Counting from Fifteen

We didn’t mean to stop. We really didn’t. It just… sort of… happened.

If we wanted to — all of us here at Glass­dog World Dom­i­na­tion — we could pin­point and delin­eate the rea­sons. Key word: “If.” We are not so inclined because, truth be told, there have been endeav­ors to do exactly that a num­ber of times over the past few months (adding up to a cou­ple of years) but they always end up sound­ing like the lonely, bro­ken old man who chases the kids off the lawn with flamethrow­ers and rabid poo­dles. “The lawn” in this case being the entire web, and “the kids” being pretty much any­one who has ever left a com­ment at YouTube, and the “rabid poo­dles” being the odd assort­ment of nuclear-waste vic­tims in the Labs.

So rather than that, we have decided to jet­ti­son every­thing that was here and start fresh as if noth­ing ever hap­pened. Remem­ber Design-O-Rama? We don’t. What about Over­heard? Or The Vaca­tion Project? The ill-defined attempt at gath­er­ing a bunch of equally ill-tempered writ­ers and throw them into a psy­che­delic stew, hop­ing to some­how drum up inter­est with anger and annoy­ance? Gone.

All gone.

We exam­ined it all and as we did so, a com­mon won­der­ment con­cern­ing the rea­sons why any­one would want to see any of that now kept crop­ping up. Well, we were kind of nos­tal­gic about it all, but nos­tal­gia for the sake of nos­tal­gia is like dig­ging up Princess Di’s corpse just to fuck it. Let’s face it, her best years are behind her.

So what have we here? Noth­ing! Absolutely noth­ing. The prover­bial clean slate. The new start. The fresh begin­ning. Yes, boys and girls, we’re going ahead as if the past never even hap­pened. Because why? Because!

(Oh, yeah. If you’re look­ing around for that Lance guy, as always, he has his own home to take care of. He might be hang­ing around here like some sad, pathetic has-been hanger-on, but frankly we’re not going out of our way to prod his cold, pudgy car­cass with a stick.)

The best part of all this is that we don’t have to accede to any demands or expec­ta­tions. Who the hell knows what was going on here before? We sure don’t! Think of this as being under new man­age­ment, and you’ve come back expect­ing to sit in the same old ratty vinyl booths and get the same old crappy ser­vice and the same watered-down drinks and soggy French Fries. Instead you find the place boarded up with ply­wood and a poster for a liquor license pasted to the doors.

We don’t know what we’re going to do, yet. The plans aren’t dry, and the con­trac­tors aren’t hired. Hell, at this point we don’t even have a bud­get or a sched­ule. All we know is that we are once again march­ing for­ward into that bright, hot tomor­row with a fresh, clean Pee Chee folder, a fresh set of Dixon Ticon­dero­gas (#2) and a pink eraser with the imprinted label still clear to read. There’s an unopened pack­age of college-ruled paper on the desk and the school bell is about to ring.

Hi! Wel­come back!

Okay… let’s go.