The world is a vampire.

Today, as I was attempting to do something constructive (like, oh, Ottoman homework), I instead went to CNN.com to read more about the Cat Stevens thing. If you have been living in a dimly-lit cave for the past week and a half, Cat Stevens (aka Yusuf Islam) was detained in the US after his transAtlantic flight was diverted because his name triggered a "no-fly" alert with the Department of Homeland Security.

Where did they divert his plane and eventually detain Mr. Stevens? That's right: Bangor, Maine. My hometown. If I had been home I would have heard his plane land as my house is less than a half-mile from the tarmac of the airport. Bangor. Third longest runway in the United States. Bangor. Northeastern-most airport in the United States.

Bangor: apparently, somewhere to send the world's detritus. Suppose he was some sort of freak with a bomb: my MOTHER lives within visual distance of that airport! Oh, we have to protect the BoWash megalopolis from harm; let Bangor burn. *hackling*

OK, well, Cat Stevens aside (he's not detritus; the DHS sure is getting a lot of phone calls about that one as divine retribution--the man sang "Peace Train", for the love of all that is sacred), strange things happen in Maine. Maine, which is usually a place one thinks about in association with seafood, pine trees, responsible upstanding politicians (well, comparatively) and sleet, has become the setting, fictional and otherwise, for utter randomness. Behold:

Murder, She Wrote. If we believed that randy Jessica Fletcher hag's show, Maine's murder rate would be approaching that of Dade County, Florida. Portland and Miami. Sister cities. Oh yes.

The Allagash Five. When I tell X-Files-type people that I live in Maine, this is the first thing out of their mouths. The Allagash Five were a group of men who went camping in the forasken wilderness of Allagash State Park in north-west Maine. They went expecting to get tanked every night and urinate into a roaring campfire, drink Tang, eat Dinty Moore "beef" stew and go back to their lives. Instead they were sodomized by aliens.

Unruly foreigners. Do you remember that rash of plane diversions that took place a few summers ago? Where drunken Eurotrash got frisky/handsy/punchy with flight attendants and then their Atlantic flights got diverted? Guess where they ended up (!). Penobscot County Jail in the Penobscot County Seat, Bangor, Maine.

Last, and certainly most signifcant, is the legacy of:

Stephen King. If Maine was the touched-up tapestry woven by Mr. King (who, incidentally, partly paid for my undergraduate education: he gave me $2,000 for college through a Bangor High School scholarship for "the humanities"), Maine would be a place where:

There is a store where you can have anything--for a price.

When the snow falls on tiny isolated islands, fanged visitors come and demand child sacrifice.

In the shadowy forests in the South, the undead swarm amidst an unholy town with a Biblical name.

Worst of all, Bangor, Maine is the setting of the book "It." Do you know what it's like to live in a town where, after dark, you can't bring yourself to look into the canals downtown for fear of seeing a balloon? Or worse, that be-fanged clown face staring up at you from the brackish water? Oh how about living a block away from a fiberglass statue of Paul Bunyan that comes to life and attempts to hack you to pieces with his axe and log-holder?

Good times.

1.8 million people. More than a thousand miles of coastline. 90% covered in forest. And, apparently, swarming with vampires, murderers, animated statues that kill, sodomite aliens and clowns who lust for blood.

How I ever slept there is beyond me.

I bid you farewell for tonight, and I shall join thee again tomorrow.

Dom (aka, Moose)