B.O.W.L.

This is, as usual, painfully true. Out of the five of us only one consistently makes time to practice. As much as I enjoy bowling I have a very hard time getting myself to go to the bowling alley more than once a week. A part of me worries that if I made a habit of practicing then I’d start taking it too seriously.

The past week had been amazing for me for a number of reasons, most of which don’t make for good stories, but a customer at work told me a pretty good one that I’d like to retell. I was working in the camera department helping a woman make a purchasing decision. I asked her what happened to her old camera and she tells me that it fell over a waterfall. Nice. We continue the transaction and she picks a camera she likes, but then she tells me, “I also need a new iPod, my old one fell over a waterfall.” Well now she’s got my interest. “What exactly happened at that waterfall?” I ask. Then her story begins…

“I was out hiking with some girlfriends one day, and somehow I got separated from the group. It was pretty frightening for a while because I was lost and alone, but we eventually found each other again near this big boulder on the side of a cliff. We decide to take a break, sit atop the boulder, and smoke some weed cause I was still shaken up and needed to relax. We’re sitting up there eating sliced cucumber and getting high when I drop some cucumber in the main compartment of my backpack. Without thinking I pick the whole pack up and turn it over to dump out the cucumber; which would have been fine except one of my friends had taken her cell phone out of a side pocket and forgot to zip it shut again. The cucumber, my keys, cellphone, camera, and iPod all dump out onto the boulder, and everything but the cucumber starts to slide down to the edge. It took us a second to realize what was going on and by the time we came to our senses it was too late to try and stop anything from falling, ‘less we risk plummeting over the edge ourselves. So my car keys and all my electronics fall down the ledge and into the waterfall. The worst part was that we had taken my car that day, so I had to shimmy down the side of the fall to get my keys. Then, while I’m wading around the bottom in nothing but my underpants trying to find whats left of my belongings, a group of Asian tourists walk up the trail, stop to admire the waterfall, and of course can’t help but notice the half naked white chick standing up to her crotch in freezing water. It was not my day.”

This made my day. I love stories like this. Crazy, unlikely, but totally something that had to happen to someone kind of stories.