Salutations to you, commune reader, assuming you're reading these columns and not merely gazing at the pretty colors while waiting for your Girls Gone Wild video clip to download. Forgive my gruff manner, but the Raoul Dunkin story has taken a swerve and crash lately, and I'm not in the best of moods.

In life you like to feel like you're constantly moving forward, and not backwards. Sometimes it's necessary to take a step backward, then two steps forward, like some kind of insidious conga line of the damned. Let's just say that I'm back in that conga line, stuck in the back with my paws on Sampson L. Hartwig's dusty hips and with Boner Cunningham's Vaseline-coated palms sliding up and down me in a sickly fashion. Back at the commune—neither above nor below hell, just slightly to the left.

A recent court ruling decided that maybe I could pay a judgment debt to the commune and Red Bagel in particular by returning to work here, and I suppose it's fair; or if not fair, un-appealable. I've gotten over arguing with my lawyer and blaming him for everything gone wrong in my life and I'm here to make peace with it all, and introduce myself to you. Not that you haven't had an introduction already, thanks to my friends at the commune; not a day goes by where I don't hear, "Hey! It's Palace Limp-Dick Raoul Dunkin!" or some other witty greeting on the street. Mine will be a little more personal.

I started off at the commune in the beginning of its web birth. I was the first to point out to Red Bagel that a black background and black text make the stories more difficult to read. My thanks was a dirty scowl and a desk drawer full of cooked noodles, which would have been more of a disappointment if I weren't so happy to receive the desk at the time. In short, I helped make the commune what it is today. If you hate me, I don't blame you, I hate myself for it. And since I took off for brighter horizons after we were established, everyone else from that era hates me also. Well, excuse the hell out of me for wanting those nice little perks of a secure job, like being paid in American currency and not having to wear disguises when going into the office. How dare I long for something more than spending drunken nights in the newsroom with the stereo playing, "MacArthur Park" while fearless Editor Red Bagel explains again how the strip searches are necessary to prevent government agents from wiring us in our sleep to eavesdrop on the office.

Until the lawsuit, in fact, I was never so sure of anything in my life as I was leaving the commune for M-TV. Sure, M-TV fired me for lacking "pep," whatever that is, but it set me on the paths of waiter jobs and doing maintenance on the machines at Kinko's that brought me back to writing—serious writing, playwriting. I was doing pretty damn well. My mistake was not more cleverly disguising my life story and, particularly, the Red Bagel character in my play. You got me, Bagel, what can I say? Once you were kind of like a father to me. Now you're completely like a father: I hate your guts and I can't wait until you're dead so I can inherit your rock polisher and other knickknacks. Then you'll finally have done me some good.

But again, this is a minor setback. The Raoul Dunkin story is much longer than this, and this is merely the depressing drunken newsroom "MacArthur Park"-listening conspiracy-drowning calm before the storm. Like Gloria Gaynor, I will survive, and unlike Gloria Gaynor, I will have another hit. Rest assured, though, until that day, Raoul Dunkin will put all his effort into making the commune better than it's ever been. After I have a cigarette. I'm jonesing for one bad.

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