My Carnival of Frienda

It has been brought to my attention that I have the strangest collection of friends.

Seriously!

People have started writing trying to book times to come to Tybee Island to meet them. "You should get your friend Trolly Joe to organize a tour of the life of Mike ... you know take people to the Breakfast Club to meet your extended family, watch Johnny O feed the squirrels, go to the Pier and Fannies-on-the-Beach for the Bored meeting, stop at Shirley's sad little holy dock, go to Bernie's to listen to Samuel Adams and Gordon play damn good live music, then end up on a beach swing at night. It would have to be a bicycle tour so that Whitley can give the tour of the combat zone (formally 16th Street but Shirley decided to change the name to Tybrisa Street for reasons only she understands). Can I come?"

I swear! I actually got this from a friend who lives in South Carolina.

Hmmmm .... now that I think about it ... only South Carolina people would think of something like this. She must be a graduate of the state university there that rest in hole in the ground that is called Columbia.

But then another wrote asking me to have a picture taken on the beloved back deck with Fran's thousand shades of green behind us, with me with one arm around Goddess and the other around my drunken bicycle. She wants me to post it Face Book.

Seriously!

Then she asked for another that's a group shot of the above mentioned people along with my raised-from-the-dead college friends Dedra, Mark and Mitch ... my children Jeremy, Kristen and Chelsea who are all good friends ... Stacy ... and the famous Dr. Jim Withers who lives nowhere near me. They also want to see what Conner looks like which is incredibly frightening! Hugh and Patti, Carlos and Verna, Nathalie and Ana and the St. Martin are also supposed to magically appear for the shot (which Hugh could take now that I think about it). Bill Berry (not the former drummer from R.E.M. but the other one) is also supposed to be in it. It would be like a very warped Sgt. Pepper at the Beach picture!

I mean you can't make this stuff up! I really did get these requests!

Which got me to thinking ... my carnival of friends really is a strange bunch.

Let me give you a few examples.

Johnny O and Judy feed squirrels on their porch every day, take photographs of stuffed kitties smoking pot on a toilet seat to post on the Internet and Johnny really believes that he is Sinatra. Of course he still talks daily to Chicago Bob who is long dead. And Johnny O is regularly dropped as a columnist for "The Tybee Breeze" our ...I'm really not sure what it is ... not a newspaper or a magazine ... for Christ's sake Julia Pierce has a column ... explain that?

Then there is Whitley who wakes up every morning (that's a relative statement) to see if his traps have captured a raccoon (67 caught so far this year), rides his very drunken bicycle to aforementioned Shirley named street, then disappears for days until his very drunken bicycle needs me to throw it in the back of my car and give it a ride home.

Dedra, Mark and Mitch ... after spending thirty years ignoring one another we decided to throw caution to the wind and get back together. The result is we have formed a band ... "The Acoustic Savages" and we've already written one-and-a-half songs (soon to be released on the World Wide Web ... assuming we can come up with the other half ... or figure out Mark's role in the band).

But then Dedra went to a "Back Street Boys" concert and threw granny panties on the stage suffocating two of the "Back Street Boys" so we're re-thinking her existence.

My kids ... we're an odd lot. Put us all together and we laugh a lot. Individually we're just a little strange. Jeremy and Marie are kind of like Star Trek darting in and out of the universe at warp speed. Kristen is the mystery of the universe and likely the reason why Jeremy and Marie dart in and out as Kristen beams in-and-out of reality at any given moment. Chelsea and her fiancee Sam bring me a bobble head doll of Pope Benedict XVI as a gift after spending six months in Europe. Need I say more?

I could on.

In fact, I've scratched the surface.

Conner called me last night to ask if we have enough duct tape for next week's return trip to St. Martin. Now that we understand that Nathalie is not inviting us to her apartment or can cook anyway, he thinks that duct tape is necessary for the group massage that we're having (oh yeah ... Hugh and Patti you're involved).

I could keep going.

Franklin, who is brown, works at the Breakfast Club, and takes steroids collects "cougars" and told me today he has five.

I wouldn't trade them for anything. And I love them all. Individually are wonderful. Collectively we are a carnival.

But there is this one ...

out there ...

I'm waiting on you ...

Don't rush ... it'll happen when it happens.

Soon.

But not soon enough.