Ten years ago, I received an email from Athenae asking if I’d like to join the First Draft team. It was a no-brainer: I said yes, yes, yes a thousand times yes.
My first post landed on 9/19/2009 and was called Greetings From Debrisville. That was my nickname for post-K New Orleans, which given the whole car in the drainage canal thing may be ripe for a revival.
You know much I love self-quotation so here’s how I kicked off my tenure at First Draft:
Thanks to Athenae for the invite and the warm welcome. She just did something either foolhardy or semi-brilliant by inviting me to join the gang at First Draft. I’ll let you be the judge of that. For my own part, I’m happy to be here: I’m a longtime reader, occasional commenter and sporadic passenger in the crack van. Love that shag rug, A. I hope that Scout will still bring the ham…
I’ve lived in New Orleans (aka Debrisville) since 1987 and have been blogging as Adrastos since December 2005. I suspect you can figure out what inspired me to start bloviating on the internets: Hurricane Katrina and the subsequent federal flood.
To paraphrase the late, great Greg Peters that qualifies as lazy quoting of myself. It beats the hell outta self-dealing. I’ll leave that to the experts in the Trump regime.
A lot of excellent writers have come and gone since I sold my soul to First Draft: Scout Prime, Virgo Tex, Doc, and Jude to name a few. I linked to their work because they’re all fine writers even if Jude is incapable of writing a paragraph without using the word fuck. That inspired this fucking closing of my fucking introductory post:
The only thing that gave me pause about joining the First Draft krewe is that I don’t say fuck as much as Athenae or Jude. Once I was assured that there wasn’t a quota I said: what the fuck, why the fuck not? But just in case I’m expected to swear like a Greek sailor, here’s Warren Zevon with My Shit’s Fucked Up:
Our current krewe of writers may be motley but they’re equally wonderful: Michael F, Tommy T, and our awesome publisher, Athenae. I haven’t had the pleasure of meeting Tommy but I’ve hung out with both Michael and Allison. One thing that changed when we migrated First Draft to Word Press was that Allison and I revealed our “secret identities” which were lying in plain sight anyway.
Allison attended Rising Tide 6 and Dr. A took the obligatory picture of us with Michael F:
It’s not a particularly flattering picture but it’s all we’ve got so I won’t suppress it. Somewhere there’s a pretty good picture of Allison with the late great Oscar but I cannot find it. So it goes.
It’s been a helluva ride and we’ve only just begun to amuse, inform, and outrage you. We couldn’t do it without our readers. That brings me to the obligatory plug for our 2019 fundraiser. If you like what we do here at First Draft, please throw a few drachmas our way but do it in dollars: Greece adopted the Euro years ago. Click here for more information on how to donate from the boss lady.
Our plan is to go on and on and on; much like one of my windier posts. The last word goes to Neil Young and Stephen Stills:
Hahaha, flattering or not, I was, um, thinner then.
Very happy I met you and have been lucky enough to work with you on this. Cheers, and happy blogversary.
Well, I’m glad that you’re here. You’re a good writer
Thank you kind, sir.