Big Fun

Yesterday's post got me to thinking about Pocatello, Butte, Tofino, Swift Current, Chilliwack, Las Vegas, Arles, Copenhagen, Berlin.

Not too many people, I suppose, mention Arles and Butte in the same sentence, so whatever else happens today, I have probably let something new out into the universe. Like that sentence: "The elk landed safely on Guam," which was once presented to me as a sentence that no one had ever uttered before in the history of the world. Things like this amuse me so much that sometimes hours go by and I'm thinking of ruminants and the South Pacific and black jellybeans and the strange turns in Latin translation that has cuased Moses to be depicted wearing horns. . . . hours and hours during which I am not writing heart-stopping advertising haiku about high-rises in Long Beach, which is actually what I'm paid to do with my afternoons, and not so much with the musings over Biblical patriarchs and Raratonga.

At any rate, Pocatello, Butte. . . . Berlin: towns with lousy hotels.

Happy Harry's, Tofino, BC: Mice playing cards on the bed. Black beetles performing backstroke in toilet.
Budget Inn: Swift Current: 25 cents buys you a bed that vibrates ALL NIGHT.
No one wants to know about the Las Vegas thing.
Thunderbird Motor Inn, Pocatello: Site of 5th wedding anniversary, doubtlessly immortalized on a secret camera hidden in there somewhere. Someone dismantled his own car immediately outside our door at 3 in the morning.
Butte, Montana: Head of GIANT Virgin Mary airlifted over War Bonnet motel at 2 a.m. To read all about it, go here.
The optimistically named Copenhagen Sleep-In: Robert from Latvia borrows your toothpaste in the communal bathroom.
Berlin: It lives on in our mythology as That Gloria Gainor Hotel, because the boys' nightclub downstairs seems to have been her German fanclub headquarters.
Arles: How to even begin describing the mattress?

And yet, now that my traveling days are clearly over for the foreseeable future, even Butte Montana and its massive virgin (the only virgin in Butte, as the joke goes) seem pearlized and immortal in the annals of Big Fun.

Say, perhaps I'll go taunt the angry tiki gods; if all goes to plan, they'll send me to the mouth of a volcano, where at least it won't be minus 25 in the sun.