Strangers In The Night

There's nothing like the first time you wake up to a shirtless blonde four year-old asking you to make him breakfast. This is Glass's son Aidan, one of the two brilliantly blue-eyed and energetic children who run the household I'm living beneath. The last few days have been the prequel to the near two weeks to come. But last night kicked them off right.

I met my new friend Diane on this blog. Even though we had folks in common it was here that we first crossed paths. She missed the reading at Eso Won on Friday, which played out just as I expected (eight of my friends, a client and two people who just happened to be wandering the store. I think that's the last bookstore event I'm doing for a long while. I think readings as promotion are an antiquated thing. Besides, after the Nightshift series my battlefield will be elsewhere.

I spent Friday night with my the B-Man and Big Rob J, chopping it up about our successes and failures in the first decade of our careers are professional artists. Rob and I commiserated on Beats, Rhymes and Life, a something that we always hoped could be so much more and yet wasn't. We watched The Dark Knight on bootleg and talked shit and made plans and I felt better about certain things. This time was the first time in years that I'd been nervous when my plane touched down, when I was literally shook about the weeks ahead. This time around I begin with no rental car, no scheduled appointments, no management, no agent. Just this handful of folks. Diane's one of them.

As I found myself on the dance floor, struggling through Cuban salsa dancing at a Brazilian restaurant. I loved watching the way most couples glided through the air and the happiness that the music always injects into the humid room. I spoke Spanish with a Venezuelan woman named Patricia whose boyfriend writes quirky scripts. I met Jennifer, one of the editors on Ugly Betty, a tall white girl who was slowly beginning to master salsa steps all on her own. There was the shy half Nigerian sci-fi novelist named Fumi and a small sort of squirrely cat named Luis who danced with twenty beautiful women at the center of a circle because it was his birthday.

Even though it was pushing 3am on my internal clock Diane took me to this a house music party. But we never got in because the asshole security cat was a little too nasty for us to even consider dropping twenty to go. The music had an echo when we heard it outside, which meant that the spot was most likely empty.

As the early morning began looking at the dark horizon beyond the beach at Santa Monica, posh restaurants to our backs and a crew of kids tagging up the public restroom with Krylon, we talked about how easy it is for Hollywood to break people, and how the two of us, for certain periods of time, were broken too. But we're both moving on, keeping it going, because it's what we're supposed to do. It's good to have good friends. Out.