The Tea Makers

What a forlorn douchebag like Joe Clark has a hard time understanding is that even online, promises are your word and bond and need to be honored at all costs. That and the fact that writing under your own name doesn’t automatically make you in possession of couth or instill respect.

So it goes that we write under pseudonyms or anonymously with hubris, style, grace, and honor.

These thoughts floated through my mind as I made my way home from the secret underwater lair in which the Tea Makers party was recently held.

Despite worries to the contrary, the party was exactly as advertised. CBCers and Tea Makers editors, authors, commenters and readers drinking and talking. It was a masquerade party in reverse. The masks came off. There was nary a laptop in sight.

Amazingly, no one was knifed.

There was a lot of ground to cover. Entire years’ worth. I’m not going to go into who was there or what was said. Initially we had a strict no-blogging no-tweeting no-photos policy but by the end of the evening we agreed to relax it. You can find snippets online if you look hard enough.

But as I went through those streets on my way home it became clear to me that what we have are the makings for some kind of Toronto Media salon, in the classic sense. Or maybe a Salon des Refusés? It was hard to tell. History is still unwritten.

Years ago, Jesse Brown and some of his friends started something they were calling Nonfiction. It was not perfect, but it was better than nothing.

What I experienced that night was something else entirely, and again, not perfect. But nothing like it exists in Toronto right now. Maybe it should?

What form this should take and how it should work is something that I still need to figure out. But there will be more of these parties and I encourage you to come. We won’t bite. You will be welcomed.

Conversations about The Tea Makers web site offered me clarity. Nights later I awoke soaked in sweat, in a strange bed in a strange land and in my mind’s eye I saw the path before me that I needed to take, laid out perfectly.

The Tea Makers will be changing again. I’m not going to openfile myself here and brag about how it will alter everything we’ve come to know and love and cherish, but it kind of will. We have a track record. Our wake is scattered with the bones of forlorn douchebags.

It should be finished by the time Do you think Jian Tweets because he is Lonely? reaches the unprecedented milestone of 1000 responses.

Depending on how fast we can work and how lonely Jian gets.