THE BOOK: The work itself. What a day! Page 1 - Page 2 - Page 3.

After all that, you can imagine how eternally grateful I am to one Mr. Christopher Schelling for not only accepting my manuscript, but also for each year sending Christmas-time mix tapes even long after “Party Out of Bounds” had gone out of print. He obviously saw whatever it was in the book that helps it speak to folks even if they aren’t necessarily huge fans of the B-52’s or R.E.M. It’s rare in life to get the kind of break that I felt I got when my book was passed to Chris Schelling.

The sun broke through the clouds. ZuZu’s petals. I want to live again.

Anyway, the book came out, but it came out just at a time when Athens was becoming old news to the hipsters. Or something. I dunno. It had a binding that tended to split if you spent too much time looking at the pictures and was printed on the kind of paper that yellows fairly quickly, and it was backed by a promotional tour that took me to one radio station in Minneapolis. How could it possibly fail with support like that?

It wasn't the sensational bestseller that I thought it would be, but the reviewers who reviewed it seemed to like it…