See? There it is...
Do you know where your towel is?
You should. And you do — if you’re a hoopy frood. After all, a towel is so useful:
A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value. You can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapors; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a miniraft down the slow heavy River Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (such a mind-bogglingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitch hiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitch hiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitch hiker might accidentally have “lost”. What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is, is clearly a man to be reckoned with.
Hence a phrase that has passed into hitchhiking slang, as in “Hey, you sass that hoopy Ford Prefect? There’s a frood who really knows where his towel is.” (Sass: know, be aware of, meet, have sex with; hoopy: really together guy; frood: really amazingly together guy.)
Mine is on the back seat of my car, all wadded up with a bunch of other junk. But I know where it is. Because today is Towel Day.
I don’t see any scheduled events here in SC. But Burl, there’s a guy who’s inviting people to join him for Pan Galactic Gargle Blasters at sunset in Waikiki. So we know where you’ll be…
Related Posts
Huh??? Did you mix up your meds this morning???
I keep threatening to re-read this series. You may have shamed me into it.
Tomorrow night HBO is airing a documentary called “How to Die in Oregon” that deals with the issue of assisted suicide. Apparently this is an extremely powerful show and very difficult to watch. I applaud the people of Oregon to allow this sensible choice when someone is faced with an aggonizing and hopeless future. It’s not easy but then again a cruel and painful death is even worse. Too bad South Carolina will never consider this as a legal option.
I’m outed!
Have Towel
Will Travel
About the picture I just added to the top of this post…
Yes, that’s a Dick Harpootlian fan (you know, for cooling yourself with, like funeral homes gave out in the Old South), minus the handle, which has been lying around in my car ever since the Democratic convention.
The crackers are some I saved from a restaurant for the Twins and forgot to give to them. I don’t eat crackers.
The Alabama map? Every time I pass a state welcome center, I go in and get a free map.
Now, CONFESSION TIME: That’s a posed picture. The towel really was lying there rumpled like that on my back seat (in a very hitchhikerly manner, except that I guess hitchhikers don’t have back seats). But it was tangled amid stuff that would have demanded more explanation than I felt like giving. LEGAL stuff, mind you — just really esoteric. So I posed the other stuff (which was also lying around) with it. You can sort of tell, can’t you? The Alabama map doesn’t really look natural.
Hey, you think the Sgt. Pepper cover was a candid, that it just happened? Stuff gets posed sometimes…
Earlier this afternoon, Julia at ADCO said she was thinking about making another pot of coffee, and Lora said no thanks, that she’d had enough caffeine. Maybe I should have said that. Somebody just walked down the hall and clapped his hands together for some reason, and I jumped…
Funny thing about that Harpootlian fan, the faster you fan, the warmer it gets.
So the other day I was at the Carolina baseball game in the middle of a ridiculous downpour and thought to myself how handy it would be to have a towel. I even commented as much on facebook and referenced Ford Prefect and everything, and nobody even commented. Very disappointing. Nice to know you people understand.
I had to replace my towel last week. It disintegrated when I used it to wipe up a spill from my Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster…
Well, I don’t understand why people didn’t get it, Scout. It’s right there in the Guide, clear as day…
I wish that I had patented the idea of sunshades for windshields. I would’ve been a multi-millionaire!
In the late 1960’s, I would drape a newspaper (probably The State) or a towel over the steering wheel on my teenage car of a 66 Mustang or a 66 El Camino.