The thing that made my day today
This week has been good but also bruising and exhausting — to some extent because I don't know to whom I can explain why the week has been good, bruising and exhausting. I'm an explainer. Lacking answers there, you're stuck listening for now to one of the little good parts.
You know my blog post this morning about Dan Neil? I got a text from buddy Nate tonight while I was grocery shopping, "Dan posted on the fb page via his wifes profile!" I got home, and, sure enough, Dan had found my blog and then landed on our Facebook page for the Dan Neil Fan Club. Wrote the man: "Dan Neil here. Quite belatedly I've come to say thank you for being such a wonderful and faithful audience. You've made my job a lot easier and more fun. I truly appreciate it."
Made my day. Realized halfway to home I'd left my case of beer in the rack under my grocery cart in parking lot — this is exactly why I never use my vegetable crispers — and it didn't matter. A random dude who writes great stuff for newspapers had once again proven himself cool.
Which, really, is why Nate and I are fans. It's fun to prop the dude as larger than life on Facebook and in a blog. But by all appearances, Dan is a guy with a regular life who works in a newsroom, just like I do and in many ways analogous to what Nate does. Dan has a creative, cool job in which he invests himself a crazy amount, gets pissed at The Man on a regular basis and wants to do awesome by his audiences every damn day of the week. Nate and I, on our respective coasts, live that and drink to it. In a world where ("In a world where…") we all struggle to break through the information cloud, we salute success in doing so.
