The Coal House

The four of us pulled out of Williamson, West Virginia, without a good reason as to why we had gone there in the first place. Williamson is 80 miles from anywhere, cradled in the elbow of the Tug Fork, the muddy brown river that forms the border with Kentucky and has half-a-mind to rise out of its banks whenever it damn well pleases. Dead little coal towns dot the Tug, some encircled with an Army Corps of Engineers flood wall to protect the crumbling structures inside.

Williamson has a few two or three story buildings. But it is not much of a city anymore. Not like it used to be. Three-thousand people live along a collection of streets that snake along the flattest ground. Between the roads and the river is one of America's largest rail yards. More than a dozen railroad tracks sit side-by-side, ready to take all of the coal that comes down out of the hills north to Huntington and the barges. Everything in town is a bit monotonous and inconspicuous, except for the thing you see when you turn left on to East 2nd Street. There, among the vacant storefronts, is the Tug Valley Chamber of Commerce, which sits inside The Coal House, a black cube created from 65 tons of coal mined from a single mammoth seam in Mingo County.

I know all of this now. I didn't know any of it when we drove through a gap in the flood wall and left.

The Short Happy Life Of Wavecrash Sansboarderson

If you would have seen me around 3:30 today, the first question you would have asked is why I was furiously rubbing my left eye.

It's Friday afternoon. Girlfriend and I unfold our chairs on Carolina Beach, go for a walk, then plop down and start in on our books. I've got a big collection of Ernest Hemingway short stories that I've been meaning to get to. The first one, The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber, is about a guy who goes on a safari. He encounters a lion. He runs away. He's a coward. Then, he redeems himself, and regains his chutzpah by killing a bison. Only it's not dead. Francis meets a rather horrible end.

As I read that, I notice the waves are getting bigger. Big four or five footers are crashing just a few yards offshore. At least a dozen surfers are bobbing up and down in the water. It looks intense.

Time to prove to Girlfriend that I'm no coward.

How Christopher Columbus Totally Ruined This Party I Was Gonna Throw

FuglyFest was supposed to be this party a friend of mine was going to throw, and it never happened. But we created a blog to spread the word, for which I wrote the only entry, a detailed and wholly fake historical document (which, inexplicably, got three page views last month). If we ever do get around to partying, here's what you should know:

--
Let me get you up to speed.

FuglyFest is actually an ancient Greek word, meaning "drunken prosperity." Aristotle threw it around a lot at parties in Athens, and although history remembers him as one of civilization's great thinkers, Aristotle always thought of himself as a guy who could cook up some mean lamb-kebobs while pounding enough Ouzo to bring down a rhinocerous.

Jake By The Lake

Here's what happened when I walked up to Jake Delhomme in Cleveland over the weekend.

ME: Jake! Hey, we're from Charlotte!
JAKE (looks confused): What?
ME: We're from Charlotte!
JAKE: No, you mean Cleveland.
ME: No. Charlotte.
(awkward silence)
ME: Can I take a picture of you and my girlfriend?
JAKE: Sure.

He's Been Everywhere, Man

Not much really needs to be said here. Except for this: Tony is a college friend of mine who lost what he called his dream job at a sports radio station in Columbus, and decided to embark on a 40 day tour of the country, playing his guitar all the while. In between gigs, Tony stopped here and there and recorded bits and pieces of this song. You see the result here.