A&W

No, I’m not here to talk about root beer. I’m just warning you all that, mysteriously, the A key and the W key on my &%@#!! new keyboard keep sticking. I was thinking about trying to write this column without either of those letters, but then it occurred to me that such writing would be incredibly garbled and what’s worse, it’s possible that nobody would even notice.

Dropped calls

I also have some new earbuds that keep falling out of my ears. You know what? What am I doing here writing a newspaper column when I could be writing blistering reviews on Amazon?

The butterfly effect

So, the other day while riding on the edge of downtown Lewiston, I got attacked by a butterfly. There, I’ve said it. A massive creature, it was, and the thing just kept flapping about my face no matter how hard I twisted my motorcycle throttle in an attempt to flee the horror. I was swerving all over the place as this beautiful yet deadly insect continued swatting at my face in its attempts to take me down. Every time something like this happens, I think about how it will read in my obituary or on my headstone. “Here lies Mark LaFlamme, who survived gunfire in downtown Lewiston for 30 years and then was done in by a freakin’ Canadian Swallowtail, or whatever breed that winged assassin happened to be.” Please don’t bring flowers to my funeral because that will just attract more of THEM.

Monsieur Raconteur

One of our readers addresses me this way whenever he writes me at the paper. I rather like it, even if I’m not altogether sure what it means. I’d appreciate it if you could work “monsieur raconteur” into my obituary somewhere, now that we’re on the subject. I mean, let’s face it. Whoever writes that thing is going to misspell my last name, anyway.

Dude, the smells

So, I went to Old Orchard Beach this weekend for the first time all summer. One thing I’ve always loved about OOB are the aromas. You got your sweet, clean ocean smell mingling with the scents of fried dough, vinegar soaked pier fries, pizza, cotton candy, fried clams and about 50 different brands of suntan lotion. Only now, since legalization became a thing, all of these aromas are joined by the sickly sweet, skunky and more insistent smell of pot smoke, too. It’s an olfactory joyride, yo. Pure delight until its accompanied by the unpleasant smell of bile from that kid who really shouldn’t have taken a ride on The Matterhorn so soon after eating all of the above.

Also…

Hot rubber from the bumper cars. That’s another smell I associate with Old Orchard Beach. Of course, they don’t let me ride those things anymore since The Incident.

Mark LaFlamme is an award-winning Sun Journal reporter and columnist. He’s covered the nighttime police beat since 1994, which is just grand because he doesn’t like getting out of bed before noon. He is the author of eight published novels and rides a dual sport motorcycle everywhere he goes. Unless it’s winter, in which case he just sulks a lot.