I was a dark and stormy knight

I sat at my desk, with the rain pouring like blood from a Tarantino flick. The lousiest title I ever saw. What first words could be worse than this I thought. It would only get worse if I talked about a chick walking into the room. I decided to leave that part for later. It was a cold Sunday evening in hell, with depression looming over the desk like Damocles' sword. I was wondering what a good setting would be for blogs like this- self referrential? A tale within a tale? Car chases? How about a little fantasy thrown in for good measure? Should I be allowed to digress and rant about the world in general while silently screaming out my story? That's when I remembered this great game that I had played, based on Terry Pratchett novels. "A great guy," Jalan would say, "Knows how to write. Perhaps he even knows how to code. I wonder if he ever was a spy like the Winamp guy." That rhymes.

A desk. That would be a great start wouldn't it. It would have to be a desk. A nice oaken desk from a tree cut in the middle of the quad so that Bishop Berkeley would have fits over his existentialist angst. So would Pussy Verghese, for that matter, but that's a different story. Now, we need an office. A damp, dark room in a student's hostel would have to do, I suppose. Frozen rivers, molten mountains and all that. It would, also, have to be raining. Now, that's a must. Where would noirs be if there wasn't any rain, I asked myself. Finally, there came the texture of the story. What would the Maltese Falcon be, if it were in colour eh? So, my tale would be in black and white, with many a fine shade of grey (or gray) to interest the keener observers of the story. There would be none, I'm sure. I'm also quite sure that no one wishes to actually read. Everyone is just caught in this loop of reading each others blogs and linking it in theirs. I, on the other hand, have no idea how to do this. I'm told its rather easy, but ever since I realised I was getting old, I had absolutely no enthusiasm to put on a great show on a blog, for heaven's sake.

As I was saying, it was a cold Sunday evening in hell, when the door opened and she... no let's not bring that in yet. I'm more interested, at the moment, in setting the scene. So, on this cold Sunday evening, I was staring at a warg. Many may think that a warg is a frightening werewolf slobbering all over your face as it bites chunks out of your abdomen. Not quite. A warg, in this tale, is one of many spiders that inhabit the corners of my room. I pay the rent, they board for free. In exchange for this, they try to eat all the mosquitos and allow me to stare at them and make comments gratis. One may now hazard asking what I was doing in a damp, dark room on a cold Sunday evening in hell. Well, I was working. That was for sure. I work all the time. You could say that I'm unemployed. But you wouldn't; for then you'd hear a squelch, crack, angels flying about your head. My ma uses the rolling pin rather well.

Let me introduce myself. A hundred years ago, a band of people, who were also unemployed, decided to go about trying to right lefts, to wring wrongs and to act very pompous. Since they were health fanatics and disliked references to underwear, they refused to take up names like garters or stockings or any such animal. They wished to exalt the one thing that they had believed would change the very face of the earth. They were the Order of the Paperweight. Over the last hundred years, the Order has lost many members. Many lost sight of the original ideals and were forced to serve penances for life. Times are such that the order is now dying. Only one man now is able to weather the harsh discipline, luxury dinners, orgies and rain that the job throws up. I am the last of the Order. I am a dark and stormy knight.