Wednesday OT: Irresolute, State Of The Stack, How My Stolen Guitar Became Famous

All subscribers welcome

the chick in the red off-shoulder could not be any less impressed

Good afternoon, ACF! Let’s get started.

Shareholder Annual Report

We have no actual shareholders here at Avoidable Contact Forever, but that never stopped some of my friends in the insurance business from cosplaying public company drama so it shan’t stop me. Let’s see how my little literary venture is doing.

As you can see, it’s a cyclical game, but adjusted for seasonality it looks like ACF has grown about 30% over the past year. The biggest article of the year was this Thursday ORT about Trump working at McDonald’s; about 11,800 people read it who had never read this site before, and it drove the strongest month in our history.

A sharp reminder to me, if I needed one, that this is a global blog. I’d like to send a shout out to my brothers in the motherland of Africa — thanks for tuning in, I promise not to go all Aldous Snow on you.

On a state-by-state level, I have the most readers in California, followed by New York, Texas, Ohio, and Florida. Avoidable Contact Forever does not have a single subscriber in South Dakota, possibly because of my behavior at Sturgis 2016.

born to be wildly inaccurate

Speaking of subscribers:

Steady growth overall, and although paid subscriber stats have held steady I’m actually making a little bit more money because the number of Trackday Club members is up almost 50% this year.

It’s common for readers to move between free and paid status as their jobs and finances permit — some of you have unsubbed and resubbed a half-dozen times — and I’m grateful for each and every one of you, no matter how often and under what conditions you subscribe and read. This goes double to all of you who are out of the country and paying an exchange-rate hit — knowing as I do how far a US dollar goes in India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Australia, and China, I’m humbled by the fact that you’re choosing to send that dollar to me.

If you’re considering joining the Trackday Club, or giving membership as a gift, let nothing stay your hand. I’m planning the merchandise now and it will go out around the end of March, to include… the book.

It’s been a great year here at ACF despite some genuinely robust personal, career, and health challenges. Thanks to you, without whom I could not turn a wheel in competition, I am once again an SCCA Great Lakes Divisional Champion in the mighty Radical SR8, and for the first time I have been selected as the OVR-SCCA Driver Of The Year. During 2024 I set track records at Mid-Ohio, Waterford Hills, and Nelson Ledges. In 2025 I expect to reset those records and add more in the course of what will be my most ambitious racing season ever.

Thank you, thank you, thank God for you, the wind beneath my carbon-fiber winglets. As always, I welcome all feedback, even the mean stuff, so fire away.

If you’re ever flying through CMH…

I bet about 200-300 of you recognize the picture at the top of this article, even if you don’t know you recognize it. For the last half-dozen years it’s been in every Delta jetway at Port Columbus Airport (CMH) — and every time I see it, I scowl.

Here’s the story in a nutshell. Way back in 2010 or thereabouts I found myself starting to play the electric guitar a bit in public, with various bands and groups. Emphasis on electric. I played my first college acoustic sing-and-strum gig in 1990 and since then have performed hundreds of times everywhere from the Potbelly sandwich shop on Third Avenue in downtown Columbus to Tinker AFB, but I’ve always been a weak electric player, especially when it comes to soloing with more than five notes.

After a few frustrating years I hired an absolute whiz kid to brush me up on my music and soloing theory. We were doing pretty well when I got in a car crash and had to stop for a while. During that time he caught on with two touring bands so he didn’t have time anyway. Initially, he took two of my Heritage guitars — an H-150 clownburst and a Korina H-137 — on tour with him, but then he copped a Gibson endorsement so he sent the guitars back home…

…where his heroin-addict brother promptly pawned them. I found out about this because one of the guitars went on eBay and it was unique enough for a potential bidder to contact me about it. I contacted the seller, who put me in touch with the pawnshop, and so on, and said he’d return the guitar to me once I had the paperwork done. Then I called my guitarist friend, who brought me up to speed on the situation, begged me not to file a police report, and said he would make everything right.

One nice part of owning two hundred guitars, as I did back then, is that you can afford to be gracious. So I told the eBay seller to let the auction continue, and settled back to await reasonable compensation.

Well, the kid went out and un-pawned the H-150, which was the nicer of the two guitars, then he went back on tour. We never made things right on the other one, but when I sold the H-150 a few years later I made enough money to cover half of what I’d had in the H-137, and that was enough to settle the debt in my opinion. End of story…

…except that before the H-150 was stolen by the junkie brother, it was borrowed by another musician who used it for a big downtown concert in Columbus. The picture on the Delta jetways is from that concert, that’s my guitar. It makes me scowl, or laugh, every time I see it. Which used to be fifty times a year, but nowadays I don’t travel, I don’t go anywhere, I am very much a housecat. Which is how it was always meant to be, maybe.

That being said, my former teacher grew up to be a session player in Las Vegas with a couple of gold and platinum records to his credit. I think that someday I’ll go out to visit him, catch up, maybe pick up whatever Gibson he’s being paid to play that month…

…and run out of the house with it.

Be it resolved…

whereas i personally come from that spiritual home of rootless globalist citizenship, noo yawk

It’s 1 Jan 2025, but I made most of my new year’s resolutions six months early, when I realized that I had become fat, lazy, and emotionally deranged enough to be in danger of receiving a monthly support check from the US Government, Jalopnik, or both. Over the past sixty days I’ve also spent real money on ensuring that I will never, ever, ever have to go to a gym and lift in the company of other people. Chalk it up to autism or sheer disagreeableness, but I cannot stand to exercise in public or to observe the behavior in others. I now have a squat rack (thanks for nothing, reader who bullied me), a full set of dumbbells and kettlebells, a curl bar, a lever machine, a treadmill, an elliptical machine, a rowing machine (thanks for nothing, other reader who bullied me), and a recumbent bike in the basement. The “crowd” at the “gym” consists solely of my cats and Claire “Clairo” Cottrill, assuming that my many attempts at manifesting an astral-plane channel between us while I hold the “Rogue Ohio bar” over my head are, indeed, working. My brother goes to Planet Fitness, my father goes to a very nice gym, my son runs outside and does pushups in all weather conditions to set the example for his forty airmen, but I need never leave the ten-foot ceiling of my purpose-built suffering room, need never see anyone else.

As Madeline Peyroux once sang, this is heaven to me.

Yet there are a few things I’d like to do this year, and here they are. Make fun of them, then share yours for accountability, if you like.

0. I am formally announcing that Cat Tales and Short Fiction will be available for purchase in the spring. I have a fair amount left to write, and I need to get my head around how books are actually made and printed, but I’m going to do it. Trackday Club members will get a copy in the mail with my thanks. Paid subscribers will get a free PDF, assuming I self-publish. Following the excellent example set by Sam Smith, I’ll be selling the book myself direct where possible and signing it. The only decision left to make: which other stories should go into the book? If you have a favorite you’ve read in the past, let me know. As with “The Itchy and Scratchy Movie”, there will be a modest amount of unique content to the book, and I’ll have details on that.

1. The long-delayed album project is likely to kick off as well — and I say that every year, I know, but this year’s different, I swear. I’ll be changing most of the tunes from the demos and live performances that some of you have heard, because the lyrics and ideas I sang fifteen years ago no longer resonate with me and unlike Robert Plant there’s no money in me doing the hits.

2. I’m going to try to take twenty-five (25) checkered flags this year, using both Radicals and the Neon. After this year I expect to dial things back a bit and focus instead on volunteering with my SCCA region and supporting my son’s journey towards getting his private pilot’s license as early as legally possible. I will win the division again and set as many records as possible.

3. I am going to bench my weight, for reps, which I have not done since 2009. The bench press has long been my weakest exercise, because I have monkey arms and relatively small wrists. Note that I don’t need to do this “clean” or “legal”, so I will eagerly inject any substance available to me, if that helps. I dropped a hundred BMX gates back in the day against dudes who could write chapter and verse on the difference between Dianabol and Stanozolol, so maybe it’s time for me to learn. Let’s hit the stack and clean up those abscesses, shall we?

4. It wouldn’t kill me to get a decent day job, so I’m going to put real effort into that instead of just taking whatever comes.

5. Finally, and I’ve alluded to this recently, I am going to be a better, kinder, more earnest, and more loving person anywhere and everywhere I can manage it. I will be conscious of the gifts God has given me (tall, can kinda wheel a race car, fine singing voice, a lot of knowledge about the Atari 800) while humbly accepting my defects (everything else). I will set a positive example for my son in all things. I will be present for my friends when they need me. This is not to say there aren’t still a few people who should run for their lives if (or when) I appear like a fully assembled Sinistar around the corner of their home, office, or apartment building, but what fun would life be otherwise?

That’s it for me. Over to you, ACF! Let’s have a great 2025.