Cards on the table: a lot of what we’ve said in these little communiques hasn’t made any sense. Which isn’t to say that we lied or didn’t mean what we said or in any way ever took this space for granted. We’ve always used it on some special occasion (and, alright, occasionally when content fell through) to tell you guys something about how we were feeling about our time and our place and the strange circumstances that found us spinning through space and — aw, hell there we go again. The point we’re trying to make here is that, even if how we were feeling was sometimes so uncontrollably potent that it overcame our very ability to express it via the conventions of standard English, we still felt we could just go ahead and say it because we knew you were on the other end.

And now we’re here, across the bottom of the page, to tell you how we’re feeling one last time.

Old Jack said it best: the sooner we started realizing the implications of this hat we were wearing, the sooner we stopped thinking of it as a hat at all. As the Hold Steady put it, we had some massive nights up here in the WEEKEND lounge, nights when things were booming and nights when things were crashing in around us and we had to think fast and act faster or face the worst music of all: the kind made by the Insane Clown Posse. In many ways, we were handed a concept without definition, a name whose only denotation was the two or three days at the beginning or end of the week, depending on where your calendar’s from. (To this day, Gabriel swears the week begins with Lunes, but we don’t speak Italian or whatever, so we’ve never really known what he meant.) Either way, we like to think that we took this piece of Play-Doh and filled our nostrils with its lemony scent and molded it into something really great, like a Godzilla-type thing, or an astronaut. Hell, maybe we made them both and had them fight each other so fiercely that they glommed together to make a half-Godzilla, half-astronaut baby — metaphors are weird like that.

But we did that almost every week, even weeks when, to be quite honest with you, we weren’t feeling up to it, because we were convinced that what we were doing here was important. Sure, we were never Stephen Harper important, or even Bob Rae important, but we’d like to think — and would like to hope — that we brought you voices and views and glimpses into worlds you would have never thought about before. There’s a lot of wonder around this campus, and lots of people trying to harness it any way they can. For those people, we want them to know that there will always be a place in WEEKEND for them, because that’s what we do.

Even when we’re gone after this week, that spirit will live on. We’re sure that whoever they’ve sent from corporate to replace us and destroy our memory units will be just swell. Or anyway, that’s what they tell us.

We hate to keep quoting, but our own voices have become so hoarse. And as Michael Stipe said it last week, we’d like to put it to you: “We built something extraordinary together. We did this thing. And now we’re going to walk away from it.”