I had the pleasure to look at this – and some other wonderful calligraphy as FM and I stopped over in Singapore.  Apart from the aesthetic qualities of Katherine Xiao’s work, I was struck by its challenging title.  Crisis and opportunity.  Interesting.

I’ve written in recent times that I am heartily sick of the way almost all mainstream media bombards us with one major disaster after another.  Just before our subscription to the Sydney Morning Herald ran out, I wrote to the editor of the Good Weekend pointing out that they were not presenting us with a very good weekend.  In one edition alone there were three  cancer stories – these are supposed to show us the meaning of courage against awful odds – particularly the one in  the “Two of Us” section where a woman’s diagnosis was followed quickly by her husband falling into his own battle with the big C.  And there was another C story reported plus a person who had brain damage rewiring their working hemisphere to cover the bit that had gone AWOL.  Even the usually humorous Danny Katz was having a shot at someone with deep pockets and short arms dudding his mates during his shout at the pub.  FFS !

Have you noticed that there is so little or no joy in any of this ?  Crisis. Crisis. Crisis.

The end result – or the impact on me is to start  a chain reaction of negative or nihilist thinking.  What’s the point of going on ?  Crisis.  Crisis.  Crisis leads to depression depression depression and an internal voice shouting “Why fuckin’ bother ?”

This is how I’ve been feeling about the Pig’s Arms lately.  It’s a question put to me directly by one of our clearest and deepest thinkers.

Next month, the Pig’s Arms will be three years old.  This makes it an oldy in Internet years, somewhat like the community members.  This last year has seen significant changes, not the least of them being one of our founders and a tireless worker on the blog going feral and abusing the other patrons and generally acting like a dickhead.

I know that most if not all of us forgive our friends and make allowances for their difficult times and I have been deeply impressed by the lengths some of us have gone to help others and show inclusiveness and caring.

Throughout the last few months I’ve seen other regulars taking a particular club to each other and saying things that may not have been intended to wound – but which apparently have felt that way to the recipient(s).  I can’t for the life of me work out why this is so – and yet I did it myself when I was I think, pushed too far.  After a couple of gentle warnings I told the person to fuck off and never come back.  And that’s what has happened and we’re all the poorer.

I’ve felt the pressure of work when it’s been on and the pressure of no work when it’s been off – intruding on my time and sapping my energy for getting behind the bar and keeping the life of the pub a life I think is worth living.

We’ve also seen some of our regular contributors finding their lives in more fertile grounds elsewhere – often for the same reasons as I’ve expressed above.  While I don’t mind patrons using the pub as a conversation space for gardening and television commentary, and Twitter-like announcements about the next excitement-packed dog walk, for example, these are not things I personally find compelling.  But they’re not something to go all abusive over either.

We opened the pub so that we could get pieces published without all the palaver that the ABC laid over Unleashed and their random, conversation-killing moderation.   The Pig’s Arms was and to some extent still is such a place – for exploring creative web writing and generally having a bit of fun.  And having commentary that reflects a willingness to lay a few more courses of bricks over the (sometimes slim) foundations of the posts.

But these days it feels to me like our commenters are happier knocking out each other’s bricks and we don’t seem to be building anything substantial.

From time to time I have felt like either abandoning the pub and leaving the community to its own devices,  but the pub has my name all over the place and it’s a child I prefer to not leave on the street to suffer the vicissitudes of a random and capricious world.  Neither am I easily able to abandon friends or the massive body of work we’ve produced.

So what is my job in what looks to me like a time of crisis for the Pig’s Arms ?  In the real world patrons of a watering hole come and go and come back.  Sometimes they get chucked out for behaving badly.  Sometimes it’s for their own god.  Other times its for everyone’s good.  Sometimes pubs go into hibernation until a new publican is prepared to give the old thing a new lease of life.

Is my concern supposed to be for the people or the pub – or both ?

Since Waz asked the question I’ve been trying to ignore the elephant in the room – this, our porcine crisis.

But now the idea put so elegantly on paper by Katherine Xiao – that with crisis comes opportunity – suggests to me that by asking questions rather than by pretending that everything is hunky dory and just keeping on keeping on, we could drive a crisis into identifying a new opportunity that is a fresh and vibrant as the pub has been in previous years.  Or we could torch the place and let something new rise phoenix-like from the ashes.

In the past some of us have referred to me as “Boss”.  While it’s flattering on one level, some of us will remember that my first published story for Unleashed was “All bosses are bastards”.  Am I proving myself right or what ?

I don’t feel a strong fatherly relationship with the pub any more than I stay wedded to any other of my hair-brained ideas that have been flushed out in the name of a joke.  It’s your pub too.

IS there an opportunity – or just a crisis ?  Is there some good to hand ?

What are you going to do to breathe some life into the Pig’s – or to build the bonfire ?

Or will it be not with a bang, but a whimper ?