Omigod Omigod Omigod!

In the land before time when dinosaurs roamed the earth, there was no Internet (much less blogs), and if you had plans to meet a friend out somewhere and they didn't show up right away you just had to stay put and see if maybe they were running late because the only cell phones at the time weighed sixteen pounds and cost eight million dollars, I had the good fortune to meet a young man named Matt Armendariz. He was an early supporter of my writing, and I'll never forget it. I wrote a column at the time for an ephemeral Chicago publication called Babble; each copy was painstakingly hand printed on parchment, and it was free. One day the editor of Babble received a letter from this young man and a group of his friends who had banded together to form a fan club around my column. The return address was right across the street from the apartment I was living in at the time, and I wrote back immediately. It took a while for the letter to reach them though, because besides the fact that everything was delivered by Pony Express in those days, their real names weren't on the letter, just the fan club name and the street address, and they lived in a gigantic high-rise building on Sheridan Road. When we finally met, I knew that Matt and his friends were no ordinary neighbors, and our friendship grew like bamboo in a hothouse. We were young back then, all of us moving from city to city with reckless abandon, and facebook hadn't been invented yet so eventually we lost touch. Fast forward through the stone, bronze, and iron ages, and we found each other again on the Internet; first through MySpace, and now facebook. We're now living in Los Angeles and Chicago respectively, and as soon as I started this blog, he once again became a booster. So much of a booster that he reprinted one of my posts on his fantastic blog, Mattbites . I just won't sleep well tonight if I don't give a shout-out to Mr. Matthew Armendariz, thanks Matt!!!!