My Ragtag Band of Misfits

(Shra, the two-fisted drinker)

This is too good to be true. I’m posting blog updates from my desk in my Washington, D.C. bedroom in the glow of a crackling fire, with my dogs at my feet and my cats snuggling nearby on the bed.

It is almost time for a long winter’s nap. But first, maybe a nice latte?

It’s 2005. After 27 years with Reuters, half of them in senior news positions, I just left the company. I did the math, and a generous buy-out was just too tempting to pass up.

I didn’t think immediately about finding a new job. I had been fortunate enough to work nonstop in the news business since 1967 - that was 38 years of uninterrupted journalism - and I planned to relax for a bit.

A couple of weeks before I was to walk out the newsroom door for the last time, I got a call from the guy who replaced me. He said Reuters had fallen deeply in love with blogs and wanted to create a ton of original content for reuters.com. Did I have any ideas?

I gave him two, one of them a humor blog that would riff off of the news of the day. He then invited me to write both blogs, as a contractor, from my own home.

“Wait,” I responded. “I never get to go to another staff meeting or do another two-hour conference call? I’ll need some time to think about that.”

The gig got off to a slow start. Decades of practicing serious journalism through balanced, impartial stories, had left me without an assertive voice of my own. I had never written in first-person, always lurking in the shadows.

I dug deep to find my inner smartass. I took an immersion course in advanced sarcasm and went to a local target range to practice shooting from the hip.

Gradually, I began to create a wacky persona. I wrote the blog as this average guy who was a magnet for the strange, the ironic, the humorously bizarre. Most of the time, my character was just baffled by the confusing world around him.

Either my blog got funnier or else the readers lowered their expectations, because my daily clicks were growing handsomely. Reuters.com featured some 40 blogs. Mine was always in the top ten, often in first place.

A glossy national travel magazine actually named me as one of the top ten U.S. travel blogs. Pretty good, for someone who never left his bedroom.

I grew to understand how social media worked. I needed to know what kind of people I was appealing to, so I could shamelessly pander to them and increase my audience.

Lots of my readers left their own comments underneath my posts. Usually, they wanted to compete with me, offering their own smartass remarks, outrageous puns and witty word play. These commenters used made-up names, but I could see their real email addresses in the back end of our system. I sent personal emails to ask them about themselves.

What I found was not good. Not good at all.

My readers had absolutely nothing in common. It turned out, anybody can be a smartass. Consider a sampling of what I learned about some of my most loyal regulars:

JustK, an ultraconservative born-again Christian living in a double-wide trailer in East Texas. Played drums in her church choir.

69Spinster, an erudite technical writer in New York, also taught corporate spin classes, hence the name. Most of her comments were written in haiku, because, heck, why not?

Crowgirl, a swineherd in rural England, logged on via ancient dial-up and lived in a shack insulated from the cold by her extensive book collection.

Chris, a high-tech guru in North Carolina, flew his own small plane and sang in a barbershop quartet.

Lady Lala, a Canadian woman who revealed almost nothing about herself and never stepped aside from a persona she had created. She was deeply in love with a recurring blog character, a dimwit named Lamar, and she firmly believed that one day they would be wed. She still believes it.

Jon, an Arizona event planner who was also a Shakespearean actor in community theater. We could always count on him for some brilliantly reworked Cole Porter lyrics that were perfectly relevant to whatever my post was about.

And then there was Shra, a young woman from India who now lived in Edinburgh, Scotland. Shra saw my blog as an opportunity to meet people around the world and then go visit them. What could go wrong with that?

If you read this cast of characters and immediately think, “quirky Off-Broadway play, I can already picture the “Playbill cover,” you’re moving in the right direction.

Sadly, my demographic research had found that I didn’t have a demographic. All of them thought I was funny and clever, but all of them thought they should be writing my blog.

How could I have assembled such a crazy-quilt of readers, who should never have crossed paths with me, or with each other, in real life? Put any two of them together in a third-rate tiki bar, and they would be stabbing each other with miniature umbrellas after two drinks.

I was having the time of my life. The Reuters file, especially the massive daily photo selection, was my candy store.

I found subject matter everywhere. One day, looking at our photo coverage of aerial efforts to control an oil fire, I saw a picture of a plane from Basler Airlines, based in Oshkosh, Wisconsin.

Without skipping a beat, I wrote a post implying that I owned this company as a sideline, and the gag lasted for years. Chris, the blog reader who was a pilot, even visited the Basler home office in Oshkosh and bought me a logo hat.

In an ongoing theme, I tried to resurrect obsolete words. My posts were festooned with rapscallions, hooligans and scalawags. I used the word huzzah a lot, because someone has to.

Meanwhile, somewhat by stealth, Shra – the Indian woman in Scotland with the Chinese character for “travel” tattooed on her ankle – was befriending a number of the regular commenters, arranging meetings with them in their far-flung locales.

It gave me goosebumps to think that these people had become friends just by commenting on my blog.

In November 2011, Reuters pulled the plug on 17 blogs, overnight. They had decided to go in a different direction, eliminating anything that was remotely entertaining, including my two blogs.

Most of them were shut down instantly, but recognizing that I had a vocal and loyal following, they gave me one month to wind down my humor blog.

For that last month, the lid was off. I trotted out all my old blog characters – Lamar, Eugene “Toilethead” Johnson, The Basler BT-67 aircraft, the Goofy Face Museum and Doughnut Shoppe, the entire population of Krasnoyarsk, Siberia. The whole gang.

We all said our good-byes in December 2011. I signed off and I thought that was it.

I was wrong. A few weeks later, I was invited to join a private Facebook group, lovingly created by Shra for zealous former followers of my blog. There were 25-30 members, and this was their chance to show what they could really do.

I felt honored to have been the catalyst for something like that. The world I had created in my blog lived once again in delicious inside jokes that never grew old. But while I was flattered, I figured the effort would quickly lose steam and peter out.

Oops, wrong again. The Facebook group recently blew right past our 11th anniversary, going strong, with most of its members still stopping by for a daily visit.

(Grand Larceny with my pilot friend, Chris)

I have met many of these folks in person. Chris, the barber shop crooner, flew his plane into a private Indianapolis airport to have lunch and to present me with a bottle of Larceny Bourbon. A perfect choice, since I always felt writing my blog was so much fun it should be criminal.

A postscript: In the winter of 2014, Shra visited us at our home in Santa Fe. She was a whirling dervish, a delightful force of nature who told us our guest house was haunted but that she would stay there anyway. She flew out three days later, her suitcase bulging with all the turquoise jewelry she could buy and a pair of red cowgirl boots.

Shra still lives happily in Edinburgh. She’s married now, and just had a baby. My invitation to her wedding arrived a couple of weeks after the event had already been held, a fact that seemed like a perfect metaphor for my ragtag band of misfits.

Huzzah to us, happy hooligans one and all…