Tuesday, March 4, 2008

Zamboni versus Anti-Zamboni

On Sunday after the meeting of the Seacoast Writers Circle we went to Fat Belly's in Portsmouth. It felt sort of like the red door without the pretentiousness (I love the red door. I love pretentiousness, on mondays and thursdays and saturdays). I'm almost ashamed to admit I had never experienced an ice bar before, where a strip of ice runs parallel to the bar to keep your drink cold. I want to get a remote-control model zamboni and try to steer it from one end of the bar to the other. If such a thing doesn't exist I want to invent it. Then I want to invent an anti-zamboni, a small machine whose sole raison d'etre is to fuck up the surface of ice. It will scrape, gouge, shave, dribble oil, plant little spikes (TM "li'l spikes"), and in general maliciously reconfigure the surface till not one square inch is unadulterated. Then I will pit them against one another like those Battlebots back in the day and we can all place bets while swigging two dollar drafts. They will not be mindless, unthinking mechanisms, though--I want these things to be the living embodiments of the cutting edge of artificial intelligence technology. They will develop opinions whose only consistent attribute will be that they will be on opposite sides of every issue. Zamboni for Obama, anti-zamboni for Hillary. Zamboni for Democrat, anti-zamboni for McCain. They will swap roles periodically for the sake of not getting into a rut, even though the anti-zamboni will rather enjoy a good rut. Their yin and yang will be wondrous to behold. When the ice caps melt one day, they will die together at once, and in the post-zamboni world to come they will be inextricable parts of a myth cycle that some will speculate is based on actual historical events.

1 comment:

Linda said...

You'se one warped mind, Tim - a good thing. Laughed hard at this post.

Keep blogging... yeah, I know, I know, it takes time away from the important writing. But think of it as a warm-up exercise - you're good!

Great SEEING you at the Muse... Peace, Linda