On June 6th, 2011, I officially announced the shutdown of this website and the permanent closing of the Pollestad.Net Corporation offices. This news ripped across the globe, with major newspaper outlets printing these actual headlines that I just made up: "Mediocre blog closes", "The internet remains unchanged after website shutdown", and "What? People still read us?" I think one guy in the very back of the internet managed a slow clap and that was it. Six years of work gone in an instant. Not exactly a hero's sendoff.

For those of you that know me, I've never been one to keep my word and going back on my promises is something of a minor hobby of mine. I have a long track record lying and disappointment so the fact that I'm back here writing words and sentences on the internet should come as no surprise to anyone. What should come as a surprise to everyone is that I am now doing so while wearing nothing but a small fur coat I made out of my neighbor's cat. To be fair, it's laundry day and that cat was really fucking annoying. He was always coming up to me and talking to me in that stupid cat language of his. This is America, cat. Learn English if you want to stay here.

But fashion and glamor talk aside, the site is back and for now, it's business as usual. But why? It's certainly not due to popularity. During the site's hiatus, I netted exactly zero DVD sales, largely because this site is not available on DVD but I don't think that should stop people from buying it. And yet it somehow did. People are lazy and as a guy who does everything in his power to do absolutely nothing, I can respect that. But, seriously, why bring the site back? I'm still strapped for free time and it's not like I've been stockpiling really great ideas to write about. The glory days (such as they were) are long gone and I've long since turned my ADHD attention span to much shorter pursuits, such as updating Facebook and Twitter. I guess the truth is writing to me is like crystal meth and boy toys to evangelical preachers: I can't quit doing it no matter how self-destructive it is for me and much like crystal meth, it leads me to making a lot of really bad decisions. So, there is that.

Having officially made the choice to re-open this can of worms and bring everything back online has brought me to a crossroads of sorts. Starting fresh gives me the chance to reboot the franchise; to kill off all the characters that suck and reinvent those that I decide to keep around. I can discontinue all of the previous update series that I deemed shitty and disassociate myself from all of the crap that I've previously written. (Unless you use the site's search feature.) On the surface, doing all of that seems like a really great idea until you realize that all that stuff I am trying to distance myself from is light years better than anything I am going to come up with now. It's like Edison throwing away his light bulb invention in favor of capturing fireflies in a glass jar and calling it a day.

So I'm going to do everyone a favor and not make a whole bunch of grandiose claims prematurely. I mean, I'm still head and shoulders above you as far as a talent goes but I'm a bit rusty and I don't expect that I'll be able to jump right back into the funny pool and learn to swim. A lot goes into making this whole thing work and most of that "lot" involves me finding other sources in the internet to plagiarize from. In addition to forgetting how to be funny during my off-time, I also forgot how to use Google, so all I can ask is that you be patient with me. Hopefully this will give me some time to figure out whether all of this was a mistake or not.

Regardless, in the end, maybe this is what I was meant to do. Mediocre or not. Perhaps my lot in life is to spend the rest of it writing useless works of art for the world to read and ignore, if only to find the one person out there who considers me "hysterically funny." We'd exchange emails back and forth, he'd tell me that he's my biggest fan and ultimately he'd invite me out to whatever part of the country he lives in so that we could meet face to face. Upon doing so, I would kick him in the ribs and curse in front of his children. "Stop being an enabler, you horrible piece of shit!" I would say. "The world doesn't deserve what I am doing to it. It has suffered enough."

Hopefully he would get the point after that and maybe we'd all learn something from it, like how easy it is to beat up people that admire you.