Me and My Arrow -- Part Deux!

First, a comment on my YouTube videos.

Many people have expressed sadness that the videos are not longer (better). Just so everyone knows, I am aware of exactly how much my YouTube Vlogs suck. The problem is that I’m uploading them at cafes using WIFI. A fifteen second video takes about an hour to upload. I can’t sit in Starbucks that long. So I’m sorry. I’ll continue doing them for friends and family, but please don’t judge me too harshly.

Now the real reason for Part Deux.

I realized I forgot to include a few important things in my last entry.

A commenter asked if people treat me differently because of the “beard.” When I arrived at the Mobile Public Library, I went to the information desk and said, “Hi, I’m Daniel Trask and I’m giving a reading tonight. Do you know where I’m supposed to be?”

The very pretty and young librarian said she wasn’t aware of a reading. I asked her to please look it up on the web site. I’d checked the site earlier and knew that all the information about the reading had been posted there along with a photo of me (the one on the right hand side of this blog). She quickly found the listing for my event and scowled at me.

“You look different,” she said.

I explained to her that I’d been living out of my van. I also told her I’d been walking around downtown Mobile all day and it was like a million degrees out (I was pretty sweaty).

She just kept scowling so I asked her where the reading would be and where the bathroom was. I figured I’d better wash up.

My sister and I went to Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop (a piano bar). We sat at the piano and spoke with the player—a poor man’s Johnny Depp. There was no one else sitting near him. After guessing that I was Australian, he asked why we were in town. I told him about my book tour and that my sister had been nice enough to visit me. He asked me more about DMR so I told him the basic story. After expressing his disgust with the sexual aspects of the novel he congratulated me on fighting evil and exposing Massachusetts (a state that he’d previously thought was beyond reproach). He went on to tell us that he’d once seen a ghost in the bar, and that he was raised Catholic but now believed in VooDoo. He played one more song (and he was very good despite being very tipsy) and then suggested we all go sit at the other bar and drink and talk. He left pretty soon after that. The bartender yelled, “The piano player got drunk again!”

I got in a fender bender after the poorly attended New Orleans reading. I was driving up the ramp in the hotel’s parking garage and my sister was in the passenger seat. Suddenly the huge SUV in front of us went into reverse and backed up into us.

I got out of the car and met the two men in front of me. They were huge but looked at me kind of sheepishly. They knew it was there fault.

I asked, “Where were you going?”

The driver said, “I didn’t think I’d make it around the next corner at the angle I was at.”

I looked ahead of the SUV and kind of raised my eyebrow. It wasn’t a particularly difficult corner to take.

The driver pointed out that the damage to my bumper was less than the damage to his. As he talked I realized he’d been hitting the Early Times pretty hard (it was only like 1:00 in the afternoon). He was right, though. There was only a small puncture in my bumper. So I just said forget about it and watched as they successfully made the turn and aimed the monster toward an empty parking spot. It took the guy a long time to actually get his vehicle in between the two white lines. He must’ve reversed and then pulled back out about 15 times.

And last of all, I’d like to apologize that my New Orleans blog entry is so lackluster. It really is a crazy city and a lot of crazy stuff happened, but I leave many things out of these blogs. My mom reads them, man.