Meet the Co-Blogger

So, all right — I didn’t post an entry yesterday.

Well, let’s just say that after last week, when I posted not one but TWO entries on not one but TWO separate days*, I thought, y’know, I could afford to relax.

As those of you who (like me) try to post something every day already know, the world sometimes gets in the way. Family must be attended to. Bills must be paid and, uh, well, wages must be earned with which to pay them — we’re not just talking about writing checks here. Meals must be prepared. And yes, sadly, sleep must be had. To say nothing of writer’s block and the occasional drying-up of the well of draft posts.

None of that was responsible for my absence yesterday. No, yesterday my blogtime was given over entirely to training an helpmeet, as the expression goes — someone to stand in for me when Things Happen. In today’s post, I simply introduce him to you.

Meet Flj. That’s him, over there at the right.

Allow me to do a quick resume, bullet-point style:

• Yes: Flj is a [whispering] gargoyle. (He doesn’t care for that word — apparently it means something quite ugly in his native tongue — although he has agreed to let me use it here and will sometimes lapse into it himself for the sake of communication with us mere humans. One rule, however: if I use it he has asked me to de-emphasize it, by displaying it in gray. So gray it shall be.)
• His name is pronounced like our “flange,” and that’s how I’ll refer to him. He’ll try to remember to do so himself, in his own entries. Apparently gargoyles, despite their fearsome appearance, will happily accommodate human limitations in order to transact business.
• English (really, any human language) is not his native tongue. Expect a certain, um… let’s say a certain infelicity of expression. For the curious, he and I communicate via GSL. I will add that he looked shocked and then laughed uproariously when I first asked if he would like to be my co-blogger; apparently the term means something altogether different in gargoyle-speak.
• Like many of us, Flange declines questions about his date of birth. But he quite happily reports his age: 807.5 human years (which makes him roughly 34 gargoyle years old).
• Flange has (obviously) spent his entire life as a gargoyle. However, he has been a professional gargoyle for only 731 (human) years. He claims to be very good at it. And if you want to know more about what “it” might entail, I will simply refer that question to Flange to answer for himself, somewhere down the line.

How this will work: on days when real life intrudes, I will simply turn the floor over to Flange. We expect that on some of these occasions, Flange’s own “workload” may make it impossible for him to handle it right then and there; at these times, RAMH might go a day with no post at all. (I’ll add a new posting category just for posts of his, so you can view them all at once if you want.)

Flange has also requested permission to interject side-remarks from him in posts of my own. I still haven’t made up my mind about this but, if I okay it, I’ll be sure to indicate that it’s Flange speaking at the moment, and not I myself — perhaps by flagging the remark with an icon-sized copy of the image above.

I haven’t placed any restrictions on Flange’s subject matter. Of course, you know by now that I myself try to be as mild-mannered and inoffensive as possible and avoid Hot Topics like the proverbial plague. But Flange is, well, he’s not exactly human now, is he? So he may get into areas I’d skip over, and he may cover some of my own turf but in a… a less circumspect manner. I reserve the right to edit his posts after the fact but if I do so, I’ll take care to preserve his original wording in strikethrough form, like this.

(My weekly Friday whiskey river-driven entry will never be turned over to Flange, however.)

Oh, by the way, you may be interested in that photo. As I understand it — my grasp of GSL continues to evolve, so don’t take this as gospel — gargoyles never move when there’s a human looking at them. During even fleeting moments of human inattention, though, gargoyles may accomplish all sorts of tasks, like saving the world, procreation, and getting their wings groomed. (They manage this via clever manipulation of the fabric of what Flange keeps calling “grswld,” which I think possibly translates as “space-time.”)

That said, Flange assures me that he has one other pose in which we may see him from time to time. It looks sort of like the one above, but facing in exactly the opposite direction. I can confirm that he sometimes adopts this alternative pose.

Flange’s first post will appear sometime this week. For now, he’s asked me to add this greeting “from the humble depths of my soul as a gargoyle“:

Is on, this mikerphone? Hello human reederz of blog, this. Flj Flange exist only to surv human John’s needs.

I flexwings, my, in honor, you.

You flexwings, your, in honor, Flj Flange, no?

Only fiar, Flj Flange think.

Thank you very much for your help, Flange. I think I’m looking forward to working with you.

As for the rest of us: tomorrow, blogging per usual.

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* And where were you with your calendar and your adding machine and your sneering raised eyebrow THEN, eh, o ye of snarky-accountant mentality?