So thanks to a contact, I got to do some writing for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. This was the outgrowth of a job I had interviewed for to be an editor that, unfortunately, went to someone else. However the department head fairly gushed at me about what a fine writer she thought I was, which really stunned me. I figured I wrote well enough to get by in English class but never fancied myself to be professional-grade, or anything special. But I wouldn't argue the point if someone wanted to say otherwise.

Anyhow, the first assignment was an interview with a big-name bluegrass singer who's sort of second-to-the-throne of Allison Krauss. That was exciting! However, mostly what it amounted to was around October I would be assigned, along with several other people, to go to specific parts of town and interview the owners of local shops for a holiday shopping guide that ran in editions local to those zip codes in December.

Now, if I was a local shop owner and someone told me they were there representing The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, one of the largest newspapers in the US, and I was free to blab about my shop and have it printed in the paper for no charge, I would jump on them like a dog and lick their face. Not so with most of these people! Most of them, all but three, really, greeted me with apathy, and indeed one European bloke down in East Atlanta Village was quite hostile.

Why would this be? For one thing, sometimes they would ask to see a card and...I didn't have one. Secondly...there was this particular antique shop in Woodstock that set my wheels turning. I was up there for my second round of this sort of thing, and I was looking at myself in a neat, old antique mirror. Then I seemed to remember having looked at myself in that mirror the year before. Behind me was a chandelier, which I also thought I remembered from the previous year. I looked at the price tag hanging off the chandelier, and hell, the price tag was an antique! It was dark yellow with age, the string looked frayed. It was $325. Ya think if he knocked off $5 somebody might finally take that chandelier out of there? Yet the guy who owned the place drove a Jaguar. How could he make a living out of a place where the price tags are aged? And why did he seem so indifferent each year I returned for a free write-up?

Down in Little Five Points, same thing. There was some portly black broad who had originally sold hand-blown bongs. Back when I was doing my jam band `zine I remembered having been brushed off by her when I was trying to sell ads. Now she had converted her shop over to selling the same sort of knit caps you could buy at Marshall's off a bargain table. She seemed equally disinterested in being featured in the AJC. She hung her head low and body very rigid, avoiding eye contact; very defenisve, possum-like posture. Most peculiar.

Then the East Atlanta Village guy. He had all this wicker shit you could buy a dozen for $.50 at Garden Ridge hanging on his walls. No one was flocking there to buy wicker shit-knacks, yet for a second I thought he might even try to slug me when I wanted to advertise his place for free.

So I came to the conclusion most of those novel little shops are probably just fronts for drugs or prostituion. "Everybody knows the way you get in the big studios is a big bag of coke!" (Inside joke.)

But so anyhow, that was the "gig." Maybe it would pay off, though, because late 2004 I got a call for another job interview at the AJC.

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