Yeah, okay; we’re back…

…Let’s not make a thing out of it.

Well, we’re kinda back. And by we, I pretty much mean I. Let’s face reality; it’s been six years. Things are bound to be a little different.

First of all, Paul left town under cover of darkness about three years ago. He’s got a compound somewhere near the Canadian border, and he and his wife have given birth to a beautiful bouncing baby tax dodge. I sent him a sympathy e-card to commemorate the birth, and he replied with an e-mail that had been bounced through a Brazilian server that keeps no logs that he’s changed his name because: “Every time I was sitting in a job interview and I realized that Googling my name brought up this crappy little rag? Let’s just say no one’s eager to offer dental and stock options to a man who smells of feces and panic.

“And don’t you ever fucking contact me again. Just keep leaving the sacks of money in the garbage can in the Public Gardens across the street from Cheers every Wednesday. I’ll tell you when I forgive you for leaving that mess on my couch. And when you’ve paid off that mess’s colonoscopy bill.”

Hell, even Ken MacDonald’s married at this point. I was even in the wedding party, although it’s an insult to the concept of a party to be stuck standing in a Catholic church with a man who alternates long pulls off my JD flask with inspecting the confessionals for glory holes. I just took it as a good drinking weekend, because I knew that no court in the land would uphold a marriage contract between a desperate woman and a man who asks the priest to call him “The Honorable Sheik Al Jihad,” and if the Good Father can hook him up with “a couple handfuls of habit puppies before I have to start lying about it.”

And me? No, not married, although I’ve been dating a beautiful degenerate for going on five years now. However, she’s from Canada and you don’t know her, and any man who even implies that I’m Mr. Scoop will find out the power of American libel laws, and just how far, long and powerfully I can pee.

After The American Jerk folded, I did stand-up for a couple years, then shifted to working as a disc jockey at a Boston radio station for about three years. Now, on paper, being a DJ is fun. You play rock and roll records, you tell thinly-veiled dick jokes, and you collect a half-decent paycheck. It’s a great job, provided you don’t like to fling around words like, oh, I don’t know… for the sake of argument? Let’s say you like to use the word… “goatfucker.”

If you like to use the word “goatfucker” in your day-to-day conversations, being a DJ’s not quite as fun as WKRP in Cincinnati would like you to believe. If you like to use the word “goatfucker,” being asked, every six months, to sign a 25-page document that legally binds you from using the word “damn” becomes akin to being asked to check your testicles at the Hooters door (You know, if you weren’t already banned for shuffling ankle-panted out of the men’s room screeching, “Who’s a little short for a stormtrooper!?”).

So a couple months ago, I quit. Goatfucker. Goatfucker. Goatfucker. That is all.

So anyway; back in the day, The American Jerk was a monthly humor magazine. What’s it gonna be now?

Look at it. It’s gonna be a blog, stupid. Blog, of course, being a bastardized word from “web log,” a Latin phrase meaning: “Self-indulgent tripe.” It’s gonna be as funny as I can make it as often as I can make it that way, provided there’s nothing good on TV or that my keyboard’s too sticky from the animal pornography.

Will Paul or John Saleeby be back? How the fuck should I know? What am I, a botanist? I’ll let them know it’s here, and they can decide what to do. In the meantime, you can find John at Acid Logic, and if you’re itching for the old shit, The original American Jerk lives on in the archives.

Will the site always look like this? It fucking well better not. Look: the only reason the site’s even live now is that beer six made deleting the old homepage seem like a bafflingly good plan. We’re clocking in at around beer fourteen right now. So fuck you if you don’t like the look. Considering the condition I’ve been in while writing the code that your browser’s trying to translate, you’re lucky that even Microsoft can’t code a suckhole big enough to accomodate the dry heaves.

Talk to you soon.

Okay,

Rob

Editor, The American Jerk

P.S. GOATFUCKER. God, it’s good to be back on the Internet.