Were Getting The Band Back Together Man!

When the old crew from Fat City News contacted me, I have to admit my palms starting sweating a bit. Did I owe them money? How, and more importantly why, did they track me down? After all we are talking about some potentially treacherous and dangerous individuals here. Talented? Hell yes and basically good people. But we all shared a common short fuse and a penchant for seeking out stories or creating situations where we would end up pushing and daring some fool with a match. The folks at FCN love pyrotechnics and deafening loud bangs followed by the musical sound of shattered glass as it hits the concrete sidewalks where we taught our children to ride a bike. We’ve never physically hurt anybody that any member has acknowledged. We were, and always will be professionals. That alone was cause for my concern. The FCN crew came from all over theses United States and from parts of Canada. (Those are classified for security reasons.) While we have known each other for well over a decade, many of us have never met face to face. There have been a few encounters where a few members met as the Internet and the phone systems were never considered secure. But we have never met all together in one place at one time. Due to that whole short fuse we all share… in retrospect it was probably wise.

I was relieved somewhat when I found out that the reason for the contact was to put a new Fact City News together to be called Phat City News. Apparently some swine cyber squatter had grabbed our old FCN domain and wanted a ransom. We don’t pay ransoms, we don’t negotiate, we adapt.

My first thought was of the Blues Brothers. “Were getting the band back together man!” Well assuming you have seen the movie, you know the mayhem those 7 words brought on to the brothers and all those who agreed to come along. 7- like the seven dirty words you can’t say on TV. 7- like in craps where it can make you a winner or take it all depending on the situation. The 7 original founders of FCN. Seagram’s 7.

I made a deal with them. If they could get at least a quorum of the original crew to sign up, I would be all in. There is no way on earth that if it was gonna happen, that I’d be left out on this second trip into weirdness. While I am still suffering the posttraumatic effects of the first excursion I have always been an advocate of the “Hair of the Dog” healing ideology.

I’m waiting for the others to lumber in, hopefully they will. JB, Rev Carey, and the rest of those who are so talented in the writings of the savage and prefer to look from the inside out rather then just observe. But for now, fears must be put to the side. I must see this through if for no other reason then the fear of missing something really spectacular and explosive. Yeah… Let’s get the band back together man!

TS Penn