Maine was so necessary.

My cousin has a small resort on a lake in western Maine. My mother's side of the family descends en masse (although a smallish masse) each August, and in spite of, you know, the guests, the place feels like ours.

Her place is a quiet little haven for Luddites and music lovers. There are no phones and no television, but the place is staffed entirely by actors and singers and dancers and musicians. They wait your table or clean your cabin or staff the dock during the day and perform arias or show tunes at night. When you're sitting on the beach in the slanting late afternoon sun, you can hear the kids rehearsing in the music hall, and man, that's really close to heaven. Especially if your feet are in the water.

They're not really kids, exactly. They're usually 21-30 with lives full of summer stock and off-off-Broadway shows, cheerful musical theatre types, not a slacker in the bunch. It's just that ten years ago I would have flirted with the cute McConaughey lookalike; this year I felt like The Graduate.

And they're all beautiful. Most, anyway. (Our busboy looked exactly like a young Tom Cruise.) Being attractive and in shape are sort of job requirements for show-biz types. Between their lithe figures and soaring voices, they're a superior subset of humanity (better, stronger, faster). Which can make an ordinary and aging woman (discreet cough) feel just a touch insecure.

Anyway. We lay on the beach and swam in the lake and played tennis on the clay courts and tried to catch up for all the time we don't get to hang out. We pestered my aunt for show-biz gossip because she's In The Biz, and she told me something about Tom Cruise but I probably shouldn't repeat it. (Heh. Bring it on.)

I like to take out a kayak every year and ride the wakes from the motorboats, which requires a little wary attention to avoid getting clotheslined by passing water skiers. This year, the trend was dragging people behind boats in inner-tube-like rafts which looked like doughnuts. The kid hangs on the handles and the driver zigzags across his own wake until the doughnut bounces and the kid endos and everyone on the boat cracks up laughing. Then they go get the kid and start over. I thought keel-hauling was an archaic punishment, but everything old is new again.

Another trend was Water Noodles, which are flexible ropelike things made from some buoyant (river-killing land-polluting) petrochemical product. They're orange and lavendar and yellow and about four feet long. The idea is to wrap them around yourself in whatever way you choose (hey, keep it clean) and relax without having to tread water. The exclamations of delight from the Noodle testers were frankly a little disturbing, and I kept my distance.

They kept their distance from me, too. I did back handsprings in the shallows and splashed everyone in a ten-foot radius. I am so easily amused.

The atmosphere is perfect for thinking and writing, and I did a lot of both. The problem was that there was no easy writing situation. I was always hunching over to lean on my knees or rearranging cabin furniture to lean on a side table or lying on my bed with my left arm going numb from the elbow down and my right hand cramping. I wonder how the Great Writers (Thompson, Fitzgerald, Kerouac, Hemingway, et al) dealt with this problem. Lots of alcohol, presumably. Still, it's humbling to read Thompson's dispatches from smuggling ships off the coast of South America, when he was coping with lousy writing conditions and dysentery. I think I was eating a little better than he was.

And now I'm back and there's no food in the house and I have a thousand things to do including figuring out HTML tables (shut up) and brainstorming, sort of, for a domain name. Yes, I decided in Maine that I want a domain name. Yes, swerve.com is taken. Think outside the box.

Yes, wise-ass, I considered derivations on "handles like a bus" and dismissed them. Thank you, drive through.

I am so ready to go back to Maine.

But I'm back in Boston. People suck.

I went to Economy Hardware to pick up some industrial shelving to make a sort of hutch for my desk. The alcove is only about five feet (and change) across, but it's about nine feet tall, so vertical expansion is the way to go (within limits; I'm short).

I took the T to Symphony and walked back a block or so to the store. I found a friendly kid in an employee t-shirt and asked him a couple of questions about the shelf sizing to check against my height-width-depth measurements from the alcove. And he looked at me as if I'd popped an algebra quiz on him.

Boston is full of colleges. I've gotten used to running into smart, funny kids in stores and restaurants. I'm just a little thrown when I come across a dumb one.

But I know how to handle it. I figured out what I needed and told him; he retrieved it and carried it up front for me. Good boy.

I went in search of a plunger (don't ask) and wound up in full ADD fuzz-brain overstimulated mode, wandering around like one of the Stepford Wives and looking at all the shiny stuff. Then I saw a display of cool plungers and perked up. They were white, like iPlungers. They came with their own little cases which closed automatically around the offending bulbs and presumably made one less embarrassed to store them somewhere visible. Cool.

Then I noticed that they were $22.50. Yeah, that's likely. I hunted around a bit and picked up a standard rubber plunger for $2.99 and a dowel handle which was apparently gratis.

I paid up and struggled out of there with four metal rods (the legs; taped together), a heavy bag full of related stuff, and a 36" x 18" metal shelf. I lugged it all to the curb, hailed a cab, heaved the stuff in the trunk, got in, gave the driver my address. And he pulled out into traffic, glared at me in the rearview mirror, and finally said, "So close. You could walk such a distance."

"Excuse me?" What the fuck did you say?

"Is short walk!"

"You expect me to walk back to my apartment with all this shelving?" I asked, cautiously, wondering if I was missing a joke.

"You know how many miles we walk in Africa, every day? Fifty miles! To do shopping!"

"Do you walk those fifty miles with forty pounds of industrial shelving on your backs?"

He jumped in here to see me forty pounds and raise me ten to fifty, presumably not industrial shelving, and came out of his oratorical thicket somewhere in the region of Americans being fat and lazy and used to luxury. People, I couldn't make this up.

"Well, you never know about the people you meet," I said diplomatically. "Like some people might have health problems," like thyroid and autoimmune problems that make them exhausted trying to live a halfway normal life, let alone schlepping forty pounds of industrial shelving across the city on foot, fucky!

The shelving worked out pretty well, though.