t.ford

More to come about the Shift conference soon.

But its worth mentioning that I got to meet my hermanos in Switchfoot … guys, in case you’re reading this, I’ll get you doubles of those pics we took.

More details of our trip to Playa coming soon

I began 2008 with my great friends Chad and Nicci Hubert.
A couple years ago, they moved out to Brooklyn, NY, and instantly had more ‘old’ friends than they did while in Minnesota.

Luckily, I was visiting the week between Christmas and New Year’s, so neither one of them had much work to do, which made them the ultimate hosts.
We did just a couple touristy things:
Walk the Brooklyn Bridge
Go check out the Ginormous Rockefeller Christmas tree
See where John Lennon got capped
Throw expired produce at Donald Trump…
the usual.

Then the rest of our time they just let me tag along with them in their typical day.
We had some amazing food at a couple different places. More than one of them gave me the feeling I was about to get whacked. The best place I ate was this little Burger Joint in the bottom of a French Hotel or something. It was actually called ‘the Burger Joint“. Cheap, delicious, and dripping with all the stuff you want your burger dripping with.

At one point, Chad and I were walking down the street to F.A.O. Schwartz so I could get a rubik’s cube. All of the sudden in front of us, right in the sidewalk, a sewer main busted and started rocketing liquid nastiness into the air. Camera phones have revolutionized how we get to retell these Kodak moments. You can see all the people who got there just as I did, and how we all whipped out our iphones to capture the scene. All of us had the same hope of catching a shot of the poor guy responsible for the cracked pipe that had to go head first into the rocketing human excrement to try to stop it … to no avail.

Chad and Nicci had plans for New Year’s with these two fantastic friends that I’d met just the day before. Any other place in the world, and I would have loved to party with these people all night. But this was probably the first and only time I’d be in the same city as the biggest party in the world, hosted by the Silver Surfer of Cable news: Anderson Cooper. I had to hit up Times Square.
Not since junior high, had I been so excited to see a ball drop. I took the subway into downtown and made my way towards the noise. At one point, a female cop yelled at me in front of crowd of about 100 peeps for jumping a road barrier that had no business being where it was. The best part was when I told her that it made no sense to have it there and that I saw tons of people doing it right in front of her too. She actually used the infamous Mom mantra, “If you saw all those people jumpin off the Brooklyn Bridge, would you do that too?”
This was like a really bizarre dream come true for me – that a New York City Cop actually YELLED that old comical phrase at me in front of tons of people (people who were in a way better position to appreciate the humor than me), just a mile or two from the actual Brooklyn Bridge. So many rhetorical scenarios came together to make this moment possible. It was like getting home from the doctor with a head injury, only to find 8 little monkeys jumping on the bed, having just escaped from their barrel…and me yelling, “You Damn Dirty Apes!!”

I eventually made it as close as I could to the heart of the action, which was still about 8 or 9 blocks shy of the belly of the beast.

In Exodus, there were 2 million Hebrews wandering around like this for 40 years. I was with just over half that many for 6 hours…but instead of bowing down before a golden calf, we were there to worship a big electric ball (that big bright spot in the picture isn’t actually it; it’s that tiny speck on the top of all those horizontal lights in the middle).

About an hour before midnight, something weird happens to a crowd this size. We all became best friends. This may have been the biggest event I’ve personally been able to witness, and it’s like we all became aware that ALL our other friends weren’t there to share it with us; we were there with each other. And we were there to live it up.

For the next two to three hours after the new year hit, I was at the bottom of a number of rabid dog-piles, sometimes making it to the top. Groups of about 50 of us (mostly strangers) were screaming and climbing on each other just to hand their cameras off to passers-by and get a picture of the only time in their lives that this was socially acceptable. No one was drunk or high, everyone was being safe, considerate and friendly. It was surreal, hilarious, comfortable, and genuinely celebratory … just how you’d hope church would always be.

I walked around til just about 6am, meeting people from all parts of the world: a father and daughter from Montreal, a Japanese exchange student, a group of girls from the south, and a French couple.

I finally made it into Times Square at about 3 am, after the crowds had left, and they were already cleaning the streets up. Tons of people who (like me) didn’t make it that far during the countdown were running through the streets picking up huge piles of confetti and throwing it back into the air to simulate the ball dropping again for their own pictures.

The only picture I got was this last one with my phone. It’s the manhole that Gisele and Prince Charming came out of in the movie Enchanted.
All in all, I recommend doin the Times Square thing once in your lifetime if you’ve got the chance. Next year, Cranium with a couple friends would be fine.

ps. I don’t really have an iphone, but that would make me feel cooler.