Welp, I’ve reached the pinnacle of my career. There’s nowhere to go now but down. Last week, through some fluke of design, my column photo (signed copies available in the lobby) appeared right alongside a similar photo of Weird Al Yankovic. Me and Weird Al, side by side, like goofy, twisted brothers gracing your tablet. It was a weird thrill for me. I imagine Weird Al was pretty choked up about it, too.

Speaking of awesome Als . . . Big Al of Wiscasset odd lot store fame is throwing in the towel. Or in his case, like 15,000 towels, all monogrammed with somebody else’s initials, but so what? He’s selling them for three bucks a 12 pack! Big Al’s is one of the very, very, very few places favored by my wife that I don’t mind browsing in. To me, it always felt like the place where all those carnival game prizes you never won can be had for pocket change. You never knew what you’d find there and it was always pretty incredible to spend 30 bucks or so on stuff you didn’t even know you needed. His clearance sale is going to be raucous. I’m gonna need a moving van.

So, some of you may have heard that I had a minor, low side spill on my motorcycle last week. The cause? A giant honking spider that crawled into my goggles and who then waited until I was humming along to announce his presence. I managed to keep cool for the first hairy seconds, but when the spider decided to move into my right eyeball, it was a bail out scenario. I tell you, perched right between my eyes, that spider looked horror movie huge, like something that would stomp over small towns on its way to eat William Shatner. I’ve had various things creep into my helmet over the years: dragonflies, bees, a couple things that looked like they were straight out of Stephen King’s “The Mist,” but I never had something directly inside my goggles. Not a fan. My pre-ride helmet check these days takes about four hours and involves fire and industrial blowers.

So, last Sunday, for reasons that aren’t clear to me, they ran a GIANT photo of my face on the cover of a B Section story. A local man, famed for late October festivities at his Lewiston home, responded by asking if I’d be in his Halloween show this year. I was extremely flattered . . . until I thought about it a moment.