That's a wrap!

The first season of the Burly Flow Podcast is in the books. But what's on the horizon?

“So, tell me perr-fessor,” Leland Potter said, shifting over to the stool next to mine. “What’s the deal with this Hemingway guy?”

“Big topic, Hemingway.”

“It’s a long afternoon.”

Leland calls me professor because he’s heard I worked at a university. Also, and probably more importantly, I’m not a local, so he presumes that if I’m not actually a professor, I’m at least smart enough to be one. That holds true for every outsider, by the way. Unless they’re from Iowa.

Part of our fascination with Nickel Ross' age came from the fact that he was even still around. Nobody crashes an airplane five times over the course of a life. At least nobody who makes it to 83.

But that’s just what he did. Shot down twice in WWII. Busted a nose wheel in Korea. Clipped a wire during his crop dusting days out west. Then lost an engine on takeoff in the 80s “just to remember what it felt like.”

Five crashes.

Eighty-three years old.

The rain had fallen most of the night and showed no signs of letting up now that it was morning, leaving us all a rainy Saturday to figure out what to do with.

You know the kind of day I’m talking about. For some, it’s a movie day. For some, a go back to bed day. For others, it’s a clean out the closet and eat ice cream day.

For just about everyone, it’s a stay at home if you can day … except me.

“I figured the outing would provide a good balance,” Joey said. “A chance for me to take charge as well as be supportive. You know — the full spectrum of Joey Garnavillo in one dark night.”

“Can you have a spectrum in the dark?” I asked.

“Oh, you absolutely can’t,” he replied.

The thing about "the wave," at least around here — you’re not going to get one unless you’ve got Wisconsin plates. You’re just not.

I think in the end it boils down to reassuring people you’re not a Bears fan. I mean, I suppose you could be a Bears fan and have Wisconsin plates, but the chances are pretty slim. At least in public, which is all that matters when it comes to football. Who people cheer for in their own homes is their own business, so long as they keep their curtains closed.

Now that I have Natasha, my Subaru, and can comfortably carry four other people just about anywhere at a moment’s notice, I find myself in a place where I can pretty much walk everywhere I need to go. I’m not sure if that’s ironic or just par for the course, but whatever it is, it’s a far cry from what it was like in Georgia, where a car was required to go just about anywhere — if we’re talking summer, even across the street.

That made things particularly dicey for me when we had a team lunch at work. At the time, I drove a 12-year-old Dodge Caliber with 218,000 miles on it.

Joey Garnavillo loves to talk, and he’ll happily talk for hours about just about anything … except fishing, the thing he does the most and knows the most about. And for the longest time, that bugged me.

“It’s a thing I like to do, not talk about,” he’d say, and on one hand, I get it. I’ve read enough Hemingway-on-writing to know that it’s best not to lose the good stuff by talking it away. On the other hand, it was hard for me not to feel he was being selfish, given how many great stories he must have.

And while I wasn’t going to jeopardize my friendship with Joey by continuing to pester him, that doesn’t mean I gave up, either.