My Dinner with Sirocco
Exactly a year ago I posted about a a visit to San Diego for a conference, and former Tucsonan Casey DeLorme, who lives in San Diego, emailed me the next day. We met for a great dinner at a San Diego wine bar. Well, this week I posted about the SAS Global Forum in Seattle, and the next day I heard from long time blogger friend, Sirocco. Sirocco and I go way back to the spring of 2006.Tonight, just hours ago, I got to meet Sirocco face to face for the first time and had a delightful dinner with him and his terrific wife. We discussed what the knowledgeable reader would guess we discussed, blogging, who each other is (since he is actually anonymous, my learning who he is involved a lot more conversation, A LOT), politics and the upcoming elections, but mostly the past and our time in Tucson.
Over the years, Sirocco has become one of my dearest blogger friends. Finally getting to meet him and enjoy a fine meal in a fantastic city provides a priceless memory I will have for the rest of my life.
Labels: x4mr
posted by x4mr at 12:15 AM
16 Comments:
Thoroughly enjoyed meeting you in person, and hope life's wanderings give us the opportunity to do it again sometime.
This is great. I don't have as much history as x4mr and Sirocco, but I do date back to summer 2007, and then I read earlier material where x4mr, Sirocco, and Liza and some others were having some great dialog here.
Casey left Tucson for San Diego. Sirocco has apparently moved from Tucson to Seattle, and now x4mr is in Kentucky, yet as travels permit, they connect.
A heart warming post.
X4mr, did you ever think that this little blog project would turn into a tool for connecting with people wherever you go? I think that exceeds anything else you started out to accomplish with it, including exploring politics, sharing your experiences in Something Else, journaling your Ph.D., and helping us all add unique films to our Netflix queues.
Why am I not surprised social media guy Casey would propose such a notion? Still, he makes a good point, but what I particularly like about this post is that x4mr did not know who Sirocco was, and therefore could not know he was in Seattle.
I am all but certain the message from Sirocco with an offer to meet took x4mr by complete surprise. Really, Matt, you have a very compelling place here. I agree with Nav that this is a great post and story.
I have a question for anonymous Sirocco, although it probably pertains more to the days of higher AZ blog activity. Have you ever been in a meeting or conversation where people are speculating about who your blogger name is? I have actually been asked by my boss, "Do you have any ideas on who this Cigar Man is?"
I shook my head, acting clueless.
I take a certain pride that back in the day, when TREO was talking about posting armed guards at their doors, my identity was a brief "topic du jour" in certain groups.
Why yes, I have, in fact, been hanging around while a couple people were speculating who Sirocco was. No one was particularly close to correct, and I think I did a pretty good job of not smiling or laughing out loud.
I think social media has a generational component to its appreciation. My age is showing. I rarely text and still have resistance taking a photo with my cell phone. I use Facebook, but not anything like my daughter.
Casey sees stuff I don't.
Cigar Man's question does point to a fascinating situation. I was anonymous until May 2007, and we had the Tucson town hall literally two weeks before I would resign and post my real name. I was blogging all about the event, and in one of the sessions, they started discussing blogging about the town hall, and my blog came up.
I forget her name, but a woman working for Giffords was there, and she looked right at me.
Damnit! Now I wish I had a secret name.
Some x4mf followers have our own "gang" sign...
It was flashed at a very public event downtown last spring and readers/posters found each other...
The idea of x4mr and Sirocco dining in Seattle is really quite gratifying in a certain way. I sure would love to have been able to listen to that talk.
Sirocco and Cigar are both REALLY anonymous. I don't know the extent to which people tried to crack Sirocco's identity, but in 2008 the effort to ID Cigar was HUGE.
Dagnabbit.
I miss all the good dinners. =(
Being able to visit with "y'all two" would have been a highlight of mine as well -- just to see the cerebral sparks/arcs.
*grumble*
I'm still obsessed with learning Cigar Man's identity and meeting him.
I'm up for meeting anyone here at the dive bar where x4mr and I used to get together.
Just so I'm clear, Robish and x4mr would meet in some Tucson "dive bar" for cloak and dagger exchanges, probably with guys in dark sunglasses handing over incriminating documents about Rio Nuevo and the Cloth. Wait, is that Rob O'Dell taking a flash drive from the guy in the suit next to x4mr?
At high profile events Scarlett Letter flashes her secret x4mr gang sign to unite the anti-Cloth elements as Joe Snell brags about a graph made for him by a contractor in Ohio.
And to think, this stuff is probably TRUE!!
Anthony's Cigar Emporium at Grant/Swan was my place of choice for meeting x4mr, who was reliably there most afternoons. One afternoon x4mr was at the outside table, and I walked up to see him. Then I realized who he was sitting with and had to retreat.
Then I noticed Rodney Glassman was just ten feet from the table. One guy got up from the table to talk to Glassman as x4mr went inside the shop to talk to someone else.
That's a pretty neat story, x4mr.
Since you are so into movies, you should consider making one about your life.
Hmmm, the one and only time I ventured into the cigar shop, I happened to run into Narcissus outside as well. Perhaps it was the same day, and I had a close call with Cigar Man and did not know it!
Nav, the part about Snell (Roach) bragging about his expensive graphs drawn by out-of-state graphic artists is DEFINITELY true. While Snell likes to TALK about the Creative Class, he does not recognize any of its Tucson members.
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