Apropos of Nothing...

...what a mistake I've made!

Wasn't thinking at all...

A magazine out of Annapolis called Alive, an area entertainment tabloid with a circulation of 15,000 calls me and wants to know if they could print an article I had written. Alive is distributed throughout the Annapolis-DC-Baltimore Beltway and I smelled money with this big Yankee snout of mine and so I said to the guy after rudimentary discussion, `Well how much are you willing to pay?' and he remarked he would have to go and discuss this with his publisher and would call me back, and so that is how it was left. We hung up.

Immediately I called my Boss and said to her, Look Boss this could be bigtime for me and I need to know what sort of a ball park figure I might accept and after talking it over I decided I would ask for a hundred, hope for 75 and take 50 minimum (if you got half of everything you wanted you'd be happy right?), then I called the editor of Alive back and he said that after careful consultation with his publisher they decided they could afford to give me...

Ten bucks.

My alarm system went off. `Ten dollars! Why don't you just slap me across the face you cheap bastards! What a friggin' insult! Go %&#@ yourselves!' And I slam the phone down, fuming and gasping for air. `Ten dollars! You cheap #$%&+#@ pricks...you'll get nothing out of me, EVER!' I wing it on home and mope about the house in a blue funk.

Ten bucks.

Then I get to thinking it over.

Jeez so what if it's only ten bucks? 15,000 (!!) people would have read an article reprinted from "...NOTES FROM THE DUMP..." That's a lot of people and if only 20 of them decided that NFTD was worth a subscription that would have been $400 to add to the empty coffers...

So I sit down and write them at Alive, telling them how sorry I was for my outburst (`Not all Northerners are so rude,' I sycophantically intoned) and tried to put a little joke-type spin on the whole thing then posted it to Annapolis and waited for the all-forgiving call which of course never came.

I can see the editor and publisher now: `HA! This creep! Throw that crap in the wastebasket...who needs him!" Thus ends my career down South.