Reader, I am returned—gunked up, fuzzy about the edges, but returned. Returned from the wilderness; from dread cigarettes; from nine years (plus!) of inactivity. Returned, triumphant, from the bowels of the Overflow. Sweep away my magnificent unwashed hair—parse the bone structure, the slope of the nose, the glisten of the lips, and you’ll see that the oncoming figure is me, a web log from 2005. Near-heroic, bursting through bramble on a counterfeit horse: a picture of courage and resilience and after-dark ache—returned, raising my cutlass under everlasting stars. There is no remnant of community in these weeds, and it is not the 8th of May. But it is Melbourne, the bolthole into which we were born, and it is spring, the season of hay fever and hope, and it is me, the tireless progenitor of revolutions. Read the change in my eyes, not my waning body—the depth they convey, the promise that this time, this time, it will be different.
Let me settle a moment with this warm teacup and this ugly cross-stitch blanket and I will tell you where I buried the silver. There are clues sewn into my sentences but I suspect, at this stage in the game, the reader would prefer plainspeak. Permit me this brief diversion into scene-setting (its relevance will become clear):—April: feverish on the bed of my childhood, with the blind not drawn and something of autumn stealing in, I was the recipient of an epiphany, one of those curious revelatory sensations that come about with the force of shock and tend rather to alter the old worldview. I had experienced bouts before, little jolts of purpose after dark, but nothing so acute, so potent, so transformative. It lasted for the best part of a week, as piercingly as in its first sting, and only reduced in intensity when I had committed—in blood—to return. (You’ll recall, I hope, that I made good on this commitment.)
Queueing for cleanskins down Murphy’s (following afore. epiph.) I hatched a plot; and under blush candleglow (following return) I made a map, on which, in sensual crimson, I marked out the locations of five key individuals. Isolation is essential, the principle from which all other principles derive, but not in isolation; in isolation its benefits are negated, snuffed out by the absence of external stimuli. I knew that if this was going to work, work like it never once has, and probably can’t, I would need allies by my side, or at least mooning about the periphery; allies who can withstand bad winds and worse poetry; allies from my old red book, estranged or otherwise, who had stood with me all those years ago. But I will persist even if none can be rallied—even if the shareholders tire of my (ardent) ways and I’m thrown from the board. No matter my number, no matter the odds, these hideous timeworn antlers will light up the dark.