Sketch: Big Jim Murphy makes his triumphant return to the scripted portion of the program in a scene where Kaleb hops a train. He's running from somebody. But who, right? Who's he running from? That's the suspense that drives the scene, see.

Show: No matter how self-loathing I may get in my moments of darkness, I am figuring out how to keep it funny as a one-man act, and I aim to get there one of these days. But in the meantime I'll settle for being a cut-rate picaresque leading man.

I talk about drought. About the central valley and the whole working-class California thing. I talk about William Shatner somehow. I talk about rambling off to an assortment of small towns. I talk about Mark Twain and Bret Harte - the dead guy, not the wrestler - and Rip Van Winkle and all this other old stuff, because I'm being suffocated by my books. Someday my books will kill me.

Big Jim Murphy is no longer co-hosting. It's just ol' Kaleb and you good people for the forseeable future. Maybe the weather will change and Big Jim will come back. Maybe he'll even be replaced by somebody in a few months. Who knows. But for now we're going to figure out how to make this work as a solo show.

Jim will still be here for every episode, hopefully, as a sketch partner. We'll write a whole mess of sketches and bank two or three months worth pretty soon. It wasn't a falling out or anything that caused this, you know - just a scheduling problem that no longer seemed correctable.

Anyway, I guess I can quit doing that fake third person thing where I pretend I'm an anonymous editor. Here's what I did this week.

I wrote and read a short story. It was a rough draft but I had to replace the slot where a sketch would normally go and didn't have a whole bunch of time to do it. I'll try to avoid doing those again. I don't know how short stories work as a literary form. I just like telling rambling pseudo-campfire stories.

I explain how I'll try and make the show evolve as a one-man operation. Guest host possibilities etc.

I also talk a lot, a lot, about diners and Buddy Guy. But it's not what I'm talking about, you know, it's how I'm talking about it. Personality and narrative cohesion and tone and melody and all this. It doesn't matter that these topics are irrelevant. Relevance doesn't matter. Don't you understand? That's what I've been trying to do for years. I've been trying to say that the news cycle doesn't matter; that we're allowed to talk about old and boring things; that we shouldn't have to try and engineer social capital through manipulation of the ~thought marketplace~ and Google rankings.

Damn it. I'm sorry I wrote all that. It's 2:30 in the morning and I'm waiting to get my brother up for his shift and I can sure type, it just doesn't come out lucid. Time to pack it in. Y'all take care now.

Sketch: Kaleb and James are crooked prison guards.

Show: Kaleb rambles around through Bakersfield and the most nowhere parts of Los Angeles County he can find. This leads to a confrontation at a motel. We talk about the rights of photographers, resolving conflict with the potential of violence, The Twilight Zone, Tripadvisor, and old timey apocalyptic rhetoric from presidents.

James reads a commercial for the first time ever. It's worth it. Trust us.