Post men’s night…

Smokler on August 4, 2003

Men’s Weekend was fantastic. As we were walking down 57th street to catch everyone cabs to Penn Station, my buddy Dave and I marveled at how easy it was for the seven of us to mesh, to pick up like we’d never spent a day apart even though we only see each other once a year. How we’re all pretty sure that we’ll still be doing Men’s Weekend after we are married with grown children and mostly talking about perscriptions rather than random sexual encounters.

I don’t keep up with too many people I grew up with so these guys from college are really my first friend generation. Those 10 minutes Dave and I spent going back over the weekend and beaming at one another gave me a quick reminder of what a special thing we all have together and what a rare, unique thing old friends are.

This evening, I was fortunate enough to have dinner with some slighty newer friends whom I convened as an informal panel of experts on the Virtual Book Tour. At issue were whether the tour should accept money from publishers for our time, access and connections, whether we should be focusing on small publishers instead of big ones and if said money did, come along, how should it be divided up.

Jason and Carrie weighed in with their experience of being stops on the tour while I counted on Meg and Jeffrey to speak more to the general ethical issues as oldtimers in the weblog community. Anil mostly cracked jokes but with a full injection of intelligence cuz that’s what he’s best at.

I feel good about what everyone said. It’s too easy to take every piddling criticism seriously when you’re in the middle of a project and it’s your idea to begin with. But these wise folks have given me faith that the VBT is a fine idea and moving in the right direction.

We spent the rest of the time catching up, which is really why were there.

Dispatch from Columbus Circle…

Smokler on August 2, 2003

I finally did manage to calm down and make something of our experience at Da Ranch. Got a stone massage, explored some of the tiny towns in the Berkshires and saw Seabuscuit which was more than a little bad. Suzan left for home. I arrived in New York on Thursday.

“The men” descended yesterday afternoon and we spent the evening pigging out on smoked meat (in Manhattan. Who knew?) and talking about technology, politics, movies and our lives until the early morning.

It’s amazing, when I tell people each summer that I’m headed off to something called “Men’s Weekend”, they usually think beer, loose women or drumming and bad poetry. I guess there’s some of all of that but it’s really a chance for the seven of us, seven buddies from college to get together once a year and catch up on each other’s lives. It was a bit more cliched when we started it, nine years ago on Valentine’s day when we all hated women and decided to go eat steak and smoke cigars instead. But that was a long time ago. One of us is married and three are in serious relationships. We talk a lot about career, dreams, plans for the future. Kids even and if we want them or no.

We’re old old friends and decently evolved human beings so our connections are little bit more Ya-Ya than reunion weekend at the frat house. At a certain level then, I think that groups of old friends interact pretty similarly regardless of gender. Sure, we don’t really praise each other’s outfits or talk much about the wives and girlfriends, except to ask how are they. We probably talk more about people from college we would have liked to gotten freaky with and called each other “gay” and thought it was funny. But the nugget of why we travel thousands of miles to convene in one spot each year is that our connection is vitally important to all of us. It’s how we stay a presence in each other’s lives as we grow from college kids to men with jobs, relationships, house, families and probably old age someday. I want to be around when it all happens to these guys. And I want them to witness it happening to me.