Five golden rings.

Two nights ago and, uh, less than a quarter mile from my window, the restless North Atlantic began to whisper and moan through the Penobscot's thick, fluminal ice-crust. Its voice - at once the nearly inaudible sound of a harbor seal sliding into the icy brine, of bladder wrack settling onto itself after winter neap tide's ebb, of innumerable unseen crustaceans scuttling across moonlit rocks encrusted with mussels - traveled through the still of a midwinter night past the garish slot casino, up Larkin Street and through my opened "bedroom" window, whereupon it found me scaring myself silly with a dogeared copy of Needful Things.

"You haven't blogged for days", it hissed. "Fecker. Feckerrrrrrrrrr."

It's true, but I have to give myself credit where it is due: I've been on a holiday bender, and asking me to do anything other than remembering to not allow the contents of my colon to festoon my festive holiday skivvies would have been asking a whole hell of a lot, let me tell you.

In actuality, I've been fairly poleaxed by the task of preparing an entry that is framed with the concept of golden rings. Birds I can do: as a child who was fabulously obsessed with fowl of nearly every variety - and, more pointedly, the calcite-coated spheroids they produced - endless fodder was at my beckon call. But rings? Golden rings? And five of them?

At first I thought I'd write about how, on a brisk early spring night in March of 1980, I came into the world in Utah, a state known at that time for being more socially permissive of polygyny than most places outside of the tribal world. Five golden rings placed upon five dowdy women's liquid Dawn dishsoap-encrusted hands. Five golden rings on five hands as they tousle the blinding white, nit-ridden Aryan hair of the litter of children they'd inflicted upon the world.

Then I thought I'd launch into a venomous rant about how one golden ring, when placed upon my hand by an adorable, impish lad next October, won't provide me with legal authority in the corn - or in forty-seven other, similarly shitty states in a country that purports to be the Land of the Free. But then I thought that I didn't want to be THAT blogger, and I left it alone.

Then I thought I'd tap out a hopeful message about how five rings, joined together in symbolic unity, will fly over China's profoundly ancient capital Beijing this summer as thousands of athletes from around the globe join together in amicable international sporting venues. However, sports bore me so badly that all I want to do during the Olympics is scream until I black out whenever well-meaning people I know ask if I'd managed to catch a particularly tasty American victory over some tiny, developing nation's athletes on the telly the night before.

Instead, I'll take those few and devoted back three nights ago, to my nearly aborted entry into the Pine Tree State, and to a bearded twentysomething lad who'd been seated diagonally across from me on the flight from Detroit to "Portland."

I try my darndest - Lord knows I do! - to not stare at people who have large, disfiguring tattoos or crippling, impractical body jewlery. However, those of you who have had the "pleasure" of my company for even twenty minutes know that one would have better luck leaving a box of Little Debbie snacky-cakes in the chow hall of a juvenile fat camp and expecting to find it virginal an hour later. And so I stare, and stare hard. Like I'm the product of first-cousin mating hard.

The gentleman in question boarded long after I'd buckled in and had begun mentally providing dialogue bubbles for the blocky figures in the laminated Passenger Instruction Manual that was provided in the seat-pocket in front of me. As I provided the flight attendant who was ushering people onto the inflatable slide a naughty bit of wit, I became aware out of the corner of my eye that the bearded lad was a little twitchier than most. Maneuvering my eye in its socket a little further, I beheld a magnificent webbing of Japanese-inspired tattoos that radiated from his wrist up toward his elbow, where they disappeared under his t-shirt. His hand disappeared into his breast pocket, fell upon the 3/4 full pack of Native American Spirit Lights, gently toyed with one of their filters, and fell back to his lap. "Oooh, a hippie", I thought, "a tattoo-obsessed, nicotine-dependent hippie."

Ordinarily, that would have been the end of the entertainment, but when Tattooed Hippie Man reached one of his yellowing hands to the reading light (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenence, if one can believe it), the resulting light glinted off what I momentarily presumed to be a lost pirate's treasure that had lodged itself on this gentleman's face.

Three golden earrings. Two in the left, one in the right.

One golden ring, bull-like, across the nose.

One golden ring that was STRETCHING A HUGE HOLE IN HIS BOTTOM LIP LIKE HE WAS SOME SORT OF AMAZONIAN TRIBESPERSON BUT WITH MORE BLING-MONEY.

Two things immediately leapt to mind as I attempted, in vain, to not dry out my eyes staring at him.

1) How does one smoke when one cannot produce suction? Was there a cork he put in it when he wanted to go to Flavor Country? Or, oh wait, a tipi-encrusted landscape where one is offered peace-pipes?

2) Sometimes the Baby Jesus provides me with the most precious gift of all. No, it's not peace, or food, or money, or contentment. It's blog fodder that neatly addresses a difficult topic, and it's worth all the myrrh in Arabia.

Until next time, I remain,

Domonic (Isnexttimegeesea'layingbecausethatwillbeeasy,havingnearlybeenslaughtered
bysaidwaterfowlundermyfather's"watchful"gaze)
Potorti