Dinner tonight with Darleen Click and her charming husband, a photographer/bass player who likes a lot of the same classic rock music I love to crank when I'm driving.

"Drums and bass," I tell him. "No one appreciates either one enough. But there's no rock and roll without either one."

The occasion? Well, I forgot to return Darleen's camera last summer when she left it at my house, and she knows I love good Mexican food—so she wanted to share her family's favorite Mexican place with me. My own husband has a badass deadline, so I bore my guilt and went out for excellent food, fun music, margaritas, and terrific conversation. And, uh, to finally return that camera.

Needless to say, with Darleen's excellent law-enforcement contacts, I got plenty of story ideas, but I'm not sharing them with any of you, lest you steal them and execute them imperfectly. (The former is bad enough, but the latter is entirely unacceptable.)

What amazes me is this: one assumes a lot of the writers out there on the web—bloggers, especially—cannot be as engaging in real life as they are online.

Of course, most of 'em are. It turns out that the world is full of smart people. I mean, smart like X-Acto blades.

Having an online presence can be like panning for gold: it isn't until things get shaken up a bit that you realize whom you like and trust.

Not that this didn't happen to me in high school: I have a core group of friends now whom I've held onto for better than 30 years. But to have it happen all over again, to find people who walk in real life like they talk online, is frosting on the cake.

Thank you, Darleen. (Green corn tamales in a few months, and maybe Attila the Hub will be able to make it! Can't wait.)

Excelsior.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 10:42 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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