The Original Cyberpunk shuts the door to The Ranting Room with a familiar bang:
“So,” I said at last. “To what do I owe the honor of this visitation?”
Nixon seemed momentarily startled to notice me there, and then recovered quickly and offered up a small smile. “Farewell visit? After all, this is how The Ranting Room began: with you, channeling for me.” He smiled again, weakly this time, and shrugged. “Word gets around. So when I heard that you were retiring—”
“I am not retiring,” I protested. “I’m just reordering my priorities. There’s the new blog—”
“You’re retiring,” he said. “Or at least retiring as the creator and chief writer of The Ranting Room. You’re getting onto that big old helicopter, throwing one last great big ‘V’ to the crowd, and riding off into the sunset.
I considered The Ranting Room to be one of the Internet’s best resources for would-be writers. Here’s hoping that The Friday Challenge will turn out to be similarly useful. As for the Chinese Curse of the coming years revealed by the saturnine shade, all I can say is that I feel humbly grateful to be blessed with such a morbidly dark sense of humor.