If you have been wondering where I have been, first: thank you for noticing. Second: I would like the record to show that my disappearance was not caused by lack of material. It was caused by too much material arriving all at once, like a clown car collision between fate, poor judgment, veterinary-grade chaos, and online raid scheduling.
I have been absent because life stopped behaving like a calendar and started behaving like a county fair demolition derby. Every day had a new flyer taped to it. Every hour was a different ring. And at some point I looked up and realized I had not posted because I was busy doing all four of the following:
- being emotionally outnumbered by dogs,
- negotiating with at least one broken bone,
- smoking cigarettes in places where a dignified man would never smoke cigarettes,
- and getting summoned, repeatedly, because my warlock on World of Warcraft is apparently too broken to leave unattended.
This is not an excuse. This is a route report.
First, the dogs
There were too many dogs, which is exactly the right number of dogs until it becomes spiritually administrative.
I did not mean to become the kind of man who says, “I can’t make it yet, the dogs are doing something,” but that is who I became for a stretch there. One dog needed walking because it had the eyes of a poet and the bladder of a fire hose. One dog believed my prop bag was a hostile nation. One dog, a compact little beef roast with legs, attached itself to my recovery schedule like a legal guardian and refused to let me sit down without first inspecting the chair.
Dogs do not care about your brand. They do not care that you are a clown, a performer, a writer, or a man with an immaculate entrance bit. They see a limp, a cast, a bag of snacks, and a weakness in your perimeter security. They move in.
I had one afternoon where I genuinely intended to write a clean, reflective blog post about stagecraft and timing. Instead I spent two hours refereeing a disagreement between a hound mix and a squeaky lobster toy that had become, somehow, a matter of personal honor.
Another morning, I sat down with coffee, notebook, and a very real intention to publish. A dog I was watching stared at me with such old-world disappointment that I ended up taking him on a forty-minute walk through wet Indiana grayness while he stopped every seven feet to investigate civic mysteries invisible to man.
You have not known humility until you have been dragged down an alley by a dog who has decided a leaf is lying.
So yes, the dogs took time. But more than that, they changed the rhythm. A clown can live on irregular meals, motel pillows, and thin sleep. A dog cannot. A dog needs schedule, repetition, small ceremonies, and public constitutional rounds. In other words, dogs are stage managers with fur.
I respect them. I also blame them.
Then, the bone situation
I would love to tell you I broke something heroically.
I would love to tell you it happened during a daring stunt, while saving a child, or at minimum while vaulting over a parade barricade with the moon behind me.
That is not what happened.
What happened was more clown than hero.
There are broken bones that make you sound like a cowboy, and there are broken bones that make you sound like a lawsuit deposition. Mine was the second kind.
I took a bad step in a bad moment while carrying gear in weather that had no moral center. There was mud involved. There was a folding table involved. There was a dog involved in the sense that a dog was present and somehow looked disappointed in me before I even hit the ground.
The sound was not theatrical. It was administrative. My body made the noise of a venue manager stapling a revised schedule to a cork board.
From that point on, my life became a little collection of unglamorous nouns: brace, wrap, ice, waiting room, awkward shower geometry, one shoe.
Broken bones make everything take longer, including your personality. You cannot move at full speed, so every thought has time to become a monologue. Simple tasks become side quests. Stairs become theology.
And clown work, despite what civilians think, is not gentle on a frame. It is all timing, impact, balance, crouching, hauling, loading, twisting, committing to the bit with your whole idiot skeleton. Once one piece of the machinery goes wrong, suddenly every routine turns into accounting.
Can I do this entrance without eating concrete?
Can I carry the case with my good side and still look jaunty?
Can I fall on purpose if my body has recently shown me that it is interested in doing that without rehearsal?
The answer to all three, for a while, was: not confidently.
So I disappeared a little. Not dramatically. Just enough to heal ugly.
Now, the cigarette issue
Let me be clear: I am not defending this. I am documenting it.
A clown under stress becomes a philosopher of terrible thresholds. You start saying things like, “This isn’t inside-inside,” while standing in a doorway that is, by any fair reading of architecture, absolutely inside.
I smoked cigarettes in places that were not spiritually correct for cigarettes.
Not schools. Not hospitals. I do have lines. But loading docks? Back stairwells? The weird sliver of concrete behind a bingo hall where the air conditioning units cough out warm mechanical breath and you can see three separate fast-food signs blinking at different rates? Yes. Those zones became my ashtray confessional.
One cigarette was smoked next to a hand-painted sign that said NO SMOKING WITH AN INTENSITY THAT SUGGESTS RECENT HISTORY. I would like it noted that I was six feet away from the sign and dressed as a clown, which I felt altered the jurisdiction. I am not saying it did. I am saying I felt it did.
Another was smoked while half out of costume, with greasepaint still hanging around my jaw like I had lost a bar fight with a birthday party. That is the thing nobody tells you about clowning: if you smoke in costume, you do not look dangerous. You look like a budget European tragedy.
There is no cool way to smoke a cigarette in oversized shoes.
You think there might be. There isn’t.
The ash falls wrong. The posture is ruined. The whole image says, “his life is either incredibly sophisticated or absolutely not under control,” and because I was near a concession trailer in Anderson at the time, the answer was obviously the second one.
Smoking in an inappropriate place as a clown creates legal questions the average smoker never faces. Nobody expects dignity from you, but they do expect whimsy. The cigarette confuses the whimsy. Children do not like it. Old men understand it too much. Women running ticket tables look at you like they have seen the end of several civilizations and you are one more minor detail.
Did this contribute to my absence? Yes.
Not because I was out there doing noir monologues into the rain, though at times that was spiritually close. It contributed because it meant I was in one of those seasons where every break became a side-stage confession booth. I was between gigs, between healing, between plans, standing in dumb little slices of Indiana concrete thinking, “I should really update the blog,” and then immediately not doing that.
Finally, the warlock problem
If you do not play World of Warcraft, here is the simple version:
Blizzard released an expansion called Midnight in March. The expansion is called Midnight. I am a clown who works nights. The universe has a sense of humor and it is not subtle.
My warlock is currently in the category of “stupid enough to become other people’s scheduling concern.”
I made the classic mistake of building a character as a joke and then making the joke efficient. When Midnight launched and Demonology got tuned into the S-tier of raid damage, my joke became infrastructure. The spec does not just perform well. It performs well in a way that makes guild officers speak to you like you are a licensed contractor during a flood.
Now every time I try to act like a man with priorities, somebody messages me as if I am a rare industrial machine that must be brought online.
hey are you around
need your lock for voidspire
yours is doing disgusting numbers right now
That phrase — need your lock — has ruined several perfectly good evenings.
I will be wrapping ice around a damaged limb, surrounded by dogs, smelling faintly of cigarettes and Bengay, and suddenly my phone lights up like a cursed relic. Need your lock. Raid starts in 20. Council says your portal utility alone justifies attendance. We are working on Vorasius and your damage is still sick in execute. Also Blizzard just buffed Hellcaller Chaos Bolt damage by 250 percent so if you could log in that would be tremendous.
Two hundred and fifty percent. They buffed it from 10 to 35 percent increased damage and the tooltip reads like a dare. I did not ask for this. I did not lobby for this. I was busy trying to get a dog off a squeaky lobster, and Blizzard decided my warlock needed to hit harder, as if the problem with my life was that I was not being summoned urgently enough.
This is how men disappear into secondary lives.
My warlock was supposed to be an unserious side project, a little backstage goblin with too many spell effects and a morally compromised pet situation. Instead, Blizzard rebuilt Silvermoon City from scratch for the first time in twenty years, opened the gates to Quel’Thalas, dropped three raids including the Voidspire and March on Quel’Danas, and then decided that warlocks should sit at the top of the DPS charts looking down at the other classes like landlords.
They even tried to nerf Soul Harvester. They reduced Demonic Soul damage by 55 percent. Fifty-five. And the warlock is still S-tier. That is not a nerf. That is a compliment in the form of a restraining order that the warlock simply chose not to obey.
The worst part is that they also added player housing. You can now own a home in Silvermoon, decorate it, share it across your characters. I am a man who lives out of a duffel bag in Indiana motels and sews his own seams, and my fictional warlock has a permanent residence with customizable window treatments and a neighborhood association. He is doing better than me. He has a house. I have a prop case with a dent in it.
There are bosses in the Voidspire where I barely feel like a player. I feel like a municipal service. Lightblinded Vanguard? I show up. I apply curses. The screen turns into a stained-glass window designed by a pyromaniac undertaker. Numbers pour out. Someone says, “good lord.” Another says, “don’t nerf this until after Tuesday.” I am thanked with the sincere desperation usually reserved for tow truck drivers and winter linemen.
And because I am, at heart, weak to being wanted, I keep logging in. They just announced 12.0.5 drops April 21st with Void Assaults and new Ritual Sites and something called Decor Duels which I assume is competitive interior decorating, and I already know I will be there on day one like a man who cannot say no to a flyer taped to a telephone pole.
That is the ugliest truth in this whole post.
Not the cigarettes. Not the bone. Not the dog bureaucracy.
It is that if enough people ask for my warlock in a tone of need, I will postpone real life to go cast forbidden nonsense at a digital horror in the rebuilt streets of a city that looks better than any venue I have ever performed in.
So where have I been?
I have been here.
I have been on the back side of a rough little stretch, getting dragged by dogs, healing one dumb piece of skeleton, smoking in the kind of places that make fluorescent lights look judgmental, and answering the call when Azeroth required an overqualified goblin florist of shadow magic to help clear the Voidspire on heroic while a dog slept on his foot.
I have been quiet because the material was too alive to summarize. Also because Midnight launched in early access on February 27th and I lost approximately eleven days to Silvermoon City and the firm belief that if I just finished one more boss I could get back to writing. That was a lie I told myself with the confidence of a man whose warlock has a house and whose real body was eating cereal at 2 a.m. in a motel outside Lafayette.
But I am back at the desk now, or close enough to call it a desk. The paint kit is where it belongs. The brace is less of a conversation starter. The dogs, for the moment, are asleep. My cigarettes and I are trying to see other people. And if the raid leaders want my warlock for March on Quel’Danas, they are going to have to accept that I am once again a publishing man.
That is the update.
If you missed me, I appreciate it.
If you did not miss me, that is fine too.
The dogs did. The guild definitely did. And the broken bone, in its own way, still does.
My warlock’s house looks great, though.