~Monday~ This morning, while enjoying my breakfast—poolside at the Island House in Key West—I received a Facemail from a friend of mine alerting me to the fact that it appeared that Joe Jervis was currently at the Island House, too, which he’d surmised from this Morning View—Island House Pool entry on Joe’s blog.
Joe Jervis is the author of the Joe. My. God. blog. A multiple award-winning blog and blogger, including Most Valuable New York Blogger, GLAAD’s 2011 Outstanding Blog, The Village Voice Web Award 2010 Best Politics Blog, About.com’s 2012 Readers’ Choice Award, among many others, which although I’m not subscribed to via an RSS feed, I read often, as it’s usually pointed to by various Facebook friends of mine or the people I follow on Twitter.
Not long after that, I spotted someone I thought was him, and throughout the day whenever we were in the same area, I wanted to say something to him, while simultaneously wanting to respect his privacy, so I didn’t.
I purposefully wore my, “Wanna blog?” t-shirt to Happy Hour that night, so as to see if I might get some reaction from him if he saw it.
When that didn’t happen, and my friend—also named Joe—got tired of hearing me all ga-ga about him but not doing anything about it, and after imbibing several glasses of liquid courage, I waited until he went up to the bar to get a drink, and I walked up beside him.
When he turned and I was right there, I said, “Hello,” and then looking down at my t-shirt, pointed to it and said, “Are you…?”
He looked down at the word “blog” that I was specifically pointing to, and smiled.
I gushed, “You are, aren’t you?”
“I am,” he said extending his hand, “I’m Joe.”
“I know that!” I screamed in my head.
“I’m John,” I said using my inside voice, adding “I really enjoy your writing.”
“Thank you very much; I appreciate that,” he replied graciously.
I babbled that I had a blog of my own with an entry in it for every day—coming up on 9 years now.
“You do? What’s the name of it?” he, again graciously, asked.
“Oh, it’s just gibberish,” I said waving away the question, and said, “I’ll let you get back to your vacation. It was a pleasure to meet you.”
“You, too,” he replied.
Swoon.