Chipatosis

Sometimes, the mail is your conscience. You make a purchase on the Internet and then forget about it. Then, weeks later, a package arrives or, as happened today, a mountain of boxes arrived via UPS from a mad moment at the 13Bit compound that occurred weeks ago.

We were editing one night and Meredith had a craving for some salty food. Usually, it's sugar that powers the Superbitter engine but, every once in a while, one of us wants something specific. In this case, she was jonesing for a bag of the Hawaiian Sweet Maui Onion potato chips from Tim's Chips that we had eaten for a whole previous year.

A little background - I first discovered these chips on one of my hot spring trips with the mighty Paul S. We had stocked up at the Nugget grocery store in Davis, California. Actually, he had brought them on previous trips for years and I had fond memories of ravenously, greedily eating them with great gobs of fresh guacamole by the side of remote hot springs in Idaho and Nevada. Good memories. How much better does life get than a feast of such delicacies, bottles of water, and a good soak at dusk?

Anyway, that's how I knew about them. I could not find them on the East Coast, though, and had become curious about where I could get them. I also wanted to get some for a cross country trip a year or two ago. So, I found them online (www.timschips.com) and, on a whim, ordered a few boxes. When they arrived, I was a bit horrified because I had not thought about the fact that boxes of potato chips take up a lot of room. So, we began to eat this stuff while we'd edit. And the boxes were bottomless. We had chips coming out of our ears. We gave chips away to people. We had Hawaiian Sweet Maui Onion potato chips available for every shoot for "The System," aka "Not Blavatsky," aka "whatever the fuck we are going to call this movie." Anyway, we had chips for a long time.

And then one day, there were none left and I said a silent "hallelujah" and thanked the Universe that I lived through all those chips and vowed that I would never make the mistake again of ordering potato chips in bulk from the west coast.

Life went blissfully on. We edited. We shot. We kept on bitting.

And then one day, Meredith wanted some chips. I had a weak moment, as well, and decided to order some new ones. I went on line and was barking out varieties to her from the main workstation: "Limon con Salsa?"

"Yes"

"Maui Onion Rings?"

"Yes"

We just went into a chip frenzy, clicked "Buy," and then forgot about it.

Today, I was taking Elko out when the UPS truck stopped in front of the building and the guy ominously said "I have something for you."

He started piling the boxes up in the back of the truck.

I had only bought a hundred dollars' worth of chips, but let me tell you, a hundred bucks goes a long way in the world of wholesale chips.

When Meredith came over, I promptly blamed her for the whole episode, tried to impart as much guilt as possible through special osmosis, then we sat down to work.

20 minutes later, I felt like a chip. Just one chip. Meredith was an easy sell. She wanted a chip, too. So we both walked over to the mountain of chip boxes - a bit warily, I will admit - and we started cutting open boxes in awe.

I will not reveal what two flavors we ended up sampling, but within 20 minutes, Meredith was complaining of the dreaded 13bit Chip Fever.

We are now well provisioned for the end-of-summer writing, post production and test-screening season.

[crunch]