My high school reunion’s coming up, and along with the many emails from the organizers (including one goody-two-shoes type who now sports a @irs.gov address—she’ll be popular after a few drinks) has come a flood of memories. Given that this was high school and I was a teenage boy, most of my memories are around girls (cue Superbad trailer, uncensored version). Sure, we all have our R and NC-17 stuff from back in the day, but for me there’s nothing that beats a decidedly PG-13 first kiss. You only get one first kiss in life.* You also only get one first kiss with a new person, whether it’s first-and-only, first-of-many, or first-and-forever. First kisses, I am here to report, are the best. Have a first-kiss story?

The three years and going strong First Kiss Project wants it, explaining “the aim … is to record as many first kiss stories as possible. To capture those clumsy sweet first attempts to end our innocent and bumbling foolishness.” The site posts stories of debut smootches regularly, and accepts submissions of 350 words or less. If you decide to go down that lane, leave SMITH your first kiss tale here or via email. xoxo.

*You know who you are Jen G. Thank you.

Dog kissing baby from Flickr user crzytx1369.

The above headline is one of my favorite bits from our just-published excerpt of Gonzo: An Oral History of Hunter S. Thompson. Thompson has never been lacking in publicity, but I think even those with a PhD in the good doctor’s life and times will love reading this take on Thompson’s boyhood days in Kentucky. These were the emerging artist’s days of war games and BB guns and sports and pranks and booze. Tossed in jail for a crime he may or may not have committed with two friends, young Hunter was hung out to dry while his better-connected compradors were sprung free. Historian Doug Brinkley recounts what happened:

Hunter wrote his mother these very philosophical letters from behind bars. They exude the desperation of a young man in jail looking for his freedom as well as contemplating how the rich get away with dastardly things and the poor don’t—that the buddies that he was with in the Cherokee Park event were waltzing because they knew the judge, and that he was the poor kid on the other side of the railroad tracks with no dad. The game was fixed.

Like so many young writers, I fell in love with his work, specifically Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas*, and fortunately got my own god-awful gonzo stage out of the way early, in college. Later, after editing a story my friend Cheryl wrote about being Thompson’s assistant, she thanked me by giving me a cigarette holder he’d given to her. I’m not an autograph hound or huge celebrity worshipper (or, for that matter, even a smoker), but I cherish it.

Read more about the beginnings of HST, storytelling legend, here.

* My wife tells the story of how as a twentysomething in San Francisco commuting to a temp job she hated, she would re-read Fear & Loathing, standing up, squashed in the train like an animal. It kept her sane.

We tend to steer clear of celebrities unless they play well with the rest of us—and mesh with our storytelling mission. In our Brushes With Fame area, for example, readers write about celebrities landing, alien-like, on their turf (at say, the urologist’s office). And one of the many things that we love about gathering six-word memoirs is that we can showcase the short life stories of never-published writers right next to those of chart busting wow-I’m-on-Oprah authors.

It’s in that spirit that I give you a post on Cowboy Gossip that lists 66 celebrities who blog. I’m fairly certain that this list is the only time in history where Rosie O’Donnell and Tommy Lasorda have appeared together, and co-exist as just two crazy kids blogging about their life, be it about gay parenting or the joys of baseball in October (far from mutually exclusive, of course). The beauty of blogging is that it’s a level playing field, one where a Hairstory and the Dude’s story are all just a click away—and only as good as their last post.

Rosie from Flickr user no-frills marilyn; Tommy from Flickr user CJM. Thanks to to SG for the tip.

Happy Monday. If you don’t have Columbus Day off—and one wonders how it can still be a national holiday except in, say, Arizona—then you’re probably not psyched to be at work and staring at your overpaid, demanding, unappreciative, and possibly even ungroomed boss. We feel you. And so do our friends at True Office Confessions. Taking a page out of our six-word book, TOC is seeking six-word reviews of your boss. Submit your best six here.

Book shot from Flickr user candrews.

I was on line at the bookstore at the airport yesterday (New Yorker? The Atlantic? SI with my fightin’ Phillies on the cover? I went with Vanity Fair, perfectly sweetened plane candy) and saw that the woman in front of me was buying Eat, Pray, Love. “Is it a gift or are you buying it for yourself?” I asked her (she looked so ecstatic about the purchase I figured that, like me, she took serious delight in gifting it people she was sure would devour it).

“For me,” she said. “I’m on my way to Rome.”

As Eat, Pray lovers know, the first section is set in Rome, and one of the greatest 100-page sprints of a memoir opening I’ve ever read. My Rome-bound friend was in for a treat.

I told her that the book’s author Elizabeth Gilbert would be on Oprah tomorrow (today) and that the little online magazine I run was one of two spots graced with an excerpt (Oprah’s O was the other), which we asked for back before the book’s publication after reading the galley. What I didn’t tell my new friend was that I first met Liz back when we were both writing stories about Burning Man (she for SPIN, me for P.O.V. magazine) and that such wild success—E, P, L has sold more than 1 million copies—could not have happened to a more talented, humble, groovy person.

“I haven’t been this excited since Bono was here,” Oprah tells Liz today. Here’s to that—and the power of a great story.

Douglas Rushkoff (who has not only published 10 bestsellers but also was a SMITH blogger—the kid’s got a future!) teaches Technologies of Persuasion: From Propaganda to Paranoia at the Maybe Logic Academy. “This seminar will explore persuasion in a wide range of media,” he says. “Our task will be to evaluate humanity’s ability to maintain agency in the face of the increasingly sophisticated influence techniques used against us.” The course is a very reasonable $145 and runs through November 25. It’s already started—no star for me, I was late on the homework assignment to blog this—but you can still jump in. Prof. Rushkoff tells Wired.com, “You may not be able to go back to your job at the advertising agency after this.” SMITH’s own JahFurry is enrolled, and will turn be offering periodic book reports here.

Josh Neufeld has just finished another chapter (part 1 of a two-part chapter) of A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge, the webcomic whose images The Atlanta Journal-Constitution says “are sure to linger in memory, perhaps even longer than hours of news footage already have.” Chapter 7, The Bowl Effect, is live now, with part two of this installment coming in a week (or so). Linger over it.

Slate calls the Year in Sex a few months early. Why wait, right? How weird’s your sex year so far?

Meet Andie Grace, aka ActionGrl, the latest in our series of Beautiful Pregnant Women. Her partner, a great man who answers to the name Thumper, took this shot on AG’s birthday in the deep, dusty Nevada desert. I’ve watched Andie, often from afar, as she’s glided through various life stages, tribes, trials, and transformations with more grace and beauty than sometimes even I can bear. Bassist. Filmmaker. Media maven. The girl you wished was living next door. Girl of Action. Mom to Be. Virgo. Her six-word memoir? “Wasn’t born a redhead; fixed that.” Catch her if you can.

Here’s a bonus shot. Don’t tell anyone.

My headline plays off the mission of the deceptively simple, totally delicious site, Passive Aggressive Notes , which has been around a while but I just found via my peripheral web vision and a tip from any blogger’s BFF. PAN’s part FOUND Magazine, part Overheard in New York and as addictive as both. In a perfect bit of kismet, I found this note waiting for me when I got home the same day I discovered Passive Aggressive Notes. The gods have an excellent sense of humor. And timing.