Friends of RandBall: It is with sadness that we announce to you the retirement of Clearance Clarence, the popular weekly guest post from commenter Clarence Swamptown. The door is always open for occasional guest posts. But the weekly stuff is no more. We'll let the man, Clarence Swamptown, explain: ---------

I've been wrestling with this decision for quite a while, but regretfully I need to retire from writing a weekly Clearance Clarence post for the RandBall.

As you know, it hasn't been a "weekly" post for quite some time. My kids' activities continue to grow and my responsibilities at work continue to expand, and I just keep finding it harder and harder to give a weekly post the time it deserves. ... I made a commitment to write once a week, and as silly as it may sound, it makes me feel bad to continually break that commitment. I know it's just a goofy weekly post and it shouldn't take a lot of effort to Photoshop a kestrel holding Matt Tolbert in its razor-sharp talons, but I'm not a writer and I'm not very smart to begin with, so drafting these things takes me more time than it should.

I'll continue to comment from time to time; that'll never change. And I know there are people out there that would absolutely kill for the opportunity to write whatever they want on a major-market newspaper's web site once a week. But it's time to retire from this thing before I start just going through the motions every week and overstaying my welcome and then Al Davis tries to resurrect my career but I simply have no explosion off the snap anymore and I become a shell of my former self and have to join a dance competition reality show and then inexplicably end up on Larry the Cable Guy's Comedy Central Roast. Anyway, it's been an absolute blast doing this for the last few years. And it's just so incredibly cool that you ever decided to give a weekly space to this weirdo in the first place. I can't thank you enough.