Fiction, the Author, and Publishing

Story telling is older than the hills. A good story “gathers food.” It imbeds ideas in its narrative, providing structure as a medium for its message. The “structure” is composed of images that function as anchors for our minds, anchoring our thoughts by association. For example,

She is an evil clown on meds The Hildebeast has three heads. One head has a lip-sticked, smiley face crowned with a stylized coif; from another head issues a shrill voice, rasping out a raggedy chain of hard-ass words; and a third head has eyes that look up, loopy, wide and vacant. The Hildebeast could do no wrong. It is all about her. She tells lies and does self-serving things that bear no consequences. For she is not of this world. She is infused with the negative energies of her overlords. A demon possesses her. Many are enthralled by her evil. It seems that none can stop her idiot machinations. She truly is an evil clown, and dangerous too (as long as people think she is real)!

In 23 Skiddoo the author weaves an imagistic narrative within which he peppers notions of an alternate take on consensual reality and culture trance. It is nothing short of non-fiction (a “red pill” sensibility) brought to life via fiction. The story acts as a container with disparate inner messages. And the readers’ own meaning-making, culled as it is from the writer’s interpretations, is a kind of mirroring process.

As readers get into the action and the thoughts of the narrator—even as that narration shifts from the main character, Sos, to that of Ex or Ivan, or to an omniscient over-soul entity—readers are swept into the narrative while standing in the shoes of a host of actor-narrators. Soon one is caught up in a sort of “noospheric cloud.” Gradually, the container broadens and deepens and pulls together many strands that connect up within its grand, over-arching narrative. The psychic mirror world gets unglued before reassembling itself.

During the process of reading the whole of 23 Skiddoo, the reader gets transported into the culturally mutant world of Sos and company. An empathy forms; the identification is at once stimulating and endearing, and the reader is internally egged-on to know what happens next and to figure out how the various plot strands will eventually coalesce.

In fiction we can impart truths that might otherwise be awkward or unpalatable as non-fiction. And learning where possibilities lead is tricky. Learning where fantasy ends and fact begins—when reality is simply a blurred by-way of our current consciousness anyway—leads us into a new “brave new world” way beyond all normative illusions.

The author professes no ideology or other conditioned mental reflexes. His aim is to upturn certain “givens” and to make people think about how to rise above the System’s animal farm; to question the foundations of everything and then to leave us in a languid, ponderous state. The author is a wily old coot. He just wants folks to see things via his or her own search for the truth. The “absurdity of life” is perhaps his overriding theme. But “life” is a misnomer—where false consciousness reigns, no life exists, only a constant absurdity that becomes “life”—a stupidity; sheer foolishness.

23 Skiddoo is the first of many planned novels. It strives to set the stage for what will follow. Another book is in the hopper, Plight of the Cultural Mutant. Meant as a kind of spin-off of Sos’s grand opus (The Cultural Mutant’s Guide to Consensual Reality and Culture Trance), it is actually a true life story of its author that is, in many respects, stranger than fiction. It covers about 25 years of Wyman Wicket knocking his head against Mammon’s wall, that wall of impenetrable befuddlement. Overall a humorous tale (and even profound, here and there) it’s due out in early 2017. In the meantime also planned are some special forays into social media. So stay tuned.

Reduced to living by his own guile, Wicket has no other recourse than to fall back on his love of pounding out the written word. No one will hire him for anything else, it seems, and in any case, he is less than ambivalent about participating in the corruption of the age and prefers a life of solitary confinement in his own, culturally mutant world. Join him soon as he takes us on yet another crazy-mixed-up tour of the absurd, the abyss, the fictionalized non-fiction of this, our sick age.