A time of reckoning
Over four years and 184 issues ago, I took up residence in these pages. The time has come for a reckoning.
You can imagine what it's been like — trying to come up week in week out with something to say and a nifty way of saying it. And doing it all within 500 words. It ain't easy. Already I've said precious little and it's taken me 68 words to say it.
Emboldened by my ability to (at least) survive via the written word in these pages, Life of Riley Enterprises Inc. expanded into other avenues where a certain grandiloquent ranting could find a ready audience.
I began to look upon myself as something of a "satirist" (yes, I know, but I was so full of myself) and naively believed that my day had come. Then followed, in quick succession, the Life of Riley web page and e-zine, the Life of Riley troupe of travelling players and, finally, the Life of Riley national radio show.
I tell you, the life of Riley ain't what it used to be.
I've discovered that you can stretch 500 words a very long way when you really try. You can cut 'em and paste 'em; recycle 'em; speak 'em as a speech and share them around so that a mere 500 words can be drawn out to last 13, 17 or even 20 minutes of spoken — herein lies the transubstantiation — dialogue.
I now speak and think in 500 word allotments. It's a habit. (Memo: 241 words so far — 259 to go.)
But in the beginning — contrary to what the Bible tells us — was, is and always will be the deed. The word — all 500 of them — follows like a phonetic shadow. My point — and I do have one — is that writing a column in a newspaper such as 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly (the only one which will have me) depends on a happening. Something's gotta give.
It's like a meal — you have to make it out of something. Should it be Hanson or Howard this week? Or Beazley or Beattie? If it's to be meat and two veg — which meat and which veg?
But this week I thought: stuff it! I'm not going to scratch my head trying to scrape off a storyline. And you know why I said that? Because the newly elected One Nation members of the Queensland parliament have been so inane and so bizarrely fixated on some very weird notions that I soon realised that my job was suddenly redundant. I could never top this lot.
So I said: "Dave, you've had a good innings. Maybe it's time you stepped aside?"
Given that this column may function primarily as an amusement for the greenish left masses, perhaps I could better serve them by subcontracting its contents to these 14 stalwarts of One Nation (under God, etc) who have so far hidden their comic pearls within the hard binders of Hansard. There's no fun in that. Times are tough. We could all do with a good laugh.
By Dave Riley