The Wetass Lifestyle–Bummer to Be a Bum?: Ski bumming is a fading way of life, according to the LA Times:

“Escalating costs in resort towns require most bums to juggle at least two jobs, an affront to the snow-slacker ideal that eschews timecards — except tallies of hours spent boarding. Latino immigrants, who expect less pay and often prove more reliable than drifters and itinerant college students, increasingly fill entry-level jobs. Globalization has reached the snowy peaks, and a lifestyle built on avoiding real life for unfettered access to powder, kegs and flirtation is fading.”

Hmmm, the article extrapolates all this mostly from the life on one loser, who got a really bad haircut when he was drunk, is on the lam from a DUI charge in Pennsylvania, and starts tabs at local bars with an expired credit card (“What happens when you do that?”, he asks the reporter). The alternative explanation is that today’s ski bums are simply whiners. Ski bumming in its glory days never really meant sitting around, getting stoned, and doing no work. It meant working your ass off at a menial job, getting stoned, and skiing 100 days a year. Yes, it’s harder to be a bum when there is a growing supply of immigrant labor that works hard and actually shows up at work on big powder days. But there is a sense of entitlement that emanates from all the so-called “bums” interviewed for the story that just sounds off…..



No Whining: “Who gives a sh*t if I have to wait tables? The powder is deep, the slopes are steep, and Ski Magazine says the divorcees are on the prowl….”