MIdnight Marauders

I know that it's not a Throw Back Thursday but lately I've dubbed myself and my blogging buddy the Midnight Marauders.  Technically, we don't loot, plunder, pillage, raid or rob but still...we own the night (sorry, I ripped that from a commercial...probably Taco Bell).  So, since I don't want to talk about my day (it was pretty bad), I'm going to tell you about my old friend Mike Sandler, a.k.a. Sandman and his radio show, you guessed it, the Midnight Marauders.

Sandler was my co-counselor when I worked at Camp Sea Gull in the summer of 2005.  Cabin 37, first and second sessions.  That was my first summer working out there and it was just crazy fun.  I was assigned to Cabin 37 with the Sandman and a dude named Alex Ferraro, a.k.a. Chief, with whom I became very good friends.  I didn't have a cool nick name, I was just Dan.  I was a co-counselor but I didn't sleep in the cabin because I was on crutches after my knee surgery and the director thought I would be more comfortable in a staff cabin with air conditioning...I didn't argue.

Anyways, Sandman was a college student in Saint Louis and was really into underground hip-hop.  He use to blast it all the time in the cabin - stuff you never heard of but it was really great music.  He told me that he and a buddy of his had a radio show on the campus radio station every Sunday night and that they streamed it live over the net on their website.  They played their favorite underground hip-hop and stuff like that.  I thought that was cool as crap so after we got back to school in the fall, I got back up with him.  The name of his show was the Midnight Marauders and it aired at, yep, midnight...central time.

For those of you still awake, midnight central time is 1:00 a.m. in Daytona Beach, Florida.  And Mondays I had to get up at 6:00 a.m. for Air Force lab...but he was a great friend and I wanted to support him and his radio show.  One night, we were chatting on AIM while he was on the air and he totally gave me a shout out - that was awesome.

I got to hang out with the Sandman that winter.  He lived in Chapel Hill and it just so happened that I was staying in Raleigh on New Year's Eve to catch a flight out of RDU the next morning for Philly.  When he heard I was in town, he invited me over to his place for his New Year's party.  It was absolutely awesome to see him again and to hang out with each other without a cabin full of twelve-year-olds always causing trouble.  I'll never forget a bunch of us sitting out back on his porch, drinking beer and smoking some fake Cuban cigars like big shots.

So, since my blogging buddy usually keeps me up well past midnight, I started dubbing us the Midnight Marauders...I know it's not original, but it's meaningful to me.  I hope that this friendship is as awesome as the one I had with Mike...it's looking pretty good so far.

Later Days!