Paging John Cusack: I sense a sequel. Calling all angels…

Sadly, this call could not be completed as dialed.

Mark Eskelsen, the Hot Tub Hobo

It seems Mark Eskelsen, a true aficionado of convivial outdoor bathing, free spirit, alfresco-dweller, and (at least mentally) time-traveller from reformed hippieville Beaverton, Oregon, is not a rock. Nor yet is he an island.

He is a loser.

From the New York Daily News (really, we’re getting our Cascadia news from NYC now? really, interwebs?):

The 45-year-old called 911 from his cell phone on Sunday morning and identified himself as the “sheriff of Washington County,” Beaverton police said. He then asked for medical attention, later admitting that he wasn’t the sheriff.

Eskelsen also said he had been in the hot tub for 10 hours and that his towels had gotten soaked.

“I just need a hug and a warm cup of hot chocolate with marshmallows in it,” he told the 911 operator.

In fact, the police lied: the poor man actually called 411, as any right-thinking, cocoa-seeking hot tub hobo would do in a time of need. Can you imagine the conversation he and the friendly operator must have had? If not for the fact my readers are still recovering from my recent OD on YouTubes, I’d post the scene from 28 Days where Sandra Bullock’s character is driving around wasted in the stolen limo wearing her underwear and drunk-dialing 411 to find a wedding cake, right here. But I won’t.

The operator knew a true human emergency when s/he heard one, and handed off the unsuspecting hug-seeker to 911 emergency response, who promptly responded to our warm-hearted if pruney-toed protagonist’s cri de coeur by calling in the SWAT team to roust him from his roasty roost and put him on ice in the cooler.

And to think: all he wanted was a hug, a cup of cocoa with marshmallows, and some fresh towels. Really, when it comes right down to it, we are all Juan Mann, alone.

“…how hard it must be to live only with what one knows and what one remembers, cut off from what one hopes for!… There can be no peace without hope.”

~ Albert Camus, 1948, The Plague (Trans. Stuart Gilbert), p. 262-263

Emo Luv