Old Friends
It's been slow blogging here in my world, partly due to buckling down and producing income, which my wife tells me is, like, important, and partly due to lack of much to say. This happens from time to time, which can result in odd columns. This week I started out writing a piece about existentialism and the modern male, diverted into a discussion about the Civil War, touched on Iraq, and then just sort of stopped. I ran the gamut from A to 23, in other words. It was lame.
And I got a letter to the editor, taken to the cleaners for a perceived slight against the post office. I thought jokes about the post office were fair game, along with lawyers and Pamela Anderson, but I guess I was being insensitive. I apologize.
It did remind me, though, that this week is an anniversary of sorts. In a couple of ways.
I woke up one day a year ago and read about a new Knight-Ridder poll showing that a majority of Americans intuited, or had been led to see, a connection between the imminent action in Iraq and the 9/11 attacks. This is old news now, but at the time it wasn't getting a lot of play.
I was irritated and sort of inspired, so I sat down and plunked out 800 sarcastic words and sent it off to my editor at the Seattle Times. A few days later it was published, and the emails started at 4 a.m. Some of these were pretty nasty, although I guess the majority were favorable. But there were 600 of them, and I was sort of reeling from the invasion when, in the late afternoon, I noticed something odd. I called my editor.
"Lee, do you have any idea why I'm getting emails from Oklahoma?"
"I'm pretty busy right now, Chuck."
"Wait. Here's one from France. And Australia."
"Hmm. OK. You've entered the Dark Side of the Web. Someone linked to your column."
"What? Where?"
"Gotta run. Enjoy."
I spent the next couple of days ego surfing, trying to locate where these people were all finding my silly stuff. It turns out that the piece was widely considered anti-war (I thought it was anti-stupid, but what do I know?) and got posted to dozens of progressive sites. I was guilty by association with lots of interesting people, as below. 
(Sorry. This is rude of me. You can read the piece if you want here at CommonDreams.org, since the Times archive requires registration and who has time for that?)
But my loss of innocence isn't the point. Somewhere along the line, as I was tracing these links, I came across a site that paired a comment about my column with a mention of another writer. I can't remember the site, or the issue, but the sentence went something like this:
"Make sure to check out Real Live Preacher today."
So I read. Then I read everything, and I told everyone I knew.
So I had my Warhol minutes, which I could have lived without, and I found the Preacher's writing, which it turns out I can't. And I got a new friend, and you can never have enough of those.
RLP sent me a note the other day, just asking how I was doing. As a friend will.
Sometimes you just want someone to ask.
It was RLP who encouraged me to blog, to use it as writer's gym, and so introduced me to more new friends. I don't in many cases know where they are or what their real names are, but they comment, support, criticize, support and drop by, which pretty much defines friendship in my mind, so I'm sticking to it.
I carry pictures of them in my head. Kathleen looks like a woman I knew in college. Jim resembles Gene Hackman. Rayne looks like a woman I go to church with. Marya Morevna is a dead ringer for Mary Louise Parker, one of my favorite actresses.
The Preacher looks like a cross between a professor I had once, also from Texas, and the Comic Book Guy from the Simpsons (although that's entirely his fault).
I appreciate all of my blogosphere friends, Philip and Dave and Nina and Carroll and all of you. And particularly RLP. There a line from a song in "The Muppet Movie" that goes something like "old friends who've just met." That's how I think of the Preacher.
You can find a lot of good stuff in the Muppets, by the way. Most people don't know this.
RLP and I have a date in Austin or Waco or Dallas. One of those places, and sometime soon. We'll share jalepenos and talk about writing, our daughters, God, books, Texas...I dunno. Stuff. I promise, man. I'm coming.
And maybe we'll reflect some on the beautiful weirdness of finding old friends for the first time.
So here's to the Preacher, and to friendship, and to anniversaries.
And to the post office. In case I wasn't clear. 
8:08:34 AM 
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