Just wrapped up the second of five regional NACA conferences in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Strange little parallel world they have out here. For those of you not in the know, NACA stands for National Association of Campus Activities and is a centralized organization through which college events (lectures, concerts and the like) get booked on a region-by-region basis.

It’s a weirdly festive meat market that has us going back and forth between loving ourselves and wanting to wash every inch of our being with the soap of Valhalla. We’re getting free shows from truly incredible entertainers and meeting new friends that we’re going to stay in touch with for the rest of our lives. We’re also whoring ourselves out to total strangers and standing around awkwardly at hotel parties while middle-aged bush league booking agents try to get in the pants of student activities commissioners young enough to be their daughters.

But the bilan seems positive on the whole. Hard to complain when you’re staying at the Doubletree, even if it’s only on the floor of some guy you barely know. Onward to Kansas and the land of “lamb fries”.

We just played a two hour show on the surface of the moon. The stage was technically inside Eastern Tennessee State University’s student union, but between the high-powered flood lights, the in-space-no-one-can-hear-you-scream acoustics and the still unexplained house-sized granite outcropping that occupied roughly 1/3 of the venue, we could practically taste the Tang.

The rest of Tennessee has been kind of a blur. There was a midday dip in Lake Boon, some sweet tea, some Cheerwine, Vernon’s forty-five minute lesson in southern rock history…now we’re all sort of waiting for the other shoe to drop, holed up in our ridiculously nice hotel rooms and debating how many towels we should steal.

“Hitchhiker’s Guide…to the Galaxy? Because what you want is the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe, that’s the newer one with the Dr. No interior, that lets you travel through time.” ( – Vernon)

Looks like I’m still the only Speechwriter to have figured out this whole Blogger thing. Which is good, because history is written by the winners, and nobody’s going to contradict me when I talk about the day we’ve had thus far. Like how I beat Misha and Kolsky at one-on-two Aussie rules football before having breakfast with the mayor and saving a pregnant blind woman with puppies from drowning. We’re in Winston-Salem right now, and it’s actually dinner time, but I just wanted to publicly endorse North Carolina and the beyond-cool perfect strangers we’ve been staying with for what feels like the last six weeks. Theater techs have quickly wormed their way into our Top Five Groups Of People Worldwide, just behind benevolent concert promoters and Doctors Without Borders.

But we ought to be back on the road within 36 hours or so. Thanks for your patience.