Here’s some information that might blow your mind (it certainly makes it difficult for me to sleep at night):

Neopoleon.com, over the course of three years, has gone from roughly 30 page views per month to nearly one million.

Yeah. No kidding.

Granted, the breakdown of reader traffic is a little weird.

It’s still a decent chunk of readership, though.

And, rather than feeding the blazing inferno that is my ego, it’s actually causing me to shrink a bit and feel not unlike a man’s private parts in a cold winter lake.

I miss the good old, carefree days when my site was only getting, you know, like, 700,000 page views per month. Back then, I could say anything I wanted.

Now I have to deal with the knowledge that, each time I compare my ego to a man’s shrinking private parts, it’s getting read by all sorts of strange people from all over the world.

This is an incredible burden. Not only do I not have the self-loving sort of egotesticular megalomania necessary to support this situation, I’m also concerned that all the companies you people work for are going to figure out what’s going on and send me a bill for all the time you’ve wasted at work while refreshing my page to see if I’ve put up a new webcam image (I haven’t).

To spread this burden (and financial/legal responsibility), I’ve decided to start a new site. This is something I’ve been planning on for a while, but the conditions weren’t right until very recently.

Basically, I didn’t want to do it alone. Neopoleon.com has been described to me as “The Cult of Rory.” That’s kind of weird, and I didn’t want this next site to be another CoR.

So, I, for lack of a better word, hired another writer. “Hire” probably isn’t the right term here since I’ve been paying him in sandwiches, but that’s more wealth than he’s seen in the totality of the previous 28 years of wasted time that is the graveyard of shattered dreams and failures he collectively refers to as his “life.”

He’s someone I’ve been wanting to work with for a long time. I never thought I’d get the chance, but he called me a few weeks ago to say hi. In the course of our conversation, I learned that:

– His girlfriend had just dumped him

– His band had just broken up like a piece of space debris hitting the atmosphere at completely the wrong angle

– He was a minor celebrity among bill collectors

– His cat recently walked into the room with a suitcase packed full of little cat belongings, spat on him, and left

– He hadn’t eaten since 1997

– If his self-esteem could be measured in a physical sense, it would be about the size of a man’s private parts in a cold winter lake

“Score” was the only thing that came to mind. I feigned sympathy for as long as I felt necessary, but knew that the time was right. He was alone, penniless, hungry, and had come to understand that he was a complete waste of space on this planet, that nobody loved him, and that nobody wanted to. For me, it was manna from heaven.

In his emotionally weakened state, he agreed to work on this new site with me. We drew up a contract describing the size of the sandwiches he would work for, as well as the frequency with which they would be delivered to his rotting little shithole of a box in the ghetto, and got to work.

Since then, we’ve written enough material to start several sites. All typical-Rory-flippant-cynicism aside, I’m very proud of what we’ve accomplished. He’s smarter and funnier than I am (which is probably why he’s so poor), and he’s pushed me to become a better writer.

Our plan is to launch the new site on May 1st. Until then, updates here will be a bit sparse. I still have a bunch of crap I want to post, but I’ve been spending the majority of my “creative time” working on the new site, as well as clever ways never to have to pay my writing partner.

The last thing I’ll leave you with today is a short video which pretty well sums up the past few weeks for me. It’s a brief film of my new writing partner, doing something. I don’t know what to call it, but it certainly deserves a title and a home in the Completely Idiotic Things That Humans Do and From Which They Have Received Brain Damage Hall of Fame.

Yes. I’m betting my creative future on this man:

He’ll do that at parties for sandwiches, by the way.

Yup. My future’s looking really bright…