After learning everything I learned in the last post, I knew I had to meet Phil in person. So, one day in August 2011, I loaded up the car and headed to Maggie Valley.

The night before I hit the road, I couldn’t sleep. I kept thinking about everything I wanted to ask him and tell him, wondering whether we would really get along, and wondering–on the scale of crazy–just how crazy it was that I was about to walk into the home, the actual dwelling place, of a complete stranger… Is that, like, really really crazy? Or just a little crazy?

In any case, I went.

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