Fling it!

I'm just now awake, and there's not much going on. Feeling a bit bored, I consider dropping something off the balcony to see what happens. Nothing qualifies as smashable except the TV. This seems pretty tempting all right. Criteria include heft, ugliness, potential for dramatic impact and replacement with a flat-screen model.

The largest building in Pacific Grove by quite a wide margin is The Holman Building. It dominates the skyline. It's actually the only significant building in the skyline by city standards, depending on your vantage point. It's about six or seven stories high and all other buildings are two stories, maybe three, and they all stand shoulder to shoulder along Lighthouse or Forest avenues. The Holman Building - or Holman's as we call it, even though the store that gave it that name is long gone now - is a big ugly toad of a building that squats on half a city block bordered by Lighthouse, Grand, Fountain and Central avenues. A local self-described visionary bought it after Holman's and then Ford's department stores failed. He painted it mauve, a committee color that has gradually turned grayish pink over the years. You could argue that mauve actually is grayish pink, and I would agree. Certainly it's one of the most colorless of colors ever imagined.

So, the Holman Building is a big mauve toad. There you go.

Sitting here contemplating my TV and the Holman Building, I imagine the smithereens I could create by hauling my TV to the top of Holman's and dropping it off the rooftop. I think that would be something PG could attract visitors with. Not only could I and my friends fling offending machinery off the top, but we could sell souvenirs and award prizes, have a festival of flinging. We could build a trebouchet and send modern home appliances into the stratosphere. Oh, the possibilities: TVs flying uphill to the Middle School field, arcing high over the nursing homes and Victorians. Microwaves winging west to the golf course. "Fore!" Golfers running for cover. Even refrigerators soaring to Hopkins Marine Station. Biologists could find out what's actually within the Tupperware containers, take samples, measure the velocity and approach angles.

Pacific Grove is quiet, contained, reserved, peaceful. Boring. Dead. Bravely, an event literally rolls into town once a year - The Cherries Jubilee Classic Car Weekend rally. Cobras, Chevys, Skylarks, Mustangs and other cool cruisers line up, rev their engines a few times and drive off for a tour of the whole Peninsula. The organizers try to raise pulses with swing tunes played at twilight for couples to dance to. Old cranky citizens always call the police. "What's all that horrible racket? I can't hear my TV!"

The Groove has all this potential. Steinbeck wrote about a flagpole sitter who tried to set a record up on Holman's rooftop. Even then, the building inspired its citizens to scale its heights, challenge gravity, cure boredom. Tossing a TV is my version of that. Gulls strafe cars and streets for the same reason. So, we restless and bored stand ready to fling.