This is so simple and so brilliant but it never really happens. Well, not enough, at any rate. Someone organizes a night for writers atta bar and then they send the invite to someone who met them via their blog and then that person forwards the invite to me and then I forward it around to other writer friends and then those other writer friends respond to the forward I just sent them, telling me they’ll be there already and had gotten the message already and are glad I’m also gonna be there or maybe they tell me that they’re gonna go now because of the evite I just forwarded them and look forward to catching up. And then I’m driving down (West, actually, but okay, I’ll go with it) driving down the Sunset strip and I’m getting all these text messages from friends I hadn’t seen in ages and had no idea we’re gonna stop by, telling me that they’re already there asking where I am and that they’re waiting at the bar so I’m trying to respond to the text whenever there’s a red light or a bottleneck (like near the Hollywood Bowl) describing my other friends who are also looking for me there because maybe then they’ll find one another, even though they don’t actually know one another, but that’s okay, because I’m stuck in traffic and have something like 250 text messages for a flat fee (on top of my overpriced calling plan) and so I’m continuing to recieve texts and send them (nobody ends up finding anyone else until I get there anyway) and then drive to my friend Hollie’s place (the one who emailed me about the event, initially) and pick up Hollie and then I Hollie and I get there and there are all these writers that I really like to converse with and all of us end up having a really good time. Was from the Sunset Strip on all just one, long, sentence? Holy shit—I think it was!!!! When I met Jane, the organizer of the event, and I asked her how her blog was going, traffic-wise. She told me she go 47 or so hits per day. “Wow, that’s amazing!!” So I email her the next day asking her how to go about getting more blog traffic. “Send me a link,” she goes. And so now I’m linked to Jane’s blog.

Oh, and btw. My friend Sam (the guy in the photo) is not a writer. He’s a New York friend, visiting this week for his summer break. Sam is generally too busy attending plays and art openings to watch TV. (Also, like me, I don’t think he owns a television set). Lisa, my other friend in the photo, said she was “honored” to meet Sam, after he explained to her that he wasn’t actually a writer, struggling to get his identity on the map like the rest of us were. Reason? Sam is a full-time humanitarian. The Greenwall Foundation, the organization Sam works for in New York, funds Arts and Humanities organizations as well as environmental initiatives.