THE STORY SO FAR..

Hello, how are you? Good? Good.
If you've never read this blog before then I feel like I've got some "s'plainin' to do!"
(read the last three words in a Ricky Ricardo voice from 'I Love Lucy."

So last year I began approaching people randomly and offering to shout them a coffee in exchange for a light hearted chat. All the adventures I had and people I met can be found in the previous blogs.
From this spring boarded an entire campaign to be more friendly!!
Yeah! I was determined to be more friendly! So how was I going to do that exactly??! What does one do to be more friendly. Well, I decided to send a letter to someone I'd never met before! Friendly thing to do....a bit psychotic...but you never know it could be the start of something beautiful!
It was a lovely polite letter and also included a recipe and some FREE stickers! I know!

Now the chances of someone writing back to some nut bag they'd never heard of before wasn't really very good I thought. So I didn't just send one letter-recipe-sticker combo. I sent out 50!
But who would I choose to send them to? Who would be friendly enough to write back? Well that was easy! I chose everyone in the phone book with the last name.... "FRIEND!"
I swear to GOD this is all true.
When I ran of 'FRIENDS" I went on to people with the last names, MATE...BUDDY..PAL ..NICE.. AMICO..SMILEY..SMILES.. even SMIRK! and..BOTTOM. Because I'm immature.

So I posted my letters off with friendly glee and two weeks later I got my first response!
It was a call from the police. Just a routine call from 'Office McCollough' from the Norwood Police Station wanting to know why I'd sent some old lady some bananas in pyjamas stickers.
She must have taken a banana in a pyjama the wrong way.

Sadly this was the only response I got.
But on the flip-side I was getting an almost unanimously positive reaction with buying strangers coffees. You wouldn't believe it would you- but it seems there are a lot of positive people out there who have faith that their fellow man will buy them a coffee and not want anything else.
I stopped buying people coffee for strangers in about February 07 for reasons I'm about to disclose! I know, you heard it first here. Even before 'Entertainment Tonight!'
But before that I'm sure your wondering what's happened to some of those strangers since I initially met them?
Well, Stranger Michelle I have continued to see on public transport. And on the odd occasion I've seen her miss public transport. She can't run very fast.
Stranger Paul and I often catch movies and see the odd band together when he's not away on fishing trips. We keep talking about a camping trip, but I've only just seen "Wolf Creek," so I'm going to have to put that off for a while.
Then there's Morgan. That's an interesting one. Morgan was very enthusiastic about my project so invited me to as many events and social gatherings as I could attend. In turn I was equally as enthusiastic about accepting them! Here was the guy I was looking for! Someone who understood what my project was about and was willing to up it a step! That was until I met a friend of his called Aaron.
Our conversation went like this:

"So, your this 'Let me buy you a coffee guy' Morgan's been telling me about."
"Yeah!! It's great!Morgan's invited me to heaps of stuff"
"Right.. does this mean Morgan's still an experiment?"
Ooooooh.

It felt like I'd been kicked in the nuts and the chest at the same time. He was right! Morgan was an experiment and I couldn't help but feel ashamed and guilty for abusing Morgan's good will and friendship like that. I felt so bad about it that I decided to stop buying people coffee and stop hanging out with Morgan.
Even worse, I realised that despite being outwardly friendly and spontaneous, I was still the same old temperamental, highly strung slightly selfish Mark.
So I decided to be friendly in a different way. Rather than being wacky and obscure I decided to be a better, kinder friend to the people already in my life. And that included Morgan, who I'm proud to say has become quite a good friend and whose wife Erin makes a brilliant lasagna.

So is this is the end of the blog I hear you ask? Well, I have another social experiment planned and this will be my outlet to tell you about it! Until then, Merry Christmas and I hope to see you at my fringe show in 2008 called 'Danger.' Feb 22- Mar 15. 7pm Electric Light Hotel. It's all about what happened to me after I almost had the crap beaten out of me by some drunk guys. I was drunk too of course. But it was their fault! GODDAMIT! Oh great now look what you've done I'm all wound up now! I'm need to have a sit down now, so you'll just have to see the show to find out what happened!
MERRY XMAS!