| Ask A Drunk : One Thread |
Just for once – and only for a moment – he lifted the veil that hid so much of his tortured, star-crossed life.‘I am leaving,’ he wrote* in his elaborate, archaic script, ‘for several days [sic] holiday, visiting the wild haunts of Oregon of which I am so fond…’
It must have made a queer, obscurely touching spectacle to anyone who happened to observe it: the gaunt, tiny, fiercely erect figure in his frayed crimson mackintosh, with a wind-up gramophone strapped to his back, his pitiful handful of worldly possessions half-filling his carpet bag, and a partly broken lemon-coloured parasol held defiantly above him, striding at dawn along an ill-made road on the rude outskirts of Portland, and then – stepping out fearlessly into the raw wilderness.
What could be the meaning of this impossible intruder? What bleak compulsion drove him into the haunts of wolves and fugitive white supremacists?
Despite strenuous researches I have not been able to learn anything of the events of Aimless’s ‘holiday’. Yet there must, somewhere – in a rusted tin box perhaps, or a bundle of yellowing papers, or a LUSENET forum so obscure that even Duane Zarakov has never ventured into it – be some kind of record of those lost days of the Oracle of Oregon.
So may I issue an appeal to all readers of Ask A Drunk? Rack your brains – peel your eyes – search your attics – and, should you discover any information about Aimless’s weird jaunt (travel plans, postcards, holiday snaps, eye-witness accounts, scurrilous rumours from chambermaids at the National Parks Administration), share it with the rest of us here.
* on our Serious nasal situation thread
-- Rex (rex@waitrose.com), October 03, 2002
Perhaps the fact that he was "fiercely erect" offers a clue....
-- Bollard (tim_collard@yahoo.com), October 04, 2002.
Believed seen picking up driftwood from the shores of Lake Huron, between turning a map through 90 degrees at regular intervals.
Not a confirmed sighting, though - the approach was upwind from 300 metres away. After nervously twitching his nostrils and briefly sniffing the air, our suspected Aimless made a surprisingly agile dash into the surrounding bushes.
-- J Forrester-Gump (s.denim@aol.net), October 04, 2002.
Aimless spotted at a gas station sat on a deckchair reading Freya North and watching the local girl scouts performing a forecourt rendition of Pinters' "Rick Astley: Brigadoon".He was drinking a Long Island Iced Mr.T, also he was wearing a decorative cobalt merkin and earrings shaped like The Damned.
To his direct left was a crying Polish sprinter clutching her left knee and wearing a Jim Bowers t-shirt. The significance of this can only be unravelled by David Lynch.
-- Lynskey (paul@daymaker.freeserve.co.uk), October 04, 2002.
Or a David Lynch Mob.
-- Jarl'rmai (parkerj@edgehill.ac.uk), October 04, 2002.
apart from the fact that my buttocks are hopelessly jammed into the business end of a princess cruiseship suction toilet, flushing me by inches into the aegean, i am quite fit. don't forget to turn ma-ma to face the sun. she hasn't been very heliotropic since they changed the numbers format on countdown. maybe one of those clockwork telescope drives would do the trick . . . .
-- aimless (presstunk@uss.bollixandspray), October 04, 2002.
They're notoriously flakey. What you want is a Billion Speed Spiral RAMjet. They plug directly into your parents' goiterport and are practically noiseless. My dear old mum got a 10 letter word with it. Impressive.
-- Lynskey (paul@daymaker.freeserve.co.uk), October 05, 2002.
I submit this without further comment:[UPI, Portland, OR] Doctors at Portland's University Hospital said Wednesday an Oregon man shot through the skull by a hunting arrow is lucky to be alive, and will be released soon from the hospital. Tony Roberts, 25, lost his right eye last weekend during an initiation into a men's rafting club, Mountain Men Anonymous, in Grants Pass, Ore. A friend tried to shoot a beer can off his head, but the arrow entered Roberts' right eye. Doctors said had the arrow gone 1 millimeter to the left, a major blood vessel would have cut and Roberts would have died instantly. Neurosurgeon Dr. Johnny Delashaw at the University Hospital in Portland said the arrow went through 8 to 10 inches of brain, with the tip protruding at the rear of his skull, yet somehow managed to miss all major blood vessels. Delashaw also said had Robert tried to pull the arrow out on his own he surely would have killed himself. Roberts admitted afterwards he and his friends had been drinking that afternoon. Said Roberts, "I feel so dumb about this." No charges have been filed but the Josephine County district attorney's office said the initiation stunt is under investigation.
-- Aimless (aimless@national_raffle_association.org), October 06, 2002.