Had the steely-eyed yet playful Rives pre-determined this seemingly random meeting of alcoholic minds, or was it a little bit of TED magic working its way into my reality?

I have a psychopathic disdain for group activities designed to foster new relationships so I spent an hour walking around the resort alone smoking yellow American Spirits and trying unsuccessfully to think of clever ways to hate on the beautifully-organized flow of the day, surreptitiously checking the credentials of smiling attendees: chatty Korean high school students, product managers with funky eyeglasses, twentysomething CEOs of ambiguously-named startups. My aimless loathing must have been palpable because an Anderson Cooper-looking dude without a badge stopped me in my tracks with an outstretched hand: “Hey Trent, I’m Reeves. Welcome to TED.” If he had had a badge on I would have known that it was actually spelled Rives and that he was a host for TEDActive, but he didn’t, so I asked him what his deal was with the not having a badge and all. “I’m one of the hosts for TEDActive, so I can do whatever the fuck I want hahaha! Let me show you around a little bit.” But we just walked about ten feet and he dropped me off in a perfectly-formed circle of TEDsters and introduced me immediately to three New Yorkers, one of whom said the perennial word of the day (“margarita”) within fifteen seconds and we were soon in our own degenerate version of a relationship-building activity. Had the steely-eyed yet playful Rives pre-determined this seemingly random meeting of alcoholic minds, or was it a little bit of TED magic working its way into my reality? And why had he reminded me so much of the greeter at the Scientology Learning Center in downtown Pasadena?

As the sun dipped below Mt. San Jacinto and the booze continued to flow I let go of some of my baseless disdain and eventually found myself in a rainbow-lit teepee next to one of the four concurrent pool parties. After a few minutes of pleasantries we discovered that we were all writers, and, more bizarrely, all Virgos. Another seemingly-random pairing of strange attributes, and this time Rives wasn’t near enough to have had any overt influence on the meeting. Two hours later during Jill Sobule’s campfire singalong, I ended up talking to a woman whose daughter goes to high school with my niece in Texas. Shit was getting weird but it was a kind of OK / familiar weird I couldn’t quite put my finger on until the next morning when my brain was functional enough for me to realize that it felt like I was at church.