start a club

I’m inspired again to start this up. I think I can start small and make it a book and other media club. I have twelve themes for twelve months, and I think each month will have a book and a movie and maybe a speech or essay on the topic. I’m going to formalize this a bit more and send out invitations within the next month or so. I’m excited about it. Let me know if you want to join (though, I’ll probably invite you even if you don’t want to).

I keep thinking about this club. There’s something great about clubs and I want to find out what it is exactly, and how to create it. And the best things in this world seem to have club-like qualities: families, companies, cults, mobs, teams, and every other kind of community.

• The Northwest Film Form: a non-profit right across the street from our office that encourages new film makers to make films by providing all of the equipment, encouragement, and connections necessary to make a film from start to finish.
• The Ballard Young Sophisticates: I don’t know anything about these guys but they seem to exist.
• The Universal Life Church: let everyone be ordained.

I should be keeping a longer list of these somewhere.

I wish there was a better word for it than club. I’m thinking of something halfway between a group of friends, a company, a self-help group, an investment club, a book club, and a sports team. The more I think about it the crazier it gets and most likely nobody will be stupid enough to join. Here are some of my first ideas though:

1. The mission of the club will be to make all (or as many as possible) of its members insanely famous, wealthy, and rich (or whatever combo you want to go after).
2. I don’t know if the club should ever meet. Maybe it would only meet to celebrate successes and drink to failure, and most of the real activity of the club would occur through email or phone or whatever.
3. Several tiers to the club: there will be a board of directors, a team of investors, and members (not necessarily mutually exclusive). The board of directors would be the visionaries, in charge primarily of making people famous. The investors would help make us rich. And the members… guinea pigs? Not sure how to go directly after power… maybe we’d need to bully people around or something.
4. There will be a Book of Rules that members will need to opt in to in order to be members. Not sure what goes in the rules… things like “You must like sushi” perhaps. Not sure how Rules get made… voted on by the Board of Directors perhaps. This is where it all starts getting crazy I realize.
5. I want to capture some of the spirit of salons, of hanging out after school, of endless happy hours, of sleep overs, and the things like these things which take us back to a day when we all had time and energy to think about life and the universe and do crazy things. I’m sort of on that track myself, but it’s always more fun in a group.

This idea is still in progress. Am I losing it or would this be fun?