He Slightly Returns.

A dark stage. Silence.

A single spotlight casts a beam to the left of stage. A tall and gaunt looking man in his mid-to-late twenties with thick rimmed glasses, torn jeans and dregs of a beard enters from off-stage. The light follows him to a solitary microphone front-center of stage

The man nervously adjusts the microphone height. It drops down a little too far, he tries to bring it back up but smacks himself in the head. Somebody in the small collection of rickety and creaky chairs coughs. He faces the utterly bored and expectant audience, who have been checking their watches for a good six months now

PATRICK
Hello. (Taps Microphone) Is this thing on?

A feedback squall from the mic melts the ears of what little audience he has remaining.

Sorry! Sorry! I just haven't used one of these things in a while. I forgot how to turn it on.

Thing is, see, the world has shifted in so many ways this last year, I always ran out of time to come back here. I used to hang here every night, it brought me comfort, you guys brought me comfort.

But the thing is, a website is not a therapy session, and I lost a little discipline there for a bit. Things got a little crazy. Thought I'd try living and dealing in the real world, let things drop away. Wait til nobody was watching. And then I just kinda forgot about my regular gig.

But now I'm here, the mic is working (is it? can you hear me at the back? oh, good). Things are good, things are very good. I'm sitting at the end of the Earth, in Newfoundland. The power has just dropped out. Laptop batteries are a good thing. There are gale force winds and feet of snow. The sun sets in a fiery sky. Todd Bertuzzi's NHL King Hit is shown on television more times I think than the September 11 impact. It's quite a punch. And I just spoke in hyperlinks. There are waves destroying Asia. I'm halfway round a round-the-world. I'll be back in Perth in a couple of weeks. Here there is nothing but the end of things.

I'm doing radio now. Still doing Papercut. I'm happy. In love, even. I have many things to write. Many articles to bring to you. I've got some fantastic interviews to transcribe.

In the coming couple of weeks, I hope to put up my interviews with Joel Bakan, author of The Corporation, and Robert Greenwald, director of Outfoxed. There's some other things I've nearly finished.

The point is, this time I'm back properly. I've missed you guys. I gave the place a fresh lick of paint and some new fonts. Why? Well, I've been looking at this creaking old performance house every single day, and I'm just tired of it. And you can search it now as well. You see the new address? We've moved. The reasons why are exciting. I deleted a lot of the extra rooms in this place, thought I'd focus just on the journal. You won't miss the other rooms, you never went in there anyway.

So, anyway, I just wanted to say thanks for coming, and I hope you'll stick around... there's a couple of poorly written things about New York and Montreal to start you off just down below. Thanks.

Patrick exits the stage, the spotlight dims. A solitary figure in the back claps in that slow way where you can't quite tell if they are being sarcastic. Somebody coughs. The lights don't come up. The power is still off. We don't ask about the spotlight. A silhouetted figure in row G speaks.

FIGURE
Fifty bucks for this? I thought this was Chicago! I expected leather. Then I go hear this guy's a friggin' Sam Shepard fan. It won't last. He'll be kicked so far off broadway he gets funding from NASA...