Friday the 13th....and 14th and 15th

A few weeks back the crew met for the 13th time. My recollections of that evening are not quite as keen as they may have been in previous posts, as it was several weeks back! Of course, my fellow Crewers are welcome to contribute to this blog, too (hint, hint!) ...so the blame for the lag in time since the last update must be shouldered by all of us.

Someday in the future, you guys are gonna appreciate having a running documentation of what life was like "back in the day" when we had these Crew meetings, even if it seems silly to keep a record of all this stuff now. The subject of time passage and the documentation that sorts out the historical details will be the subject of one of my future readings.

Anyway, to get back to the subject. We met for time number 13 (the "we" being Sue, Paul, Joe, and I) and the location was at Snitter's Place in Valley Stream--also known as Joe's home. The pizza was great, the writings were inspired, and the discussion was wonderful--but that's what we've come to expect. What was a little different this time around is that we held the gathering on a Friday--which is the first time we've strayed from our customary Wednesday. We'd been talking about meeting on a Friday to mix it up a bit and to try a weekend-night thing, but it took some inclement weather to actually force our hand on the issue. We were all set up to meet at Paul's on Wednesday, but the start of a big storm postponed the meeting. Sue and I still drove out to see Paul, anyway, and had a non-crew gathering. I reasoned that I was going to venture out into the blizzard one way or another, and my choices were to go to Home Depot for lumber or to go to Paul's place for a free meal. I chose the latter.

So, instead, we went out to Valley Stream on the Friday. It was freezing outside, but there was no snow falling.

The Friday thing worked well, so we kept it. A week later we met at Rich's place, with 4 of us in attendance (Sue, Rich, Paul, me). Interestingly, Rich and I both wrote new pieces and both were about having writer's block. They ended up in different places though: his morphed into a dark essay about the realities of life, mine ended up being mostly a commentary about some of the annoyances of the Google search engine. Bet you didn't see that coming.

And then, a week later, we--Sue, Rich, Paul, Joe, Linda, and I--met at Paul's for gathering #15. The most notable piece? Joe's discussion/"tree" illustration of the history of rock. That little gem spawned not only a ton of discussion, but an ongoing debate that is still being volleyed about, hitting such key topics as: What is or isn't art? Is objectivity ever possible? Why does Paul have so much rap music in his iTunes library?

Hope to see you all at my place next.