The lottery is up to $240 million

The lottery is up to $240 million. I rarely play the lottery, but I probably will this week. I know my chances of winning are tiny, but the pleasure I'll get out of spending the money in my head for the next few days is worth the $5 I'll put into it.

The baby is teething.

The baby is teething. God help us.

So about a year or so ago

So about a year or so ago I found a box with about fifty or sixty Parker Vacumatic nibs at an antique shop. Now Vacumatic nibs aren’t worth a whole lot—there’s just so many of them out there and they’re all pretty much the same—but the idea of having fifty or sixty nibs to play with was so compelling I had to buy them. And I did get a pretty good deal on them.

So of course the first thing I did was to try them all out and “grade” them both by size and feel. There were seven excellent nibs in the box—smooth, a little bit of flex, just very pleasurable to write with—and I used three of them right then to upgrade Vacumatics in my personal collection. Two of them, in fact, were better than the Mottishaw nibs I have, and the pen folks out there know that’s saying a lot. There were about twenty that were very good—better than your average Vac nib, but nothing to get really excited about. Five were absolute crap, and I tossed those. The balance were average, ordinary Vacumatic nibs.

I have since used the four other excellent nibs to upgrade pens I have bought for my own collection, and consequently probably have one of the nicest-writing collection of Vacs out there. As other pens have passed through my hands in the past year I have upgraded them when required so that all the Vacs I have sold in the past year have had very good nibs—good enough that this one guy has bid on (and won several of) every Vac I’ve put on E-bay.

The problem is that now I’m out of the very good nibs. I’ve still got my box of Vac nibs (fifty-one, at last count), but now they’re all average. And having a box of fifty average Vacumatic nibs isn’t terribly exciting. I could sell them off, either one by one or as a lot, but it is handy to have spare nibs around—even if they are only average. And I got so much pleasure out of grading the box when it was new, I would feel like I was cheating whoever I sold them to.

So they’ll probably just stay in the drawer with all the other crap I should probably get rid of.

Alice and the baby went to bed early last night

Alice and the baby went to bed early last night, so I had a few minutes to slog away at the book. I got a couple of paragraphs out--they're still very rough--but here they are:

I seem to recall his name began with a Thom, something along the lines of Mister Thomas or Mister Thompson or maybe it was Mister Thomason but it did at any rate begin with a Thom I am almost certain, and while I may not be able to recollect exactly his name it was, to be fair, something like at least twenty-five years ago not to mention the fact he was of that particular breed of high school teacher that is not terribly blessed with much in the way of a memorable personality or a memorable style, the type mostly remembered by former students as “that teacher with the bad comb-over and the ties that were too narrow (or wide, depending on what decade you attended high school), now what was his name exactly?”, I do recall with quite some clarity the fact as relayed by Mister Thom-whatever with the bad combover and the ties that were far too narrow for the late nineteen-seventies during ninth grade Physical Science class that matter can neither be created nor destroyed. I also recall with quite some clarity that the desktops in Mister Thom’s classroom, being pretty much like the desktops in most every classroom at the Clyde Roark Hoey Senior High School were made of in the majority some sort of softish composite-type material that wasn’t quite as soft as masonite but was a good bit softer than any product designed be used five days a week for thirty-six weeks out of each year for an estimated economic lifetime of ten to twelve years by fifteen to eighteen year old boys and girls who would much rather be just about any other place doing just about any other thing had any right to be, with a laminated top and bottom of what was back then still called Formica and I suppose the reason this particular construction type had come to replace the wooden desks I recalled from my junior high school and elementary school experience was the near indestructibility and graffiti-repellant nature of that Formica top given the fact that I had been near about but not entirely unable to find any place suitable to carve my very own initials on my last junior high school desktop given the veritable Woodward County history of initials already carved in its top by generations of thirteen and fourteen year old boys and girls, rendering the desk just the other side of useless for its given purpose, namely providing a surface upon which to write, without placing a book or something with some substance and a smooth finish under the paper to provide some sort of surface that was in fact suitable for writing upon, and desks are after all not meant to be sub floors. But the soft-ish composite-type material that was sandwiched between the nearly indestructible Formica top, which I believe had some sort of pattern of soft grayish lines or maybe it was a grayish non-symmetrical grid work on it I can’t quite recall, and a Formica bottom which I don’t recall actually ever examining the aesthetic nature of was, as I have said, far softer than it had any right to be and could, with a straightened out paper clip or the tip of a ballpoint pen or number two pencil in a pinch, be bored into without too much of an effort, could in fact be outright tunneled through, and it was in this pursuit rather than anything even remotely scholarly I was engaged when I heard for the very first time ever the fact that matter could not in fact be neither created nor destroyed.

I do remember a fair number of other things I was taught at the Clyde Roark Hoey Senior High School, like the fact that mitosis is the quantitative and qualitative division of the nucleus of a cell or the fact that the eyeglass sign of Doctor Eckles was not a sign at all but in fact a literary device although I didn’t learn the fact that Nick was of the homosexual persuasion until a dinner party just this past year, a fact I cannot feel all that much foolish for not having picked up on my own since I’m not entirely sure I was entirely aware of the very concept of homosexuality during the ninth grade in Woodward County, or the fact that Governor Clyde Roark Hoey was the handpicked successor and brother-in-law to boot of Governor O. Max Gardner and that during his four year term he gave a speech somewhere in the state of North Carolina on an average of every 2 days, but none of those other facts have the sheer adaptability of the fact that matter can neither be created nor destroyed. By this I mean not that the actual fact that matter can neither be created nor destroyed is adaptable because facts are, after all, facts and therefore pretty much fixed which is what makes them facts I suppose, but that the very way this fact was constructed and presented is, in fact, supremely adaptable because I have found that you can replace the word “matter” with just about any noun of your choosing and add the implied “merely redistributed” to the end and in doing so you are likely to end up with an entirely new and entirely plausible axiom, although I will confess it tends to work better with your more conceptual type of a noun like liberty or honor or pride than your more concrete type of a noun like spoon or pillow or citizens band radio which makes sense given that matter is itself one of your if not conceptual then at least non-specific types of a noun. Some of my favorite adaptations include the fact that unpleasant smells can neither be created nor destroyed, merely redistributed as anyone who has ever finally tracked down that foul smell in the kitchen to the decomposing chunk of god only knows what too gristly to be disposed of by the disposal and then disposed of it only to find that that particular odor was masking the smell coming from one of the containers of leftovers that has been in the refrigerator since god only knows when which, upon its proper direct removal to the outside trash can reveals the fact that the litter box should have been changed at least two days ago can attest to, and the fact that the fact that the I-III-V chord progression can neither be created nor destroyed, merely redistributed, as anyone who has ever listened to “Louie, Louie” by the Kingsmen (I-I-I-III-III-V-V-V-III-III), “All Day and All of the Night” by the Kinks (I-III-III-I-I-V-V-V-III), or "I Can't Explain" by The Who (V-III-III-I-III-III) can fully attest.

-Andy

I'm blaming IHOP

I'm blaming IHOP, which may not be fair but it is where we ate lunch on Sunday. At any rate, I woke up feeling like shit yesterday morning. Dry heaves in the shower are never a good sign. I went on in to work anyway, but by noon it was apparent that that was a bad idea. So I drove back home, turned off the phone, and crawled into bed.

Alice got home about 6:30 and woke me up to force feed me some Tylenol and ginger ale. The next time I woke up was at 6:00 this morning. I felt like a new man.

It's amazing what 17 straight hours of sleep will do for you.

-Andy

I have to tell this story at every party I go to

I have to tell this story at every party I go to, so I guess I'll share it here. In 1985 we had just released our second album and it wasn't doing very well (neither had the first). So the label decided that to get our name out there they would put us on tour supporting their Big Name Act. Now if you listened to college radio or watched 120 Minutes on MTV in the late '80's or early '90's you'll know who Big Name Act is, but to protect the innocent I shall refer to them here simply as Big Name Act.

So Big Name Act was embarking on a national summer tour, playing 2,000-3,000 seat venues in college towns, mostly. We were booked on for the East Coast leg of the tour, forty shows in fifty days. A real grinder. We met Big Name Act for the first time before the first show and they were very nice to us, offered to let us sleep on their bus--just nice guys. Looked like it was going to be fun.

That first show was in Chapel Hill--our hometown--and we went out there and just absolutely killed. It was one of those nights where everything went perfect. To be fair, we had been gigging three or four times a week for the past two years and we were tight. But that night we were awesome--and the crowd knew it and appreciated it. Now it sucks, as a band, to have to follow something like that. But it's even worse when, as was the case for Big Name Act, it's your first show in five or six months and your chops are rusty and you haven't really practiced enough. Man did they blow. People walked out, they were so bad.

They weren't as nice after the show. The next night was in Raleigh at the Rialto, and the same thing happened--we killed, they blew. They barely spoke to us after the show. The next night was Winston-Salem and the same thing happened--although they were getting better with practice. The next night was Charlotte and they were on their game by then (I suspect they had spent the afternoon practicing), but we were still in "our" neighborhood, and we still got a better response than they did.

The Charlotte show is where things went from frosty to nasty between us and Big Name Act. Weird shit started happening, like our guitars would go out of tune backstage. Labels on the soundboard would get changed between soundcheck and curtain up. Mult boxes would get unplugged during our set. Stagehands would disappear when it was time to load our stuff in or out. That kind of shit.

Two or three weeks of this pass and we're just sick of it. Now one of the things we had noticed early on was that Big Name Act played the same set every night. To this day I don't think highly of bands that do that. Sure, you've got a set list when you go on, but you've got to change things up if it's not working--give the audience what it wants. If downtempo is bombing--drop it. If the crowd wants speed, give 'em speed. And if no matter what you do it doesn't work, there's always "Freebird". But Big Name Act played the same list every night, no deviation whatsoever. Even the between-song patter was the same.

We got to Tampa with a three day break before the next show. Once we'd gotten out of the Carolinas/Georgia nobody really knew who we were and we weren't getting a great response. So we figured we should probably liven things up by picking up a few semi-obscure cover tunes we could sprinkle into the set. So we rented a rehearsal space to teach ourselves a few new songs--"Calling Doctor Love" by Kiss, the "Speed Racer" theme song, "Rain" by The Beatles, and "I'm A Boy" by The Who. About halfway through the rehearsal, Jess started playing the chords from Big Name Act's opening song. I picked up the bass line, and Jason jumped in on the drums. It was rough, but it was passable. All at once we all looked at each other and said "We're going to learn their set!"

So we raced to a record store and bought all of Big Name Act's records. And then spent the next two days learning their set--down to the patter. And then went out the next show and played their set--or at least the first forty-five minutes of it. When they came on they had no choice but to play exactly what we had just played because that's all they knew. And they were so rattled that not only did they have to repeat what we had just done, they sucked while they were doing it.

To say they were furious was an understatement. They wanted us off the tour immediately, threatened to sue us, the label was apoplectic, yadda yadda. We would have been happy to leave the tour right then, but it took our managers and the promoters and the lawyers about a week to get it all worked out. And so for the next five shows we went out every night and played their set. They tried mixing it up--pulling in different songs, but were so off their rhythm that they got worse every night.

It was all over the trades, and it pretty much killed us. But that was okay, because we'd all pretty much decided it was time to enter the real world anyway. Jess went to law school, Jason went to work for his dad's accounting firm, and I turned my part-time guitar brokering business into a full time job. It was the worst but most satisfying career move I've ever made.

-Andy

I had meetings in Greenville all day

I had meetings in Greenville all day today, so I didn't drive down to the plant this morning. So instead of drinking it in the car, I had my morning cup of coffee sitting at the kitchen table catching up on the overnight e-mails. And, not used to drinking my cup of coffee out of a mug that doesn't have a lid, I managed to pour it all over my white shirt. So I went upstairs and changed my shirt. On my way out the door I selected a pen out of the case (a 1936 silver pearl Parker Vacumatic) and clipped it to my shirt. Apparently the cap wasn't screwed all the way on, because as I got into the car I felt the barrel fall into my shirt. By the time I fished it out, there were several large ink spots. So I ran back into the house, went back upstairs and put on shirt number three.

We had lunch at Atlanta Bread Company downtown, where I managed to spill soup all over the front of my shirt. Which necessitated a quick trip to the car for the emergency white shirt I keep in the trunk.

Four shirts in one day. A new personal best!

-Andy

Back to the test Dennys in running in Houston

Back to the test Dennys is running in Houston. Alice is leaving next Wednesday (she's staying at the Hyatt downtown, not the Holiday Inn) and will be gone until late Sunday. This will be the first time she's left the baby, and the first time I'll be left alone with the baby. I'm not sure which one of us is more freaked out.

Now I'm already "the baby wants you" parent, so crying and puking and poop don't really worry me that much. Having no support system, nobody to "hey, watch her for a second, will you?" around does. I'll probably puss out and ask Dad and Bonnie to come down for the weekend--I not only won't have to take care of the baby while they're here, Bonnie probably won't let me within ten feet of her. She's the uber-grandmother. Dad and I can sit on the couch and watch football and drink beer like there's not even a baby in the house. And that does appeal.

How on God's green earth do single parents do it?

-Andy

About a year ago I got the Audi airborne by accident

About a year ago I got the Audi airborne by accident. Jeremy from the warehouse was getting married and I was on my way to the church (and running late) when I took a railroad crossing too fast and got the front end of the car airborne. There were no warning signs about the railroad crossing being dangerous like "no gooseneck trailers" or anything, but as I crested it I saw it drop off suddenly on the other side and I knew I was in trouble. The car came crashing back down and I knew it was not going to be good.

Sure enough, within five seconds the oil warning lamp came on and I coasted into a convenience store parking lot. I got out and got down on my hands and knees to look under the car. The oil pan was completely gone--I ripped that sucker all the way off. So I called the Audi 800 number, and waited about an hour for a tow truck to come pick me up. Enough people from the plant passed me and stopped to see if I needed help that by Monday everyone knew what had happened. Suffice it to say I took some shit.

Apart from the oilpan the damage was relatively minor, but the car was in the shop for about a week waiting for parts to come in. The first day I had it back Bernard called me in the afternoon and said I'd better get out front quick and look at my car. I thought it had burst into flames or something, but when I got out there all the guys from the warehouse were standing around it and laughing their asses off over the confederate flag and "General Lee" they'd taped on the roof.

Things like that make you feel that you might be a pretty good boss.

-Andy

We played a lot of cards on the porch

We played a lot of cards on the porch after Fran came through Durham in '97. It came through Sunday night, and we didn't get the power back until Thursday. We slept through the storm itself, but when we woke up Monday and didn't have any power we weren't that surprised--we lost power every time it rained hard in that house. We didn't lose any trees or anything, and so when Alice's receptionist called and asked if she had to come to work Alice told her of course she did. We didn't realize how serious it was until I got in the car to go to work and couldn't find a radio station.

It was ungodly hot for October, so since we had a big front porch with rocking chairs and a swing Rob and Greg and Brian came over and we all sat on the porch and drank warm beer and played cards for the next few days. It was too hot to sleep upstairs in our bedroom, so we pulled our mattress down into the den and slept on the floor in there. The south side of town had power, so we went and ate at the Panda Inn buffet a bunch. The whole thing was kind of an adventure. We did lose the fish after a few days--didn't even think about the aerator not working. Felt kind of bad about that as all we would have had to do was change the water out.

Watching the news when we got the power back, a reporter on WRAL asked a power crew down from Ohio somewhere if they'd ever been to Raleigh before. When they responded in the negative, the reporter asked them what they thought about it. "It's tore up," the guy said. Brian, who still didn't have his power back, did the only honest-to-god spit take I've ever actually seen in person

We finally heard from Brian this evening. He moved to Biloxi about two years ago, and we've been worried about him. He's fine. When I asked him how his house was, he dead-pan told me "It's tore up."

-Andy