As you can see, having descended the hill, I still look like me, and forever will
A dark stage. Silence. You've been here before. You've heard the promises.
Your narrator shuffles once more onto the stage, a little older, a little more broken, just as tall but somewhat surprisingly a little skinnier. A single spotlight picks him out against the fading curtains. There are more scars on his body than last time you saw him, but those aren't the reason he's been away. He's wearing jeans that are not ripped, for he is now more mature, although he is still wearing a Daniel Johnston t-shirt, so he might just as well be fifteen. The glasses are more expensive and oddly angled.
PATRICK
Umm... hi. (Taps Microphone). Yeah, so anyway. Thanks for coming.
Frankly I'm quite surprised to see anybody here at all. We kinda closed things up without telling you about it. Sort of like when that little restaurant, the only decent one in your neighbourhood, puts up the signs saying they've closed for a few weeks for renovations. Something in you knows what that really means, right? Those signs always make you sad. Me? I'm still mourning the loss of walking-distance cajun.
I'm not going to go into the boring detail of the reasons why I haven't been writing for the last year. Those who need to know do know. Those who don't most certainly don't need to. It is not a year I would choose to repeat, let's just leave it at that and I'll tell you some time over a beer or ten.
But I think I've managed to piece my brain back together. I've been stripping back my various online presences, redefining descriptions of self to something much simpler and much more achievable. At the point where my day-job business is more successful and has higher profile than probably ever before, I've taken down its website and replaced it with a one-pager. Likewise with my professional site, which cribs the same design and pretty much just points to other things I'm doing.
Cutting down on noise. Cutting down on distraction.
What I'm attempting to do, what this place has always been for, is for me to share my writing, my interests, and some of the stranger stories and characters I've encountered in my travels of being whatever the fuck I am. Which, I've decided, is mostly a writer, partly a broadcaster, something of a community organiser. I've been described as many other things -- here's one website calling me an arts guru and jack of all trades. Not sure I'm those things, but I figured I best set to working it out.
Look, I hate these apologetic returns as much as the next person. So I'm going to shut up now and get on with it. Any questions?
A man wearing a fedora, a card with PRESS written in 38 point Arial protruding from its brim, raises his hand. He is in fact the only person in the audience. I suppose that he is you.
PATRICK
Yes, you there?
NEWSMAN
Patrick, what sort of work can we expect from this new reincarnation of your blog? And is this just a hollow promise?
PATRICK
Well I'll answer that question in two parts. Firstly, yes it probably is just a hollow promise. For starters I'm off to Argentina, Brazil, Canada and the USA for a few months in a couple weeks. But there are going to be things to write about there, from dormant volcanoes to the hunt for Sarah Palin, so I don't think that's going to get in the way. Who knows? It's a blog, there aren't any rules. You might even get some of my fiction, people seem to like that. And the reasons I've left this blog alone for the last couple of years... well they're not so current any more.
NEWSMAN
But can you point to specific content you will be posting?
PATRICK
Oh you're a tough one. Well, I thought I'd kick things off with a few of the more interesting interviews I've done recently. Look in the coming week or two for interviews with my favourite filmmaker of the outsider nutso underground, Craig Baldwin, about his wonderfully bizarre screed against L. Ron Hubbard, Mock Up On Mu, and also a great chat I had with Jeff Krulik, the guy who made Heavy Metal Parking Lot a couple of decades back. There are some other things to dust off in the archives as well. I think tomorrow I'll post an interview with Matthew Herbert about his mad new big band album.
We'll see. It'll be fun. Do come back, won't you?
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