chinese broccoli

Roll up the town of Chapel Hill at 1am and hop in the van: Asheville is waiting and so is the extended Nolan family. It’s only 200-some-odd foggy miles west, and Pete loads up on Red Bull and the rest of us try to keep him awake by describing the entire plots of The Matador and About Schmidt. Somewhere shy of 5:00am we roll up on the house (past the laundromat, down the old road, with the white picket fence) and Pete’s dad and Wrigley and Mr. Britches all run out to meet us and I fall asleep instantly.

In the morning (okay, noon) I wake up to meet the rest of the family and am guided to the fridge to find a plastic grocery bag just filled with fried chicken. There is also a chocolate cake, wait, no, there are two chocolate cakes. I fix a plate, pour a glass of Coke, and have breakfast in the south.

After some intense and awesome family time with all of the Nolan Clan (NoClan) we drive into downtown Asheville for food and wandering. I decide to wander and feed on my own, and think if I search hard enough I should be able to find the coffee shop and some cute vintage stores or whatever. This takes me about four seconds, and I find about 537 vintage/etsy-coture stores, the good coffee shop, Izzy’s, and a whole lot of places to buy lawn ornaments and sustainable bed linens. It’s real rich Carolina retiree/Berkeley around here, I can smell a lot of clove smoke, man. There are even permanent little change boxes affixed around poles in town to collect money for the homeless.

I stop to eat lunch at the Mellow Mushroom, which makes pizza full of pesto with a crust that tastes like crazy bread, and the whole scene is pretty awesome other than the psychotic array of birds that get more and more progressively aggro while I am trying to eat. They start hanging out on my table and actually start LANDING ON MY PIZZA, occasionally having time to steal a chunk of feta here or there too before I shoo them away and all the other hippies and tourists and townies on the patio laugh at me.

John Shaw comes over to the pizza place to tell me they are going to the club to load in. Even though I have been eating my pizza in full view of the van, apparently it has gotten a parking ticket. Oh, no, wait. This is Asheville. It got a parking warning.

I have more work to get done and I accidentally stumble into the French Broad Chocolatier, where I down a vanilla-bourbon truffle and a French press of Counter Culture La Golandrina before my laptop battery runs out and a crew of 898766825 old women and tweens overrun the place to celebrate some sort of birthday party. I walk down to the club by way of a scenic overlook and a sunset.

The Grey Eagle Tavern is a lovely place, the size and feel of a bowling alley but trying to look nice (sorta), huge but cozy, the kind of place you might wish was the only club in your town, and apparently with good hush puppies, too (though I didn’t try them and I don’t really like hush puppies). More inroads are made with Ghost — I think — and the show is great for both bands. People keep asking me at the merch table (and later, Pete’s mom brings this up, too) what the difference is between the old Magik Markers and the live Magik Markers and the last-couple-records Magik Markers and I try to explain it by saying that although something has been harnessed into the shape of songs it is still wild under there and you can tell it is the same dudes and the same threat level, even if the danger to your personal safety seems somehow less immediate.

Backstage there is some relaxing and then some locals show up with a generous gift for Ghost in a mason jar: moonshine, which Elisa tries to explain to them that they should be judicious in consuming, or it will make them friggin crazy. After a long series of attempts to communicate this, they somehow understand that it will turn them into werewolves.