Her Words

I found a book at the Roadhouse called The World's Greatest Love Poems. There was a page torn out of it so I checked the table of contents to see which it was. I looked it up online and liked it, so I copied it on the back of a shuttle schedule flier and taped it in the book. Theodore Roethke, amen.

Ordinance

In Seward there's a law that there must be an equal or greater ratio of churches to bars.

There's a lot of churches there.

To be known

At the Fairview bar I see a waiter from the Roadhouse.  He points at me and yells, "Mushroom swiss quiche with bacon bits on top!" 

We arrive at Mountain High Pizza Pie right as it opens, so the cook takes our order for two waters to start.  He's getting the waters when the waitress walks by and says, "She doesn't like ice in her water."  He dumps out the ice.

Too Bad Montana Gave That Kid Wine

The rooms in the employee housing up the hill have TVs in them.  The channels are limited.  It's not a normal cable package, it's a few chosen ones.  A&E, HGTV, Fox News, HBO Family.  The Alaska Channel, which is actually long advertisements for Alaska properties also owned by the corporation that owns the lodge.

There's an employee photo contest every summer, and this year someone put the photos entered on one of the static channels, along with a radio station that plays 70s songs.  My friend and I watched it tonight and came up with ways each photo illustrated whatever lyrics were playing when it was shown.  Like they were intentional music videos.  ("I don't care what you say anymore this is my life;" a picture of a moose staring at the camera and not giving a shit.)

When he mentioned that the channel used to be just static, I was like "We could have had a public access show all summer."  Wouldn't that have been fun?  A side project for the restless employees, so they'd do something other than stack up three heavy wooden picnic tables and climb onto the roof, for instance.  (I might have thought that idea up and encouraged others to do it, but let the record show I myself did not climb up onto the roof.)  (Troublemaker.)

We imagined commandeering the channel somehow, wearing masks and holding up poster boards with a conversation written on them.  It would have been like that season of the Real World where they had a public access show.  Too bad neither of us plans to come back next year.