It’s not old men drinking coffee, but it will have to do

by Jon Mark Balaam, former sportswriter

They had been on “a little bit better terms,” which is to say they had been able to stand in the same room without bloody murder being attempted. Bloggers all, they numbered about a dozen on the evening last week when they rode the great glass elevator to the elite spinning saloon high above revitalized downtown Amarillo and just one floor above Mr. R Spacedark’s offices in the sky.

Some drink Shiner Bock from bottles, others sip Red Bull and pure grain alcohol from tall glasses, and some bring their own plastic bottles of Mohawk-brand vodka . The delegation from a blog called Ivory Dome huddles in the corner partaking of homemade hooch and methamphetamine fresh from the hastily-assembled portable distillery they brought with them. Mr. Spacedark guzzles 200-year-old Irish whiskey straight from the bottle and shouts insults at friend and foe alike. All comers best bring a coating of extra-thick skin.

This motley group has assembled to celebrate the publication of The Collected Bloggings of R Spacedark, selected, edited, and annotated by Curious Texan. The collaboration was a match made somewhere south of the Pearly Gates. Spacedark writes for the notoriously liberal hate site Panhandle Truth Squad, while the gracious and cordial Curious Texan— a gentleman and a Christian, unlike Mr. Spacedark—writes for the witty and intelligent conservative site Ivory Dome.

I asked Mr. Texan—standing beside a strangely vibrating broom-closet door—how he had been able to stand working with the drunken Spacedark, and before he could answer the liberal hatemonger butted in with a typically cryptic rant. “It’s like how Mark Weaver used to have the largest pornography collection in Texas,” he said.

I exchanged a sympathetic glance with Texan. The only Mark Weaver I had known was a center for Quitaque’s 3-man football team back in the 70s, and I truly doubted that a football player would be so immoral as to look at stag films or dirty pictures. But then Spacedark was rambling about how Mark Weaver had been the head of the American Family Association in Texas. The closet door began rattling louder. Spacedark's comrade Blogarillo tried later to explain Mr. Spacedark’s nonsensical rant. “So many wingnuts seem to have a sick fascination with what they supposedly deplore. The further to the right someone is the more likely they are hiding something,” Mr. Blogarillo lied.

The door shook as a series of loud thuds was heard from behind it. “Curious knows what I’ve written better than I do,” Spacedark said. After sitting through a couple of clear-as-mud rants, I think that’s probably because Mr. Spacedark was drunk when he wrote it. So be it. Spacedark informed me that Mr. Texan could cite chapter and verse every loony lefty idea he’d ever espoused.

Well, politics made strange bedfellows, I guessed. At the “bedfellows” reference Mr. Spacedark smiled mysteriously. The closet door behind him finally burst open. Mr. Texan’s amiable colleague Celtic Texan had broken down the door, and he burst out of the closet. “Don’t say any more!” he ordered Curious. “Interview’s over. We’re leaving,” he said to me, grabbing the still and the rest of the Ivory Domians and heading for the elevator.