I’ve custom-built this particular bit of prose to serve the needs of both the fans of Studio8 and its wanton displaced crumbling creators. Does anyone else pick up on the vibe that shimmies straight from the site’s glorified flash-designed front page up your spinal column tapping your vertebrae as it goes like a small paleontological monkey looking for a fossilized mollusk in the contours of your central nervous system? Was something lost in the scattering of the Studio 8 boys by Hurricane Katrina other than the boys themselves? Is something now missing as we all find ourselves displaced willy-nilly across the country by a destiny in the shape of a swirling Category 3 cloud monster from the Gulf Sea?

     I am at a lost to name it, but I sometimes, in the moonless nights, in the articles that poke around the site like starry-eyed Mexicans staring across the border into America, in the quiet of this place absent the friends that mean so much to me but are so far away, I sometimes feel whatever it is I cannot name. Life?

     It was late August and I was returning home to Louisiana for the first time in eight months. Under my tires were thousands of miles with names like Savannah, New York City, the Jersey shore, Lake Eire, Columbus, and Denver.

     The Studio 8 House in New Orleans slumbered. They had grown calloused and accepting of my absenteeism, for up until that time, no one, including myself, knew if I would ever return to the land where children are born in the nooks of cypress knees. It was my intention to surprise them with my return, to creep in through that upstairs window that Java never locks and come tumbling down the spiral staircase with my pants around my ankles and a fishhook in my ear.

     Everyone was going to be so happy.

     Unfortunately, what was supposed to be my grand entrance was stolen by an even grander character who tore the roof off of the back bathroom (and simultaneously off of the Superdome), flooded the streets with lake water, fish oil, and afro grease, and worst of all, ran my friends out of town.

     The fates swapped them for me, and the Studio8 boys and I passed each other blindly somewhere on the open road, neither of us knowing, as we drank pink lemonade and played license plate games with our respective passengers, that it would be a long time before we would ever see each other again.

     We are spread thin now, and perhaps that’s why this column seems so transparent.

     Terp is tending to his own gardens out in Austin and Brock is finding it hard to do what has always been so natural to him, making other people laugh. I have not written anything for this site, and for me, in months.

     What story do these facts tell? What is it I’m not allowing myself to see? Maybe we all just miss Lance, or maybe more importantly we miss the point that only when we’re all together will another Lance memory ever happen. We’re in awe as children at the fact that grown-ups always know the answers, when in truth we should be proud that we are still in ignorance.

     Frodo said it best when he looked through the gloom of the caves of Moria and saw the light of day at the other end, “Despite my shit-eatin’ grin and contemptible hairy feet, this is a precious moment for me and the others on my team.”

     For now, I will do my damnable best to hold down the fort alone here in Louisiana and I promise to all to make my next column much funnier.
 

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