Life Among the Slightly Older Natives

I knew I was done for when she mailed me the URL...

Kelly, that is, also known as Darth Kel to anyone who has ever had her as an editor and felt a verbal, but very real, version of the Darth Vader Force Choke.

Missed deadlines are not an option...

I expected her, as soon as she told me she'd begun blogging, to begin persistently asking me to resurrect the old moldy corpse of Life Among the Natives.

Life Among the Natives (LAN), for the pretty much all of you out there who don't know, ran between 1999-2000 as a humour/commentary column in a "online newspaper" called tullahoma.net. My friend and former college newspaper editor, the aforementioned Darth Kel, was entertainment editor for the paper and was apparently desperate enough for column inches to ask me to write for her. I agreed and every Wednesday for 58 weeks, LAN made its regularly scheduled appearance to virtually no fanfare whatever.

It was tough meeting those weekly deadlines, knowing that Darth Kel was waiting for me to hurry up and write something so she could turn it into something readable and publish it for my tens and tens of fans. But I had a ball. I have never before nor since been so prolific. When Kel left T-net in 2000, I went with her. I knew this process was always a team and Kelly was the only person I felt comfortable letting edit something as personal as LAN had become.

From time to time, Kelly has e-mailed me, wondering if I was writing (the answer, mostly not) and if I ever considered bringing LAN back. Before, I could always plead having no venue to publish, all the time knowing that my real fear was getting back to it and finding I'd lost the little bit of talent I had. What if, when I opened up wordpad, nothing came to my mind and flowed through my hands to fill up those vast empty pages? What then? But with T-Net out and no ready place to publish, I had my excuse.

Then came the bloggers...

At first I thought I was safe. Darth Kel, despite being one of the two smartest people I know, has never really the fastest to catch up with technology. In '94 when I was telling her of the wonders of these things called BBS, she was looking at me like I was a loon. In '95 when I excitedly told her about getting Internet access, she again seemed uninterested. So I figured with blogging just taking off fairly recently, I figured it would be a couple of years before Darth Kel discovered blogging.

It wasn't.

A few months ago she e-mailed me and told me that she'd started a blog. Good news. Kelly has always been the better writer of the two of us, though she usually prefers to edit and will never admit it in a million years. At that time, she made one mention of bringing LAN back. Here we go, I thought...

She never brought it up again.

So why, I wondered, did the person who pestered me to bring back this old dead column when I had no ready place to publish it decide to suddenly stop so close to her percieved goal?

Once again, the force is strong in Darth Kel. She knows me too well. She had sewn the seed, and kept it fed and watered through my frequent visits to her own blog. She knew all she had to do was throw all that empty space out there for me and I'd eventually be honor bound to attempt to fill it. I'm still a writer, even if the old muscles haven't been flexed in a long time.

So here I am... Filling the empty space. I can't promise LAN will become a weekly column like it was in its heyday. I'm going to try to keep it up regularly but a whole heap of "real life" has come and sat on me since 2000.

So come back again sometime, or as we say here in the deep south "ya'll come when you can stay longer." I'll fill the empty space if you'll provide me with the excuse to do it.

Until then,

Gryph

"In the end, everything is a gag"
-Charles Chaplin
NP: John Prine: Fair and Square