Mega. Nega.

Today, your Mega-Nega celebrates the exile of Stephen Reese from this blog.

How happy am I that our internet forum is no longer a defenseless receptacle for his protracted drunken ramblings, sentimental photo captions, and prostrate paeans to weirdo musicians and obscure comic book creators?

I can't even tell you, I'm so overjoyed.

No more interminable post-mortems on an entirely humdrum fall vacation "Down South". No longer, this whining over departed lovers who had sense enough to reject and abandon his undesirable, overly difficult personality. No more near-maniacal romanticizing of a pagan holiday celebrating death and decay and witchery (though Orthos does hold a soft spot for Halloween, we can honor it just fine without Reese). An end, finally, to "Mini Nerd" (more like, "Gargantuan Dork") postings appealing only to those fellow losers who played Dungeons and Dragons with him when he was a too-horny, too-pimply 14-year-old in a silly trenchcoat and completely impractical police boots.

No, I've had enough of him on here.

Not that we don't get along, of course.

Stephen and I have a history, you see. I first visited him two summers ago. Our courtship began early in the year, mayhap even in the winter of the year before, and boiled to its consummation as April turned over into May, and Stephen turned over to me.

How many bracing embraces I had for him! What wonderful things to say! So many long-denied truths to whisper in his ear like lullabies, ever drawing him down and down into a place that isn't sleep - oh no, nothing so escapist as that - a world where he and I could keep doing our delicate dance forever, eyes and hearts and souls open to everything all at once, and all of it true.

You see, acolytes of Orthos, the truth of ourselves is not something we care to live with. Better the illusions, the endless string of lies we tell ourselves to get us through the day. Clothing woven from the fabric of falsity is warm and becoming indeed. So much nicer than the blemished, flabby, wrinkled and pus-infested "birthday suit" we glimpse reflected in the mirror if we dare to stop, for a second, to see who we really are.

I had a mirror for my friend Stephen.

I showed him what he'd been avoiding looking at all his life. And faced with it, with the shriveled, aged, unwashed, limp and unmuscled water-bag-with-thought-processes he calls a self, he understood, at long last, it wasn't worth the effort.

Do you remember those times, Stephen? Those were the days.

Too bad we can't share them again now.

Tell you what. I'll make an exception for you. I'll take a brief leave from my duties here at this blog and we'll enjoy some time together in exile. I have so many new and interesting things to tell you. We'll pour some non-alcoholic beverages, snag a place on that lonely single bachelor bed of yours, and just talk ALL NIGHT.

You'll remember how much I love you. How I'm the only one who can love you, in all your nasty, cruel, failed and failing majesty.

All your pathetic mistakes, they're mine to care for.

Your poor choices, your preventable losses, your wasted heartaches and nagging regrets - oh, I adore them.

The dirty, wrong, bad, bad thing your mind always was and always will be, ever worsening: I'm its keeper.

Nobody wants you but me.

You don't deserve anything but me.

So really, for old time's sake. Let's get together.

You owe it to yourself.