quislibet | camping with meat, fictional Scrabble, high school dreams

J. and I spent a long weekend at Recompence Shore Campsites in Freeport, Maine, an attractive private campground on Casco Bay with individual sites that, on average, are somewhat larger and further apart than one finds in state parks. One of the nicer benefits of the place, for omnivores, is that Recompence is adjacent to (and, I believe, operated by) Wolfe's Neck Farm, and you can walk from your campsite to the farm store and return with high-quality, naturally-raised meat for your campfire grill.

We spent our days driving around coastal roads or inland backroads looking for cool stuff, the only real goal being to find fresh corn or other vegetables to eat with the steak.

Sadly, most people (we noted as we walked around the campground and noted what sites we would prefer on future trips [*]) weren't cooking fabulous meat and local produce around their campfires, but had apparently mostly gone into Freeport for surf-'n'-turf.

Highlights of the weekend include dinner every night, not getting killed in numerous narrowly averted head-on collisions with an astonishing number of large vehicles not able to stay in their lane, and playing .

Fictional Scrabble
Everyone knows that regular Scrabble is too oppressive. If you've got a bunch of Es, a U and a W, you're pretty much screwed. But if you're playing our game, you put down "EEUWE" (ee-yoo) and say that it means "a female ovine that meets European Union regulations," and Bob's your uncle.

Other creations:

DRABIT: (dra-BEET) Someone who fills up on too many papadums before the saag paneer arrives.

URJNAD: A person guided entirely by sexual impulses.

EXANTIC: The sea formerly located between Atlantis and the Americas.

SILAPHON: A Midwestern musical instrument played by shooting BB guns at corn silos of varying degrees of fullness.

LOURN: A mournful twilight fog upon the moors.

ETHESE: The language spoken by those under anaesthesia.

And that's not even getting to "GEFYL," an Israeli bioweapon (essence of gefilte fish), or "GUFI," an ecstatic mystic sect whose practitioners were dog-shaped headdresses, or "NAPTL."[**}

So as I lay there shivering on the air mattress I kept dreaming about going back to high school. On the first night (Friday, I believe), I dreamt that my present-day consciousness ended up in my teenage body. Not having any particular lessons I felt I needed to learn or missed chances to un-miss, I spent most of my time trying to figure out how to get back to the present, as well as (for some reason) to deal with a lacrosse tournament. (I'm not sure my high school even had a lacrosse team, and still less did I participate in it.)

Then it "reset," and I started again, this time, for some reason, with

marveloustoy and

couplingchaos, who, needless to say, did not go to my high school.

Finally, it reset a third time, and Buffy Summers and I had to fight some redneck zombies on a golf course.

The next night, I dreamed that I was on leave from grad school to take some high school classes, and was faced with the prospect not only of having to take Phys Ed again (or, as it was, oddly, in the dream, "Good Christian Sports"), but also of having to remember my locker combination from 15 years ago.

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[*] We prefer the larger, more secluded, and cheaper sites in the woods to the smaller and more crowded and more expensive ones (with admittedly killer views) right along the bay. It was still only a fifteen-minute walk to the beach from our woods site.

[**] "NAPTL. It's a Yiddish word."
- "Oh? That surprises me. I would have expected Aztec."
- "... It is! It's the lost tribe of Israel. They went to Central America and started up the Aztecs. But then they got really tired and that's where the naptl comes in. It's a ceremonial garment you wear when you sleep in the afternoon."
- "What does it look like?"
- "It's covered in feathers. ... It's kind of like a down comforter."
- "In Mexico?!"
- "Well, the climate was different then."