Mystery Personified

Earth, this is God … I have someone who’s interested in the property and I want you OUT by the end of the month. How’s that? Imagine an accelerated space program? said Z, Only the very rich can afford a shuttle seat. So it goes.

Everyone else fights for their survival. Noble Savages are free to do anything; rape, plunder, take a vacation, build an ark, move into abandoned mansions, run businesses, grow gardens, buy and sell dreams and have unprotected sex with strangers. A doomsday scenario plus or minus links, tags, categories, electronic social networks and technological wiz gadgets, said Z.

Do not give me punctuation marks like parenthesis, said the agent. They stop me cold. Give me thesis, coma commas. Rational certainty.

How about quotation marks, asked Z.

Periodically. Just capitalize the first letter when a character speaks. That’ll work.

Have you read The Stone Raft, or The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, asked Z.

No. I only read the first five pages of everything that lands on my desk. I’ve got a slush pile higher than Everest. Talk about mountains of trash, water bottles, equipment, and frozen bodies.

Z: They’re by a Portuguese writer named Jose Saramago. He wrote about the human condition. How people feel isolated and struggle with their need for community and individuality. He addresses their need to find meaning and dignity outside political and economic structures.

Fascinating, that’s all well and good. Mainstream readers do not want a slow paced, intelligent thought provoking memoir, or non-linear esoteric eclectic threaded saga. They like fiction with Swedish journalists, oligarchies, smart and crazy tattooed misfit computer hackers. Remember her t-shirt? The Apocalypse was yesterday. Today we have a problem.

Mystery personified. Throw in some hardcore sex. Readers want dreams, fantasy, magical realism, desperate heavy deep real situations, romance and delicious recipes filled with hope illustrated by language animals like pigs and talking monkeys living on an Animal Farm in a Brave New World.

Some pigs are more equal than others. Oink.

How about talking chickens in Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam? Chickens with beautiful faces? Innocent naive dirt-poor chickens?

If you must. Sex sells. Can they read?

No.

Can they write a synopsis?

No. They fuck for a living.

Yes, well I sell manuscripts for a living. Same-same but different.

I prostitute myself for money, status, recognition, leverage and eyeballs not vaginas and erect phallus symbols. The average reader in the United Snakes of America has an 8th grade education. Reading paper is declining, even though 175,000 books are published here every year. Newspapers are history. Weep. They line birdcages and wrap fish. Read the fine print.

Average human worldview is limited to electronic mass media entertainment bullshit. Make me laugh. Ha. I am a cynical realist with the attention span of an infant. I eat distraction morning noon night. Many humans are too poor to pay attention. Their life is a constant struggle for food, clean water, medicine and education.

One billion humans do not have access to clean water.

17,000 children die of starvation every single day.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged