In a fortnight, Season Four of Mad Men starts up. If I burn through an episode of Season Three a day, I can be all primed for the debut.

Mad Men’s official website is here, which contains sneak peaks and cast interviews, recaps and full episodes from last season as well as a cocktail guide. The official iPhone app can be downloaded here.

AMC brilliantly whipped up interest and hype last summer before its Season Three premiere by allowing users to “Mad Men Yourself” which just about everyone on the planet did. The avatars were able to be used on Facebook and Twitter and everybody was a cartoon character for a while. If you were one of the few that didn’t, you can still do it here.

Bring it on, Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce!

Do you know the blog Post Secret? Probably, but if you don’t it’s an interesting site that puts up postcards that have been mailed in by viewers, allegedly revealing some secret they would never reveal. It’s easy to reveal it if you’re sending it in anonymously and that’s the beauty of the site. Of course Post Secret has a Facebook fan page that you can join that does what I’m not exactly sure, but you can join it if you want. I haven’t joined it so there’s no way for the site bots to know who my friends are, so imagine the chances when, at the bottom of their page, is a pulling from all their 700,000 FB fans and I know two of them!

If you start posting shit like this to Facebook, you’re either going to get a “Hide” or an unfriending pretty darn quickly.

It’s supposed to be 70 degrees outside today and, according to Facebook and Twitter feeds, people are pretty excited about it.

I could care less; I’m not going outside.

I guess if I had a job and had to be couped up inside all day then maybe I’d be excited about some warmer weather. But it brings no sunshine into my world even though I could go and sit outside all day if I wanted to. The thing is, I don’t want to.

Instead, I’m scouring job posting sites and finding wonderful gems like this one:

Title: Graphic layout
Description: Seeking a person for with graphic layout experience to assist a non profit organization. If you have worked on a magazine that would be a plus. This is a contract position and I need someone who can start immediately. Very pleasant work environment and nice people to work for.

Yes, that’s the entire ad placement. Obviously this is either a shitty job or the person posting it has no idea what they’re talking about. Maybe it’s a little bit of both. And this is about as good as I can find. And since unemployment benefits ran out over a month ago, something has to be done to get some money flowing in, even if it’s some shitty job that someone without nearly twenty years of experience can do.

I’m at the beach. I came down with Eddy (and full-grown yet little dog Buddy) yesterday; Chris & Jeff came down the day before.

Last night was making the usual rounds at Aqua for cocktails and then Nicola’s for pizza w/ extra sauce and extra cheese. Then back home for True Blood and standup comedy. It may sound rather bland and routine but that’s the way time is spent at the beach and it’s relaxing and carefree.

For instance, our mornings are spent drinking coffee and Facebooking/surfing on the back deck. Sometimes we have to piece together the previous evening but since there are only four of us here I don’t think things are going to get too out of hand. But you never know. It’s exactly noon now and half of us are still on the back porch: Chris is watching True Blood on Hulu and I’m writing this. Our afternoon hasn’t been planned out yet and that’s the pace at which things go. It’s nice.

Just now, a notice from Eddy to get showered, our day is starting to move forward.

As a continuation of Sunday’s post…

My good friend from high school, Charlene, did indeed pass away Friday. Suicide.

How far does one have to go down a path to commit suicide? Do you get to a point of no return and is that point unrecognizable to those around you?

I’ve spent this week communicating with, or trying to track down, high school friends. Some are on Facebook, some I have phone & email contact, others I’m desperately googling to find an access point.

Those whom I have gotten in touch with, I’ve told what I know of Char’s story on the phone or through email. The phone conversations are actually best, partly because these are folks that are/were actual friends and it’s easier to have a back-and-forth conversation, but also because I don’t have to sit there and write a long letter to the others who are responding to remote emails. Still, I’ve been writing them and once they respond back, let them know the details. At first I felt odd about revealing too much, too many sordid details, but then this isn’t my story to be told and these are the facts that I’ve been left with. So I’ve given them all the information that I know.

Now I’m coordinating for the services this weekend. There are two viewings on Friday, one from 2–4 and another from 6–8. This must be hell for the family to have two viewings. I remember my mother’s viewing and it’s a weird thing to do, to actually have an open casket. I remembered the role I played there, of strongman, holding up my Dad and welcoming guests & friends, thankful for each person that showed up. Char’s funeral services (as well as the viewings) will be held Saturday at 4:00 at George P Kalas Funeral Home just outside of Annapolis.

Ironically, a previously-planned PVHS 1982 mini-reunion was and is being held this Friday evening. While I hadn’t planned on attending, now I feel compelled for camaraderie with my peers from 25 years ago. I plan on attending the 2:00 viewing and I guess I could came back into town, keep going, to the other side of the ‘burbs and go to the mini-reu. Maybe it’s what I’ll need in between the services.

RIP, Charlene Polen 1964–2009
aka Charlene Kimble, née Charlene Pogue

UPDATE: Char’s obituary can be found here.

We all slept in this morning, although I was up the latest again. That’s fine though; I’m the guest here.

After an omelette breffus made of yesterday’s fajitas leftovers it’s time for car washing. I’m just an observer to this process of scrubbing and hosing. I’m there for the comic relief. And to squish my feet into the green lawn.

I’ve also learned (through Facebook, of all things) that a close high school friend of mine passed away on Friday. I’m reading updates from her daughter which are pretty much pointing to that inevitability. Her daughter’s phone number is there on her info page and I’ll call her when I get home.

My friend Shawn posted this to Facebook a while back and I had to go back and back and back in his posts to find it. Since it’s Saturday night, here it is. Apologies for the commercial before the clip.

UPDATE: The rerun SNL episode with NPH aired last night! Talk about timing.

Beau, whom I met almost two years ago during a JMG-sponsored blarg crawl, is in DC tonight. We hit it off that night 17 months ago, palling around together because neither of us knew any of the other bloggers who were participating. Since then, we’ve stayed in touch with a few emails but mainly through each others’s Twitter tweets. This is not a date, but friends getting together. Beau is happily spoken for.

I’ve take the familiar D6 over to Dupont to meet up, but I’m waiting for him to finish with his client dinner. After exiting the bus I went to the ATM to have some mad money in my pocket. First time at an ATM in months! Then to the CVS for camera batteries. Then I’m trying to think of a place to meet up and I stumble upon Urbana, which used to be called something else, and Mimi’s is now some other establishment so I’ll belly up here.

three hours later

This evening didn’t turn out the way I thought it would. I was thinking Beau and I were going to do a barhop up 17th or down P St or something but it turned out that we simply ended up staying where we were, ordering drynx at the bar, for the entire evening. I think this actually turned out to be the right thing to do, as we were able to have a fantastic conversation through the evening. We discussed the blarg crawl and how we became fast friends there, we discussed Twitter and its social associations and how we think it should never make money, the merits of blogging, Facebooking, my future and of course, New York City.

The best part about this evening was how seamless our reunion was, after all this time becoming more and more familiar by twittering. We were able to pick up, without a hitch, our conversation that we left off two years ago with minimal fill-ins. It was truly a beautiful moment that would could not have happened ten years ago.

I’m thankful for friends like Beau, near and far, with whom I have such a great connection that camaraderie is effortless. Beau, being the proper gentleman that he is, pays for all the cocktails and even though I insist on taking the D6 return he pays for my cab ride home. Thank you, sir.

After arriving home, I realize that we totally forgot to take any pictures together. Damn! While our conversation is what I will really remember from this evening I grabbed a photo of our original meeting in NYC. Here are me, some dude, Joe, Beau:

I’m not going to mention the name of the company I used to work for. It’s not a secret, and I’m not hiding anything, and I think I’ve mentioned it before (and only that one time) recently, but it’s just not something that needs to be put out there for search engines to find. And it’s not like I’m trying to hide anything either, because I know that several people who still work there pop into the fuju every once in a while, and that’s okay. But again, the people researching me, or the company, don’t need to be privy to my ramblings. Let’s call the company “Gee”.

There are employees at Gee that blog, many of them Facebook, some even Twitter. I follow some of their blogs, some of their Facebooks and some of their tweets on Twitter. And some of them follow mine. All cool.

I had a “sabbatical” from Gee from 2001–2003 and while I was away I still had many friends who worked there and that I stayed in constant contact with. When I returned in 2003, and now for the last five years, many of the old crew have since moved or drifted away. I become, de facto, the source for many for social updates, client updates, managerial updates, all that stuff that departed employees want to be up-to-date on. Now I’m no longer in that position. And that became clear this evening.

An ex-coworker and friend posted a tweet about how beautiful tonight’s sunset was when the sun finally cut through the wet winter clouds. I know this sunset, or at least the view of it, from the 7th floor and still during working hours as the winter brings. I also know some of the summer sunsets that happen later in the day. 

The thing that distanced me from the visceral viewpoint was the lack of the photo. And this status update was by someone who is a great photographer and frequently posting to flickr and other accounts, who even started a great idea of a Gee graffiti wall where employees could put up their own artwork. So I thought it a little odd that there was no link, no twitpic, no upload to Facebook. I almost commented on the status of the lack of a picture but then I hesitated. Not out of awkwardness of communicating with this person, but maybe I didn’t think it simply wasn’t my place anymore.

Now, hours later, I check out the Gee work blog and the picture is posted there. Bam. Now it sinks in that the distancing from Gee, where I worked for eight years, is a crack that will slowly get bigger over time. I hope to not lose the friendships, but there is a another step of removal now. I’ll have to rely on those still there to relay information onto others, and maybe that relaying road to the others will slowly come to its end. 

This transition of communication between layers has happened. Now I’ll be the one relying on my friends still there to answer my questions of hey what’s up, how is business and who are the new clients. I’m at peace with this.

I’m hoping that the phoblographer won’t be upset for me sliding that pic over to my desktop and then dropping it into my fuju style. I don’t think she will be.