You’re an hour early but you head down to the place anyway. You walk from 14th st into soho. Wow, it’s a block from where you’ve been working all week.

Two blocks away, and there crossing the street is a motley crew of gypsy gallivanters. Your second family.

Nathan, wearing his new Superhero Costume, Katie, a china doll, Zachary Johnson, ten foot tall fucking artist that he is, probably smoking, and Chris Jacobs fresh from the rocky mountains sporting a hip new bethany johnson original.

You cross the street the way they’re coming. You and Nath catch eyes.

Surprising people has the benefit of watching their eyes light up, their body language change- all the things that happened to you when you first saw them, but no one was there to notice.

After hellos and hugs and how are yous you all agree to spend the hour getting food. “Have you ever been to”— (shit, you were going to write ‘have you ever been to _____’s, Nathan said” you were going to write, but you can’t for the life of you remember the name of the place.

See, yes you have this memory, but you don’t remember everything. The thing about your weird alien memory is that you tend not to MISremember anything.

..

HABANAS! The sandwich shop. Your second time there, the first earlier that week.

You all eat your food, and their amazing corn.

Nathan twitters a pic:

:

You head to the venue.

There is a HUGE LINE, and you ponder how to skip the line (you all are on some kind of guest list) without seeming like assholes. ‘Should we go in now, or wait till they open?’

“Should we to the back of the line and ask each person ‘is this the line for people on the list? No? Oh, ok”.

Then you see a little kid. BUT IT’S NOT A LITTLE KID! It’s BiancaRocksOut! (just messing, you knew yonx wasn’t a little kid ;D).

She’s standing outside some bar. “Jacob’s inside, eating nachos.” You run in and say hi to Jacob (you all got dinner the night before, at Kate’s Joint, your second time, and had a really cool discussion, more on that later) and you take a picture of Bianca through the window.

You run back and find the team.

Then Celia Rowlson shows up, wearing a giant smock-type outfit and carrying a giant Camera- a Panasonic VX1000 or somesuch. “Am I really going to cut your hair?” she asks. “Oh yes,” you answer, and point to the scissor/trimmer kit under your arm.

Then Jared Geller arrives, and after intros you all head in to the bookstore-turned-movie-theater-for-the-evening.

“Are we on the list?” asks someone in your party who isn’t on the list, when you’re close enough to the person with list that they would really do better not to ask such questions so loudly. “Don’t worry about it,” you say, and try not to worry about.

The girl with the clipboard takes your name.

“Oh, wait, You’re RonenV! Nick’s friend. Yeah, go on in, guys!”

:)

As you sit down to watch a new Mountain Goats video Rian made (with, oddly enough, the same model camera Celia’s stowing under her seat) you think about who you were the day you helped him make his last Mountain Goats video.

You think about a day when you would sit alone in your room with only your internet connection and imagination, and imagined a different kind of life.