Your humble Minister of Agriculture is back online.

After an absence of so long, one would think that I would return with all kinds of fun blogging topics and insightful comments.

Alas, I’ve got neither of those.

So perhaps I will mark my return to Naked Villainy with the tale of a summer visit from an old pal.

Said old pal and I began hanging out in college. We met through the Maximum Leader and another friend, She-who-became-a-monster. I had broken up with a girlfriend who had taken to speaking of marriage. He was carrying on a long-distance relationship with his eventual wife. We played a lot of Diplomacy. We also got thrown out of the college computer lab for playing Mechwarrior too much. Heh.

(Diplomacy if a fun, fun game. We ought to have a Naked Villainy play-by-mail tournament. The anglophiliac Maximum Leader could be England (of course), the pseudo-fascist Foreign Minister could be Germany, the leftist Minister of Propaganda could be Russia, the ever-balkanized-in-his-thinking Minister of Agriculture could be Austria-Hungary. I’m not sure of a good country fit for the Big Hominid or Air Marshal. I’d say France for Kevin based on his love of the language, but that would just be mean. Of course, the rigidly secular Italian state might be a good proxy for the Air Marshal’s skepticism.)

We had some very good times together in that short year of college before he had to leave the ivy-coated nest and fly. I still get the giggles thinking about when we jumped up on the stage during the Rocky Horror Picture show and did the timewarp.

(If only I could timewarp back and remove the girl who went wih us to the show from the otherwise fun memory. Quoth the Maximum Leader: “She’ll cheat on you. She’s cheated on everybody else.” Quoth Smallholder “No she won’t! This relationship is different!” Guess who was right… In fact, Jen could be a whole ‘nother post about how my friends failed to get me to come to my senses about this girl. Of course, we would have to give her a nomme-de-blog first. Any suggestions, lads?)

(Admit it, dear readers, you really missed my off-the-point-asides, didn’t you?)

I also remember all of us getting down at the wattage-in-the-cottage parties. For a really big guy, he was quite a good dancer and attracted a goodly amount of female attention, but never did do much about that attention. The Maximum Leader was there too, but I can’t really say he was dancing with us - it was more of a spastic flailing. But I should talk.

Some of my favorite memories from college are sitting on the porch of The Horseman of Hunger’s house, watching the boys chip golfballs off the hill into downtown Farmville, drinking beer to excess from chilled mugs, arguing politics (particularly the Second Amendment), planning for the future, reading Hunger’s collection of American Heritage (okay - so we were geeks), basking in their jealousy of my girlfriend (before she fulfilled the Maximum Leader’s prophecy).

My bud’s graduation party was also excellent. A late night stroll at the beach with our women, a great volleyball game, and watching my friend’s father get all misty eyed that his boy was all grown up.

I also really enjoy his esoteric knowledge in random fields. I remember his outrage that the rpg shown in an Indiana Jones movie was an anachronism - it wouldn’t be invented until three years after the “Last Crusade.”

He never got me into re-enacting, but I have always enjoyed his stories of life “in the field.”

I don’t get to see him much these days - we live very far apart. But our relationship, even if neither one of us is a particularly good correspondent, is one of those rare childhood friendships that deepens as you get older. As we have become husbands and fathers, I am amazed at how often our ideas and goals are similar. His lovely wife and my dear Sally (both of whom carry the well-earned sobriquet of “long suffering”) have become friends and probably communicate more often then we do.

On his last visit, he came with me to pick up my sweet Bonnie - the Ayrshire heifer that will become our nurse and milk cow. While several of my friends humor me when I go off on farm tangents (and the Maximum Leader is particularly good at humoring me), he is my only friend who actually seems to approach the joy I feel in my heart when working the land.

His response to my re-emergent Christianity has hit the right note. He is perhaps a bit more literal than I, but his Christianity isn’t an in-your-face-everyone-else-is-going-to-hell brand that I find so repulsive in many of my fellow believers. I went through some serious soul-searching at the exact time that the Maximum Leader was rejecting the doctrine of Catholicism. While the Minister of Propaganda seemed personally offended that I was no longer a godless atheist, the subject of this post was a quiet listener.

Well, enough background. My friend’s visit this summer was probably the highlight of my time off. We got to spend some good family time, hung around the farm, played with our girls, shared parenting tips, celebrated our impending familial additions, talked philosophy, and, one night when the girls were asleep, got good and damn drunk with my father-in-law. And nearly burned down my in-laws’ new house at Wintergreen.

But the best part of the whole visit was watching our progeny frolic together. His daughter is a wonderful, precocious, sweet-tempered child. Watching two year olds share conisistently with each other must be the eighth wonder of the world.

Now, my life is pretty darn good. (Is this why I am an uninspired blogger? If only I was more tormented like Skippy and Kilgore…) I have a great family, TWO jobs that I love, and live on my own nine ares of paradise.

But without minimizing all those blessings, life would be even better if we could hang out more often.

Here’s a symbolic beer raised to the Foreign Minister.