the less pleasant company I've had on my trips. Yes, I couldn't figure out where the heck I was, but I wasn't, for example, getting accused of working with aliens to oppress the citizens of New Mexico, like I did last summer. Misery loves company, and if the company's good then maybe the misery won't be so bad.
Which isn't to say, of course, that what we ended up doing wasn't just as weird as our accidental Alaska trip last summer. All I remember is trying piece after piece of the gum we bought on Sunday, and then I was sitting in a kayak that had beached itself... somewhere. According to Hiro I'd been yelling directions over the sound of the water, and then inexplicably adding the names of constellations as a suffix. "Hard left to catch the current - Andromeda!" We stopped when we got too tired from taking too many hard lefts. "Then," Hiro said, "you wanted to send a message in a bottle, only we didn't have a bottle so you tried to make one out of gum." The message contained in my gum bottle was "NO MORE LOBSTER PINBALL." (Hiro: "What is lobster pinball? Is that a sport you play in New Hampshire?") We set the gum bottle free, in the hopes that someone would find it and find a way to us. It promptly sank (eventually a lobster will see it and go "We play pinball?") and were forced to walk back to civilzation, where we swore never to chew that much gum in one sitting again. After a day of resting and recharging, Hiro took me to a shop run by a friend of his, where he bought me a special, custom-designed "No More Lobster Pinball" t-shirt. I'd be honored if I knew what I was trying to say!
Now listening to: "Right On" by Marvin Gaye
Photo by cleverdame107 via Flickr/Creative Commons
