Special Delivery

The street is in my blood.

(Okay, it's actually gravel in my kneecaps, the legacy of a bad scooter wipeout on Beech Street in 1987.)

An Important Message!

(The source material.)

Resurrection Mary Sunshine

When I was a sophomore in high school, I paid a visit to a book liquidation warehouse that briefly occupied a back corner of the East Woburn industrial park on Washington Street. Any hopes I had concerning stacks of beautiful and cheap books were quickly dashed upon stepping inside the place.

I'm hardly retail manager material, but even so I have to question the logic of renting a few thousand square feet of space for the purpose of shifting dozens of pallets of programming guides for the TI-99/4A and hundreds of copies of the 1968 edition of the Kelley Blue Book. I ended up leaving with just two remotely interesting items plucked from the dollar bin (though I've since regretted not picking up the coffee table book about The Spinners I saw there).

One of the books was an "encylopedia of modern wars" so unashamedly Anglocentric that it dedicated sixteen column inches to the Great Franco-Anglo Slapfight of August 17, 1662 while summarizing the American Civil War as "The North fought the South over slavery and the North won." The other book was the 1974 edition of The Hitchhiker's Field Manual, subtitled "The Complete Guide to Hassle-Free Thumb-Tripping in North America."

The title and publication date say it all -- the book is a handy source of freak-friendly information on thumbing it (which is to transporation what Russian Roulette is to gun safety) across Nixonian America, full of such nuggets of practical wisdom as "beware of rednecks with axe handles" and "don't try to bribe an Idaho state trooper with a dime bag."

The manual also features a detailed state-by-state breakdown of hitcher-friendly and hitcher-adverse locales. (Berkeley = Good, Alabamba = Bad.) It was this cryptic passage from the entry covering Massachusetts that convinced me to purchase the book:

Freaks Beware!

Regarding Henry

As a poet, philosopher, and naturalist, Henry David Thoreau had, and continues to have, a tremendous impact on well-off college kids who wish to dabble in the low-risk non-comformity game and grow unflattering facial hair. His works have inspired countless well-meaning souls to cast off the shackles of society and appreciate the simple pleasures of life -- such as Toyota Priuses, Whole Foods-brand hummus, and comfortable Birkenstocks.

On weekends, his many of his acolytes can be found puttering around the shores of Walden Pond in Concord, two towns over from Woburn. There they can engage in rapt contemplation of their spiritual father and connect with the natural beauty he so eloquently expounded upon...before driving back to their McMansions and luxury condominiums. (The fields and forests that used to occupy those spaces should have gotten better publicists, I suppose.)

Me? I'm more of an Albert Camus guy, if you hadn't already guessed. Apart from the flicker of kinship I feel for a fellow local with a penchant for hyper-wordiness, I've never understood the allure of Thoreau's work, none of which manages to exceed the profundity of his sublime deathbead pronouncement, "Moose. Indian."

However mean your life is...

Spoken like a true overprivileged armchair philosopher....

Keeping the Faith

I've recently begun to have second thoughts about the stated purpose of pronounced WOO-BIN. While there is a certain nobility to recording and presenting a slowly vanishing accent for posterity, I have the nagging feeling I ought to be doing more. Instead of taking notes as a historic indicator of regional identity fades into the long night, perhaps I should take a more proactive stance.

Perhaps I should move from passive archivism to active evangelism. It would be a Sisyphean task, to be sure. I harbor no illusions about its chance of success, yet if it holds back the rhotic tide of accent-neutral blandness for a few extra moments it would be victory enough.

All I require is a suitable vector for my plans, and I believe I have found it -- the audiobook format. What better way to proselytise than under the guise of passive entertainment? And what better way to reach a massive audience than by taking advantage of the huge market for quasi-softcore vampire fiction?

I am fortunate to have connections in the scene. The renowned Christopher J. Sims, whose Solomon Stone series is easily the gold standard of the vampire-fiction-written-by-comics-blogger subgenre (not that his competitors have set a high bar in that regard), courteously granted me permission to use an excerpt from his magnum opus for my test run.

Stone Me Deadly

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On a less megalomaniacal front, pal Thirdmate of the HMS Impossible has started up The Old Swampers' Almanac, a new blog dedicated to the lore and custom of the wild, wooly, and oh-so-historic South Coast of Massachusetts. Check it out.