It’s hot, I’m full of angst and aimless, multi-directional impulses, so I think now is a good time to grab the reins here at Nola Studiola for a couple months’ sojourn. Yours truly Alison Barker is back to update you on all things Barker, including Lost Boy, his Mustache, the politics and evolving philosophy on her invisible, swollen profession of book reviewing and criticism, her novel (only a little–otherwise all the magic seeps out!) and the current quest to Live in New Orleans and Not Lose All Sanity/Gain More Magic I Seek.

So much! We’ll start with the fact that it’s more or less eight months in, and Ms. Barker and Lost Boy are still going strong. Of course, many of those months (I lost count) Lost Boy was either holed up on an international vessel off the coast of Equitorial Guinea or performing ship’s husbandry in one of our major naval base port cities–but overall, I think we get to check the 8 month-ish box.

To the right is an obligatory image that should appear on lifestyle/personal essay blogs. In which the female writer shows off humble attempts at some DIY undertaking.

So that box is also checked.

Further/as I mentioned above: Lost Boy has a mustache. Really, it’s a Mustache. It’s got its own accessory hair products, signature finger twirl maintenance gesture, and in some ways its own social life. Lost Boy, never what you’d call a “hipster” in most definitions of the word, has, with his mustache, attracted a sturdy, if transient, young twenty-something male hipster following. Really I should say it’s his Mustache that has garnered the following. But Lost Boy and the Mustache–often inextricable this hot, sultry summer of 2014, in which, in a cruel twist of fate, I have just as little AC and almost as little employment as I did when I first wrote you, dear readers, from this blog perch two years ago.

I will use Nola Studiola for a few weeks while we prepare some new content partnership (!) and design a New Orleans call for curators. Here’s an in-between Studiola residency of my own, to blow off some steam that accumulates when an underemployed writer cohabitates with a commercial diver, and tries to write and love and live in New Orleans. So.

Back again. Still here.

Who’s keeping track?