wo years ago, on my birthday, I was at a retreat for the Morning News. The writers at the Morning News do this every year – or, technically, the editors do this for us, rent a cabin somewhere, buy boatloads of booze, let us run amok and occasionally sing Journey songs – and it seemed, to me, as good a place as any to celebrate my 31st, which (as people who have turned 31 might agree) is not really a birthday so much as an annoyance. So there I was, on my annoying birthday, and my editor and friend Rosecrans asked me to join him for a smoke outside, and we were standing out there, letting our blood flood with nicotine, when my other editor and friend, Andy, came out.

“You guys, come inside!" he said. "Michael Jackson just died!”

The words were like needles under my skin: Michael Jackson just died. I threw down my cigarette, didn’t even bother to stamp out the burning cherry, and bolted for the door. Right before I opened it, I turned to Rosecrans and said, “I’m sorry, but I’m going to be very upset.” As always, he was very sympathetic.

I remember thinking that I would remember this day for the rest of my life, which is so ridiculously dramatic but also so ridiculously me. I remember seeing a montage of pictures of Michael Jackson—Michael at age 5, smile full of stars, Michael at 25, greasy finger curl dangling over his dark eyes, Michael at 35, grotesque and unwatchable. And this is funny to me: that at the moment when I thought he was dead, Michael Jackson’s life flashed before my eyes.

I ran to the living room and found what the eight year old inside of me will probably always secretly yearn for on her birthday: Twenty people standing around a cake that had been lit up with candles, overhead lights dimmed for effect. As it turns out, I probably would remember this day for the rest of my life, a good 20 years I'd say, but for totally different reasons than I expected.

“So let me get this straight,” I said after I blew out the candles. “Michael Jackson isn’t dead?”

Anyway, the person who came up with that stunt was Paul Ford.

Paul Ford, that story about you was totally not about you.

Okay, let me try another angle. Back in college, when I wanted to be a writer but didn’t seem too interested in actual writing, I had a rather naïve notion that great writers had to be fucked up, selfish, mean and miserable people. Eventually, at a paper where I worked in my early 20s, I met some great writers, and they did nothing to dispel this notion. It seemed like brilliance required ugliness in equal measure. This belief indulged a lot of crappy behavior on my part, like drinking too much and self-immolation and the tendency to talk about Ulysses with authority while never having read it. If you are someone who suffers from this idea, that all great writers are bad people, then you should meet Paul Ford. (Paul Ford, I think I just called you a great writer. And I’m NOT TAKING IT BACK. By the way, like a month ago, this Great Writer Whoo-Hoo emailed me a completely effed eel sex video wherein someone poured 28 tiny, squirming eels down a coked-up Asian woman’s anus. Paul Ford managed to compare this, with some persuasiveness, to the Lord of the Rings trilogy so, I mean, “stable” is all very relative here.) What I learned from Paul Ford, and from many people at The Morning News for that matter, is that writers do not have to be bad people. They can, in fact, be some of the best people you’ll ever meet.

Paul Ford wrote a story about “100 Ways to Say I Love You” for The Morning News. For him, I choose #100.