Adventure #60: Summer Tour 2012 Dallas, Texas

We left Amarillo sad to leave our friends behind, but in good spirits. Then we hit Clarendon, Texas. Friends, I want to tell you about the town of Clarendon, Texas where this happened there. They got three stop signs, two police officers, and one police car. And that police car will not hesitate to pull you over if you fail to notice where the highway goes from 70 to 55 to 35 before immediately shooting back up to 55 then 70 again in the span of half a mile. So I slowed down to 50 but never saw the sign for when it goes down to 35. So $215 later and my unsuccessful pleading turned into a whole lot of unfavorable comparisons to farm animals. Well, one farm animal really. This is Pen Pen getting a great idea for a Sammy Hagar / NWA mash-up.

A cloud of dispirited silence hung over the rest of the drive to Dallas. The silence occasionally punctuated by sentences that start with “and another thing about cops...” But we got to the venue and there was a pretty decent crowd there. Opening Bell Coffee does a songwriter night on Mondays, and the host's daughter was playing a set and had brought a lot of her friends out. She opened and had a killer voice. She told me she was applying to schools in New York for musical theatre with an embarrassed chuckle. “Funny,” I said, “I write musicals in real life.” We got along great after that. Joshua, Holly, me, Pen Pen, Joshua's friend Shannon and Holly's friends Tara and Patty headed to In-N-Out Burger for veggie burgers after the show because Opening Bell is the only coffee shop venue in America that doesn't comp performers food and screw that. My moral compass makes less sense the harder you think about it, so it's best not to think about the fact that I took a stand against pay-to-play at an otherwise nice locally owned business by eating GMO at a chain fast food place... This is Pen Pen feeling slightly less bad when he discovered that In-N-Out employees get a living wage and benefits.

This is a song I wrote one time. You should download it and share with your friends.