Down in the FourStory Wine Cellar/Rumpus Room

by Jim Washburn

We’ve been having a little discussion among ourselves in the FourStory wine cellar/rumpus room, here at our mountain redoubt. We’ve been wondering about what we’re about. Are we fish or fowl, consonant or vowel, reporting graft or grout? Or homeless and housing or glib lefty grousing, are we all-in or all-out? So we’ve been wondering.

There has been a good deal of mission creep at FourStory in lo these many years since we debuted. Before we crept down to the wine cellar/rumpus room, for example, we were all up in the newsroom, producing decidedly drier copy pertaining almost exclusively to issues about or directly related to affordable housing. In a drawer upstairs somewhere we even have a mission statement to that effect.

It quickly became apparent that dry reportage wasn’t our strong suit. It’s like having Edgar Allen Poe do a diagnostic on your Prius. What the fuck did he know about hybrids? Not that we didn’t produce compelling, important stuff, but most of us are not fact-based life forms. As individual writers, that’s not generally where we made our reputations, such as they are. So we drifted on the site to writing stuff that was more us, and also more what our regular readers, such as they are, expect from us.

The problem in that, and in what we’d initially attempted on FourStory, is that no one was reading it. I’m not ignoring you, dear reader, we’re grateful for each and every one of you—and I can see you in my magic mirror on your birthdays—but, by Internet standards, we barely register a pulse. I don’t know our exact number of hits, but I do know that it is as nothing compared with, say, a YouTube video of a six-year-old getting Spaghetti-Os up his nose.

You know that “If a tree falls in a forest …” question? Without viewers/readers, we are that tree, and the answer is it does make a sound—the sound of a toilet flushing. Without sufficient viewers/readers, we are not enticing sponsors or advertisers, meaning money goes out and doesn’t come in, and eventually that becomes untenable, not to mention making us sad.

There will be some changes made here, not the desperate flailings of a drowning beast, but instead a syncopated shifting of gears, like the circa 1974 James Brown band going from funky movement to funkier movement. Uh huh.

If something doesn’t change, there is a distinct possibility the FourStory site will cease to be before long. We’ll be doing what we can to save ourselves—i.e., throwing children out of the lifeboat—but I am also hopeful that you, dear reader, will participate, with advice on what you’d like to see on the site. I’ll blow Spaghetti-Os out my nose if it gets us hits.

Also, please help spread the word about FourStory. If you see an article you like, please, please forward it to others you think might enjoy it.

When a comely mate in a bar asks for your email, give him or her the FourStory.org address instead. Carve it on bus seats. Talk the site up on your hit TV show. If you don’t have a hit TV show, go get one. Blast the word out to your social network via Twitter, vuvuzela and that other “with it” stuff.

I don’t do social media, mainly because I already hear from just about everybody I want to. If the phone, doorbell and email just aren’t portals enough to visit, then try posting an eBay ad I would notice. (Something along the lines of “Vintage Convict-Made Guitar, Real Soap Bar Pickups” does the trick). But in the weeks ahead I’ll get hip to Facebook and such, to also do my part to spread the word, because I have rather taken for granted what a dream job it is to have a venue where I can do writing I like, one where the editing actually makes the articles better. Unless you’ve been in the word biz for decades, you have no idea how rare that is.

One thing it would do us well to hear from you is how narrow or diffuse you think our focus should be. Here, for example, is info and a petition about a soldier serving in Iraq who likely won’t have a home to return to, thanks to JP Morgan Chase’s onerous loan modification policies. Maybe you can help change that, by putting pressure on Chase.

That’s an example of a story that’s at the core of our mission statement. But there are also stories like this, a Democracy Now piece on a Brown University study that our Bush-born wars have actually cost US citizens around $4 trillion, which DN places in context to the looming potential cuts in Social Security, Medicare, housing assistance, etc.

It’s not such a direct connection, but the thigh bone connects to the neck bone. When there’s a storm brewing that’s threatening to blow affordable housing and everything else in our social fabric to pieces, is it somehow not a housing story because everything else is being pulled asunder? Let us know what you think.

And now, a word from my ants: “Please help make FourStory succeed, O two-legged ones. We feel so bad about living under Jim’s roof and not paying a goddamned cent of rent. When he writes about us on FourStory, he gets paid, and we feel then we’ve done something to earn our keep. It also allows him to purchase “alternative” ant eradication products which, frankly, amuse us.”

This week, Leslie sent me a video of an expert extolling the virtues of Dr. Bronner’s Peppermint Soap as a substance that makes ants go away. Along with its soapishness, the strong peppermint scent is supposed to disrupt the ants’ sense of smell, causing them to lose the trail other ants have made to your desirable places.

I should have known better: Outside, ants are living in my mint plants, for Christ’s sake. But this guy’s an expert, so I painted the back house’s points of ingress and egress with Bronner’s, then whole sections of the floor. Not only did this not deter the ants, it seemed to amuse them.

And here’s something amusing for the whole family: Did you know Dr. Bronner himself makes a brief cameo in The Homeless Ventriloquist, my ongoing novel, of which FourStory kindly now hosts 36 chapters, each packed with mirth and avulsions? At any rate, Bronner’s in there, unnamed. The first reader to recognize him will win a Snickers bar from me. I’ll bet Huffington Post never does that for you.

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