Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Geoff Carter. Today we celebrate his ahem ahem birthday, and I’m celebrating by enshrining him in digital portrait for all eternity (or until the web implodes). For those who aren’t lucky enough to know Geoff, I’ll say this: Your life is a little less rich for that omission.

I’ve known Mr. Carter since I was but a young lad, back when we both still had full heads of long hair (only one of us does now; sadly, it’s not me), through the usual channels (basically, I don’t remember, but poetry, coffee and possibly mutual lovers played into it somehow). I knew him then as a poet, a snappy vest-wearer, an aficionado of good music and great literature, and someone who never gave himself enough credit. Geoff went on to become a writer and columnist for Scope Magazine (the precursor to the Las Vegas Weekly), a web content guru for the Las Vegas Sun and the precursor to VEGAS.com, and then he later emerged from a darkroom cocoon as a fantastic amateur photographer, just as he set sail for greener (and wetter) pastures in lovely Seattle, where he continues to ply his word trade.

We’ve stayed friends all these years, mainly and especially thanks to the magic of the interwebs. It was Geoff who was mostly responsible for turning me onto LiveJournal, through which I developed most of the good friends I have to this day, coming out of post-divorce fallout. And thanks to the magic of giant cylinders that float through the sky on jet-powered wings, I’ve probably physically hung out with that bastard more often over the last four or five years than we did in the previous 10 or 15.

It’s criminally unfair that Geoff Carter is not a household name. See, some of us hacks are really good at being in the right time and place, and have somehow attained a reasonable level of success and gainful employment through sheer willpower, despite not actually being that talented. The fact is, Geoff can write circles around just about anyone I know, myself included. He has a poet’s soul, but a humorist’s canny. He can work a camera, naturally, with no training or special lighting or planning, better than a lot of “pro” photogs I’ve come across. And the motherf*cker just gets fitter and better-looking as he gets older, not counting his fabulous mane of fashionably gray-ish hair.

So, Geoff, happy birthday. And people of the world, when Geoff finally finishes that novel he’s been working on for ahem ahem years, and it’s available in what few bookstores are left outside of your iPads and Kindles and Swindles and Bindles, you best know you’re gonna buy/download/steal that sh*t, and then you, too, will want to be Geoff Carter when you grow up.