QFTOD part 3rd

I’m grieved to report that my co-author has not given up on our joint project, and continues to contribute to what might have been a spine tingling psychological mystery were it only the work of my own brain. We’ve recently passed a sort of a landmark in our collaborative history, the two of us – we’ve now worked together on a piece for longer than one month. Not only have we never even previously achieved three weeks of continuous collaboration, we’ve never even achieved three weeks of speaking to each other. I ascribe this sad achievement to the natural erosion of my personal standards over time. As a young man, at full strength and vitality, I would have no natural reason to accept substandard work under my name. During humanity’s hunter gatherer epoch, a young man’s ability to contribute his strength to the tribe’s hunting effort assured his value to the tribe, and meant he required less patience with the ignorance of others. But as the older man’s weakness and slowed step reduced his value, he had to ingratiate himself to others, smiling at idiotic jokes, nodding thoughtfully at poorly expressed notions, cheerfully submitting to the regular desecration of his cave paintings at the hands of his ignorant co-artists. This natural progression is now stamped in my DNA, and finds expression in:

The Quest for the Orange Dragon Episode III

Case File: 102761083 (continued)

Before we leap forward through the first few weeks of Values and Principles Camp to the meeting with Candace and Tree, I should describe the main unifying factor in Kyle and I’s friendship. I’m talking about the main unifying factor at the camp – before the alien microorganisms and before Emmitt’s reign of terror. I’ve mentioned the deer pictures, but our friendship truly blossomed over hatred of Jiggles and Minestrone, our roommates in the basement of Stansbury Lodge. Vincent “Minestrone” Maltisanti and Jason “Jiggles” Gregerson occupied the other bunk bed in our dungeon room, at first. This arrangement lasted about 5 minutes after Jiggles claimed the top bunk on their side, when Minestrone came in with his backpack and began cursing at Jiggles for taking the top. Kyle and I occupied the other bunks. I had given Kyle the top bunk because I didn’t like top bunks. I believe that at some point on that first day I unwisely told Jiggles or Minestrone or the room in general that I preferred to be on the bottom, and elicited guffaws from Jiggles and Minestrone. “You like being a bottom?” Minestrone asked me. Hilarity.

For the first few minutes after entering the room, Minestrone sat impatiently on the bunk below Jiggles for a half second, berating Jiggles, rather tiresomely, for farting. Then he suddenly lunged over and grabbed Kyle’s garbage bag of sad belongings and began pulling out Kyle’s clothes, slapping Kyle’s hands away and ignoring his unfortunately shrill protests. I remember being a little irritated at Kyle for the pathetic tone of his voice, all the while I lay quietly on my bunk, studiously drawing invisible circles in the wooden sideboard with my finger.

At some point Minestrone hit bully gold, a pair of briefs that Kyle indicated to me, months later, had been washed with another pair, a red pair of spider man briefs, once kyle’s favorite, that he’d worn a little too much, that had on more than one occasion stained the other undies in the wash pink. The stained pink undies had been left for Kyle to wear as punishment, and despite his struggles to do away with them over the years, his loving stepmother had managed to sneak a few pair into the garbage bag she’d thoughtfully provided for his camp. Which Minestrone found, and displayed. Kyle jumped down to retrieve them, providing what for the hazing profession is the creme de la creme of humor, a small person attempting to retrieve their belongings from a taller person who can easily hold the item out of reach. This went on for a few precious moments, ending when Minestrone slung the undies out the door for the amusement of the lads milling aimlessly in the hallway. After Kyle dashed out to get them, Minestrone climbed into the bunk above me with his bag. I was able to hide the unhappiness this turn of events caused me by continuing to carefully trace the invisible circles in the wood grain.

I know that most non-sandbox kids will struggle, after reading the passage above, to understand how Kyle and I could become friends after I completely failed to help him with the bullying by Minestrone, especially after understanding that I never really did help him, with more than a few feeble comments now and again, in the tiresome weeks of harassment that he would go on to endure at Values and Principles Camp, at the hands of Jiggles and Minestrone and others, and on very rare occasions from the Gad boys, to whom I imagine we two were barely noticeable members of the wussy Dan kids. I endured a milder version of the same treatment as Kyle, and was secretly glad that Jiggles and Minestrone bothered Kyle more. At times, when the two of us were alone, we would savage our roommates with satiric wit, and complain about the lodge’s deer imagery. So we bonded enough that he introduced me to Candace and Tree at the Camp’s first coed social, and I became entangled with their club.

This was the Dinosaur Club, begun by Candace and Tree when they were little kids. The original members of the club were Tree, Candace, Billy, and an imaginary Rabbit named Clive, inspired by Harvey, Tree’s all time favorite movie. They made Kyle a member of the club in the fifth grade. Members of the club had to have a dinosaur name. Kyle was Kiplodocus Quintoplex. Tree assigned all the names. She gave me a name too; Diggory Dellosauros Sexplex. I think you may have gathered at this point that a certain level of Childishness prevailed in the club, and you would be correct. Tree had a fetish for Infantilism that passed for adolescent irony and wit amongst other teenagers. I found it charming at first; playing with plastic dinosaurs at the club meetings, eating stolen candy; listening to Candace and Tree’s incessant baby-talk. They were girls, after all. So joining them for an absurd slumber partyish meeting in Sunbeam lodge, where the occasional pre-school kids visiting camp with parents stayed, was an ecstatic experience. Everyone wore dinosaur t-shirts and gym clothes and we moved our toy dinosaurs around and pretended they were talking to each other. It’s hard to believe, looking back years later, after everything, that this nonsense eventually led to our becoming a temporary superhero team. And my first and second marriage. And an abortive career in pharmaceuticals

QFTOD 2nd installment

I feel like I’ve probably mid-judged my beloved readers, underestimated their taste and aesthetic standards, possibly insulted the years of loyalty they’ve shown Sperberspeak by introducing a coarser element into my fantasy sci fi novel; “The Quest for the Orange Dragon”, in the person of my former friend and ex-employer John Hagen, a decidedly low-brow sort of writer with no aesthetic morals but a sad and warped desire for money and fame. I would feel like I owed these readers something special in this next installment, more of a wise but worldly tone, a call for social justice, some pithy words about the president, characters they can admire and care about, lushly worded descriptions that could be dropped unceremoniously into the very center of an NPR podcast without the merest ripple of discord. But since these loyal readers do not exist I will forgo this guilt induced effort, and settle calmly, numbingly, into the passive, effortless editing of Mr Hagen’s awkward, cringingly indulgent script, without the vexation of an audience. To use a tennis term, we will continue to pursue that blissful zen state of mind only possible when one is serving to the wall, secure in the predictability of the return.

The Quest for the Orange Dragon Episode II

Case File: 102761083 (continued)

I should admit right now, before leading you into a false assumption, that I myself was in a vulnerable state, socially speaking, at the time that Brother Baynard foisted Kyle’s friendship upon me. It’s embarrassing to describe this, even now, in my current state, but I began to spin a narrative with Kyle’s female friends, Candace and Tree, later that month, at the first camp stomp, of myself as a popular boy, the well-liked class clown, who heroically extended his protective friendship over Kyle, and saved him from horrible bullying from the rough Gad boys who sort of terrorized the camp. I was eager to ingratiate myself with Candace especially, in order to overcome a fairly negative impression I had made the previous school year when I had on a few occasions joined in with other boys in a certain group which I always called the “Bjorn” group, after a kid named Bjorn that everyone in the group and the outer Oort Cloud of the group had complex feelings for. I would describe myself as being in an elliptical orbit around the inner Bjorn group, not quite in the Oort Cloud of the group like some others but not huddled around in cozy orbit around Bjorn. Anyway, the boys in the more inner positions of the Bjorn system had on a few occasions made some merry comments on the subject of the size of Candace’s physical being. She was a taller than average girl from a family of physically massive people, with dirty blonde hair that she had chosen to cut boy short, in a weird helmet hair looking style. Her shirts were all sport jersey tees that were handed down from older brothers, and which effectively camouflaged her breasts, and her pants were all sweats, because she could not fit into women’s jeans, not I must emphasize because she was fat in the traditional way but because her legs and arms and hips were meaty. I describe her appearance to explain the five month turnaround in my own treatment and estimation for my first girlfriend. But eight months before, whatever my own inner estimation of her BMI, the flotsam and jetsam of the Bjorn system called her fatty. I am afflicted with a compulsion to be funny in any social setting, and this compulsion achieves an irresistible strength in the presence of a group with which I desire to ingratiate myself, and if I desire to ingratiate myself with a group I do not seem to possess the self respect necessary to rise above whatever moral limitations the members of the group may struggle with. So on those occasions, when I might have behaved admirably, like a true hero in the books I avidly read, I instead joined in the cruel fun with particularly pointed jibes that on the later occasion, when I had changed the focus of ingratiation to Candace and her group, caused me a great deal of regret and shame. In order to overcome this previous bad impression, I found it necessary to give in to my other compulsion, also irresistibly strengthened by the urge for approval, which is to lie.

So I lied by giving the impression of myself as a popular boy who befriended a loser, when in fact it appeared that Kyle had exactly two more friends than I – Candace, who’s family had apparently lived next door to the Loganberries for her and Kyles’ entire lives, and Tree, who was Kyle’s friend by being Candace’s friend.

I didn’t actually believe Kyle when he described his friendship with Tree to me, because while I found it believable that he would be friends with a heavy awkward sweaty girl like Candace, Tree had always looked fairly normal looks wise to me, definitely attractive enough that I would considered her as a valid “score” in the odious way of teenage boys. She had normal shoulder length black hair, she was slim enough to wear girl jeans and even dresses, her body was just barely hourglassy enough, and no elements of her face were noticeably larger than the others. Her glasses weren’t too large or overdone. So I didn’t believe him, and made constant disparaging remarks about Candace to him that make me cringe with shame whenever I remember them, and asked him if he’d “scored” with Tree, and yes I cringe with shame over those memories too. Worse, I remember that in my additional efforts to ingratiate myself with the Bjorn group at the camp, I disclosed to them some of the lame things about Kyle that I had learned while befriending him. I’m sure you’ve seen plenty of cinematics with such betrayals in them. But we had no fights over it. I wasn’t brave or classy enough to ignore the other boys, and Kyle was probably too starved for friendship to make a big deal about it.

Revamping the Book to sell

I know there has considerable enthusiasm amongst the hypothetical reader (s?) of this blog for my serial novel “The Quest for the Orange Dragon” but I’ve decided to completely scrap everything I’ve written so far and start anew with my co-author John Hagen, former President and Founder of the Planar Pentoidal Institute, recently ousted from the board and the fellowship and even, amazingly enough, written out of the official Institute history by the New Flounder, Duane Papasideras, née Hagen. How all this came about would probably make an interesting story, but I unfortunately learned it from my former teammate, Gerald, and he failed to make it interesting at all, although he unfortunately tried.

After extricating myself from Gerald by asking if he could help me find a recent issue of Supergirl (we were at his workplace after all, where I am a regular customer, meaning I pay his salary), I hurried home and reached out to the former flounder by phone, and he confirmed the story, and indicated that he had also lost his real job but that his wife had consented to keep him on as a houseman, a slight demotion from husband but with the possibility of future reinstatement. We met for lunch at Arby’s, at which time he expressed his enthusiasm for QFTOD, but not with the fawning enthusiasm one would expect from him in his current clingy desperation. So I knew the QFTOD was sub par, and further reasoned that he would be a good writing partner by way of generating absurd stories more in tune with the degraded tastes of the superhero crowd, the actual wording of which I would bring to professional or at least coherent polish.

Long story short (I refuse to use the acronym) my new partner recently fulfilled his tiny segment of our joint enterprise with a queasily autobiographical yarn full of idiotic dialogue, repulsively exploitative homosexuality, and shamefully grotesque violence, spiced with a subplot whose only hope of defense against legal action for its naked plagiarism of the Harry Potter Series is the idiotic, exploitative, and grotesque manner in which it carries it off, so that the Harry Potter people may possibly refrain from justly defending their property because of the severe physical revulsion that reading through the offending material might cause them.

In fulfilling my gigantic portion of our joint labor I have scooped the literary detritus from the emails into which they had been dumped, removed the paragraphs that could actually be banned by the FDA for their capacity to induce nausea and possibly harm the human nervous system, spruced the dialogue up with a few words of actual English, and attempted to organize the nightmarishly confused plot line. The first segment of the result follows apace:

The Quest For the Orange Dragon (encapsulated abstract)

From: D. Langtry

To Case File: 102761083

Private and confidential

Client: Diggan Torpherson

The following is Mr Torpherson’s primary statement to myself made at my request for all information pertaining to Kyle Loganberry that Mr Torpherson was able to provide that could possibly help with the investigation which he himself had requested that I perform. FIEO:

I met Kyle Loganberry at Values and Principles Camp when I was 14 and Kyle had possibly turned 13. I’m actually not a hundred percent certain about his age because he himself at multiple times indicated that he did not know his age because his family did not celebrate birthdays. This was a euphemism, I eventually discovered. More on this and many other unpleasant things about the Loganberrys later.

For now, picture the scene; I get off the bus along with the other boys from Dan, which if you grew up in the Cult of Marlo you would instantly recognize as one of the organizational subgroups in the Cult, named after the Tribes of Israel. This is one of the reasons the Cult comes off as just another crazy Christian Sect to casual outsiders.

So there I was, dragging my duffel bag across the parking lot, lagging behind the other Dan boys, slouching along miserably, when an iron hand gripped the handle and lifted it off my shoulder and pulled the shoulder strap out of my struggling hands as easily as a silverback gorilla might wrest a cookie from the hands of a particularly feeble kindergartener.

It was Brother Baynard, the largest and most effective counselor for Freshmen boys, ages 13-14, at Values and Principles Camp. He looms as inhumanly large in my memory, but was probably not much over 6 feet tall and under 300 pounds, or maybe not. I sat behind him on the bus, and could not help but gawk at the monstrous diameter of his neck. Now he loomed over me like an amiable oak tree. He was wearing a massive white shirt with a tiny tie and suspenders. He slung my duffel over his shoulder, and I noticed that his left hand gripped what looked like a full garbage bag, and that Kyle Loganberry was stumbling along at his heels like a puppy.

“Why don’t you two follow me,” he commanded, or something like that, I don’t remember the exact words. I just remember that he was addressing Kyle and I as a group. This made me unhappy. And Kyle began to mutter a song, which is not the same as humming. Mutter singing is something kids do when they expect someone to yell at them to stop at any moment, but the mutter singing recharges the battery of their soul so they plug into it whenever they can grab a few seconds which happens in two or three second bursts on a constant basis so they’re life is the mutter-singing or muted mutter-singing or holding back and waiting watchfully for the next opening to squeeze out a few bursts of mutter-singing and that’s Kyle.

Brother Baynard didn’t seem to care if Kyle mutter-sang, so Kyle kept doing the same three note song, a number programmed to be muttered out in bursts between shut-ups, over and over, with no one saying a word, all the way over to the dorm lodge.

This was Stansbury Lodge, where the freshmen boys at Values and Principles Camp slept in four person rooms for the ten weeks of Camp. It was a hateful, dark dungeon with no privacy and the festering, aggressive smell of adolescent male permeated through the wood ceilings and walls of the dorms. For myself, the most excruciating part of the experience of Stansbury Lodge, after Kyle’s mutter singing, was the wildlife-themed decor. For a certain mentality which seems to predominate in the American West, paintings of deer and deer antlers represent the the supremest visual delight, and reiteration of this motif in the form of actual mounted antlers, but also in paintings, cross-stitches, table cloths, wall-paper, napkins, towels, blankets, and even pewter figurines. No wall, no surface, can be left without this imagery, especially when decorating a cabin in the mountains. The presence of the most numerous mammal in the area must be at all costs rammed home wherever you turn. You would think that deer were the lifeblood of our western civilization, the staple of our diet, whose skins sheltered and clothed us, and whose antlers comprised the majority of the hand made tools necessary for our survival, or that the deer represented the ultimate menace of the forest, a dangerous animal whose visual appearance should be as vividly imprinted on the minds of our youth as possible in order that they may at all costs avoid deadly engagement with the creature. I never minded a few wildlife paintings, especially if the decorators managed to liven things up with bears, fish, hawks, or even moose. But the relentless deer lovers that designed the interiors of Stansbury would have none of those other beasts, wanting only to propagate and decorate every surface, every corner where the human eye might wander to, with images of the blandest and most uninteresting creature that has ever evolved. I developed an intense and irrational hatred of deer during that first year of camp, an intense revulsion for antlers, and a vehement antipathy for the color brown. Kyle and I bonded over this sentiment, our first agreement and probably the only factor keeping me from attempting physical harm on his person whenever I heard his mutter- singing. And we both hated our other dorm mates.

The Quest for the Orange Dragon will continue in next week or months exciting installment!

Showdown at Mama Lupita’s; TQFTOD continues apace

As much as I would like to celebrate the glorious return of winter to the valley by returning to bed to “hypernate”, as I call power sleeping, I feel compelled to finish the powerful and ethically meaningful story, more accurately a novella, that I began last week. I say began but of course these stories trace their multifarious roots far back into the deeper synapsian recesses of the writer’s mind, wending treelike through many bits of memory and dream fragments, they do not follow any particular chronological order in their development, no easily measured progress, meandering unseen and unacknowledged in the absolute darkness of the unconscious, bursting mysteriously through without warning into one’s mind to take blazing possession of the faculties, striking the writer like an unseen bolt of lightning! I am unable to sustain this impact with any amount of grace, unfortunately, and have tuned out like a radio in the middle of my own sentences, stumbled over a nonexistent obstacle in the middle of a walk, and literally come to my senses, as if waking from a dream, in the middle of a convenience store, gazing emptily at a package of juicy fruits in my hand like hamlet gazing at his tutor’s skull.

For this and other reasons I have never applied for a motor vehicle license. It’s basically a medical condition.

I prefer to confine my driving, if you’ll pardon my continuing the metaphor, to fictional pathways, with the good company of discerning readers. If you consider yourself such a one, and can stifle the common human tendency to backseat drive for a few paragraphs, I invite you to join me for a journey along a particular roadway I recently, a barely paved, meandering little lane called;

The Quest for the Orange Dragon, a novel of Magic and Adventure by Frank Sperber:

Excerpt 2

“Tell me you’re kidding, Jasper.”

This was not the reply that Kiera Knute, née Green Harmonsdottir, had drilled Kyle Knute on for months and even years, when the day ordained by fate and inexorable laws of probability at last arrived and Jasper the Red finally offered Kyle Knute the full Producer position in return for the favor that Kiera had assured Kyle would most certainly be welded to the offer that would most absolutely have to be agreed to no matter what. The favor was expected to be degrading and unpleasant and a powerful producer of moral qualms, but the idea of actual, high levels of physical danger hadn’t even occurred to Kyle, and if they occurred to Kiera she had not communicated this to Kyle. So he had been prepared to be disgusted and humiliated. He had assembled what Kiera had called his “success face”, a face so completely unrepresentative of the true thoughts behind it that even Jasper would be impressed. But all these preparations had come to nothing, the success face had paled with fear, the mouth prepared for vacant grinning had erupted in a high keening squeak, truly the very opposite of a success face, an unmistakably Nermite face.

But Jasper the Red was desperate and determined, and he did not shrug it off, as he would have if it had been some everyday humiliation favor, like the human piñata idea he’d been mulling over for his daughter’s 16th birthday party.

“I’m telling you Kyle, I’m surprised the board agreed to the promotion at all. They wanted to make it into this negative thing, like reduce you to scrivener again, just because of that terrible fire metal war thing you did that everyone hated, but I refused. This guy has done his time, I said, and we should give him a chance.

“Yeah, they totally wanted to fire your ass for that,” Harmony chimed in from the window seat that she preferred to perch on in order to keep an eye on the street outside Mama Lucerda’s while keeping the other eye on Jaspers hinky dealings at his corner booth as ordered by her cousin the young chairman who admired Jasper but did not trust him, and wanted to keep a family member on him at all hours. She was a squat, short but powerfully built girl with a broad nose that can be endearing in some people, but on her face the nasal area had taken up too much space between the eyes, so much so that they had grown rather independent of each other, “like that lizard with the long tongue,” as Jasper had described her to his friends that didn’t work or do business with the Royal Puppeteers

Jasper cast a not at all irritated look at Harmony while frowning with pleasure at the comment. “Her uncle would not approve of her language, and the only thing keeping me from reporting it to him is the incredible respect I have for her family, but she’s essentially correct,” Jasper told Kyle regretfully. “Look, I get it; you’re terrified. The northern forest is a rough place, and you’re a wimpy little scrivener basically. Just like me, right? If you take away my job title. We’re all wimps. Except for Harmony there,” he nodded toward her perch. “She’ll take on any forest bandit.” He grinned, granting Kyle a closeup view of his green teeth, with the little yellow and red food bits in the little spaces around his gums that Kyle thought were probably cheese or bacon fat.

“You bet I would,” Harmony replied, staring out the grease tinted window. “I’d kick their goddamn heads in.”

“See? Too bad she’s not coming with you,” Jasper guffawed. “But don’t worry. The company has granted you a generous budget to hire help. You won’t be expected to go in to the woods alone! Dignity will help you get the best people and equipment. Go to her office in the morning. This has the full support of the company, Kyle.”

“Give me any other job, Jasper. Anything.” Kyle got out of his chair and knelt before Jasper on the floor. “I am officially begging you. Please.”

Jasper turned away, appalled.

“Now now Kyle, you’re being ridiculous. You’ll be perfectly safe.”

Kyle clasped his hands in a gesture of supplication. Harmony had turned both eyes from the window to gaze at the scene of humiliation. Her lips were parted and a little drool dripped from her thin, cruel lips. She could barely wait to describe it all to her sister Dignity at lunch.

“Jasper, please. “ he cleared his throat. “Jasper, I would like to be the piñata at your daughter Chastity’s birthday party”

“May Ulfang pacify the storm within my belly,” groaned Jasper, hand over his mouth. “Just the thought of Chastity and her friends seeing those frog eyes gleaming from her birthday surprise made me almost lose my after supper just now.”

“Jasper I’m begging you!”

“Kyle, I’ve already chosen a piñata. It’s Childeric. As if I’d spoil my precious angel’s birthday with you! Gurg!” He turned his head toward the corner until the nausea passed.

“Childeric my assistant scrivener and puppeteer?” Kyle said in a small distant voice. “Why would he do that? I told him I was set to make him lead scrivener.”

“Childeric is a puppeteer,” Harmony snapped. “He doesn’t want to be on your pathetic scrivener producer track!” One of the many favors Childeric had done for Jasper in order to make the unheard of leap from the contemptible scrivener track to the coveted puppeteer track was to liaison with Harmony a few times a week on the brunch hour, affording Jasper the short break in surveillance he needed in order to conduct business in Gretel’s Inn, an establishment set at the leewardmost end of Capn’s Walk, a thin muddy trail along the Lakeside wharf where all the most dangerously unsanitary taverns clustered, and there in the shadowy corners of Gretels Inn, shabby men gathered to conduct the transactions so foul, so bereft of dignity and moral restraint, that even the People of the Sea, with their ancient proud traditions of fraud and thievery, avoided in shock in disgust. The board of the Royal Puppeteers had promoted Jasper because of his willingness to do business in Gretel’s Inn, but it didn’t mean they had to know anything about it.

So now Childeric would be a full puppeteer, far above an Associate Producer in pay and status within the company, and Kyle had not even known he’d been aiming for it. Only a full Producer could even speak with the Puppeteers as social equals, and Chastity’s birthday party was only two weeks away.

Kyle felt cold inside as he stood and told Jasper that he would go to Dignity in the morning.

“Have a drink,” Jasper said, as Litza the barmaid and bartender and main cook at Mama Lupita’s brought three steins on a rusty pan and slammed them on the wobbly table before them. Jasper nodded at Kyle’s, the one with the broken handle. “On me”.

A new story arises like a phoenix from the ashes of the old

It gives me great pleasure to announce the beginning of a New Sperberspeak novel, a story that spent several years germinating in that teeming jungle I call my mind, a dark and fecund place that a number of family and friends have sought to understand and explore, only to turn away exhausted, swatting mosquitoes, quietly trudging back to the civilized world, far from the secret heart of the wilderness they have dared traverse. And as they turn, weary but pensive, eyes searching the far off horizon for the comforting lights of civilization, they hear the drums, distant, faint, but unmistakable, sending forth their message from the darkness in an unknown cipher…

What is that message? I do not know myself. Yes, even I myself am an explorer of that jungle. I know only a few of its secrets, as many as you would expect a man to know of a place where he has spent the entirety of his life, exiled from the bright lights of the city, always wandering, always searching, never leaving. I have spent long years listening to the message of the drums, sometimes faint, barely discernible above the chatter of the birds and the monkeys (or are they lemurs? I would actually prefer lemurs as the dominant primate of my inner jungle), but at other times thundering, inescapable, shaking the air in my lungs, as if they are so close I could push back the leaves touching my face and see them, and their unknown players before me (maybe lemurs with big hands).

But alas, I have never laid eyes upon the drums or the players. I interact with the drums only as a sound, a message that I must somehow receive and transmit to the twinkling lights far away, the lights that are for me as unknown, unreachable and remote as the drums. What are the lights to the drums? The drums are eternal and indifferent, remote and unknowing, content to churn with their own weighty rhythms. But what are the drums to the lights? That, you the reader, twinkling amidst the city lights, and I, seeking to replicate what I have heard for you to judge, we shall decide together. Now listen, if you will, to What the drums have told me:

Excerpt 1 from the Quest for the Orange Dragon, a novel of Magic and Adventure by Frank Sperber:

The story begins with a man in a ragged cloak and a tattered shawl, hurrying through the cobbled streets of Lakeside, a desperately dirty collection of bricks and stone and fine wood on the coast of a vast bay that was originally called Ulfangs Panda by the Kawasakis, the original inhabitants of Sven’s Swamp, the greater area in which Lakeside was located. The Kawasaki had nothing to do with the founding of Lakeside. They hated the ocean and despised Ulfangs Panda in particular, and named it in spite, after the same Ulfang who served as the god of peaceful digestion for the Nermites, a non-violent tribe whom the Kawasaki had subjugated around the time of the founding of Lakeside by the People of the Sea, a jolly folk with a rich musical tradition who were devoted to trade in stolen goods and who founded Lakeside to entice the inland tribes to live closer to the ocean where the People of the Sea could swoop in at night on stealth boats and snatch their valuables. The People of the Sea also enjoyed a rich stealth boat building tradition and a rich craft tradition of fake building fronts and paper mache castles and dried mud temples that they could slap together in a hurry and conduct impressive ceremonies in with fabulous music that drew all the rubes and desperate people for miles in the hopes of finding shelter and a job in a fine town with a real castle and a temple and everything and at the festivities the People of the Sea would show off a few fancy trinkets and spices and fine cloths and iron weapons and tell the rubes that they would bringing a huge haul of them from The City Across the Lake in a month, and selling them all for cheap in Lakeside, and they would tell the rubes to bring everything they had to trade at the big sale, and the rubes would swarm out of the woods on Sale Day, and have a huge party at the Lakeside tavern, and that night the People of the Sea would swoop in and steal everything the rubes had and set the paper mache castle on fire, and all the false fronts in Lakeside would be ashes in the morning, but the mud temple would be intact. And the tavern, which was built of brick by the only legitimate businessmen that the People of the Sea ever produced.

The Sale Day holiday, with the traditional Burning of the Castle and solemn rituals around the Miracle of the Mud Temple, had persisted in Lakeside to the present day with little changes except for the amazing and intricate puppet show tradition that had emerged among the Nermite descendants who made up the majority of the Lakeside inhabitants. The puppet shows had thrived at festival time and become the pride of the Nermite nation, although the theatrical companies who produced the puppet shows and the Sale Day Festival and owned the taverns were all mostly People of the Sea descendants.

The man in the ragged cloak, who begins our story by hurrying through the dirty streets of Lakeside, had very little People of the Sea blood, as evidenced by his square Nermite face, with puzzled eyes and a cherry nobbed nose that a People of the Sea boat captain of yore would have recognized immediately and reached out and pinched with a cackle while holding the tip of his thumb with the nail hidden before the surprised eyes which the captain would search keenly for a positive result on what the People of the Sea of yore once called “The Rube Test”.

The man in the ragged cloak that he clutched tightly around his neck and face from the wind had had his nose pinched many times as a youthful apprentice in The Royal Puppeteers by his round faced and sharp eyed compadres who had become full Producers and Master Producers in the company in time for their years of loyal service and paying their dues and other terms that he had heard from the Associate Executive Producer that seemed in his ears to somehow feel worse than a good hard nose pinch because the Associate Executive Producer happened to be his longtime friend and onetime apprentice Jasper the Red who spoke these phrases whenever Kyle, our raggedy cloaked friend, asked to be promoted from Associate Producer to full Producer, his wife Kierke’s longtime dream. She had coached and prodded and hounded and cajoled Kyle through long years of the dues paying and loyal service and groveling flattery necessary to achieve his long delayed promotion from Scrivener to Associate Producer, but he had no sooner announced this promotion to what he hoped would be an appeased and contented and ecstatic wife than she had with a patient, smile patted him on his large head and produced her newly prepared scroll of actions necessary to achieve promotion to Full Producer, which involved enhanced groveling and a lot of delegating and a lot of sharp tricks to play on the other Associates and a tiny smudge on of actual production work, which she held to be as necessary for promotion but as little worthy of mental investment as daily bowel movements.

Now Kyle Knute, our unfortunate hero’s full name, hurried through the dark and bitterly cold night of Lakeside toward Jasper the Red’s unofficial office at Mama Lucerda’s Inn and Tavern on the docks of Lakeside where the powerful smells of Ulfangs Panda had been known to overwhelm any sober people foolish enough to wander so close to the water.

He had received an urgent message by surly courier from Jasper that Kierke had correctly smelled opportunity for promotion spattered all over and had virtually assaulted her husband out of bed to attend to at this late hour. So now he hurried in bleary misery, having smelled on the note a disconcerting mix of the promotion still bewitching Kierke’s alert nostrils and the sharp tang of an epic nose pinching.

Both smells proved out, it happened, Jasper the Red having hit upon a fortuitous solution to an internal crisis that had bedeviled the previous two weekly meetings of the Royal Puppeteers executive board, and being so enraptured with his idea, concocted over that first beer so stimulating to the mental processes of the Drinking Species, that he had sent Harmony to fetch her cousin to go fetch Kakanute out of bed at once.

The crisis had come about as a result of the mental deterioration of the oldest member of the board, the younger brother of the previous chairman and uncle of the current chairman, who treated him with the same respect and affection that newly grown men usually accord the cherished animal companion of their youth. The old man had become obsessed with Kawasaki religious relics as his mind had degraded, and the recent news that Kawasaki ruins had been discovered fifty leagues up the Dammed River, had instilled in him the hysterical spurt of manic energy that will randomly manifest at the end of life in minds previously defenestrated by age. He had passionately advocated at uncomfortable length to unhappy fellow board members that the company mount a full expedition to the ruins to locate the Breath of the Orange Dragon, a staggeringly ancient relic of the Kawasaki “High” period that was purported to bequeath eternal prosperity to Theatrical Performers who possessed it. His orations had begun to dominate the board meetings to such an extent that desperate physical amelioration had been bruited in whispered conversations amongst small groups of the board, action which the old man’s nephew and board chair had vehemently vetoed. Jasper, promoted to his exalted position for his abilities as a fixer and complete distaste for critically acclaimed theatre, had been approached by several intra-board groups, exhorting him to do something that they could deny ever having wanted to happen. The board chair had also approached him, threatening him with the eternal enmity of his family if a single hair on his addled uncles head was harmed. Jasper had several sleepless nights, searching his keenly nefarious mind for a solution, until this night, after the first few delectable tastes of Mama’s darkest Ale, he hit upon the realization that could only have arisen from the collective consciousness of the People of the Sea ancestors abiding eternally in every cell of his body; he needed a Rube

Defeat! Shipwrecked! a lone survivor staggers along the beach, the smells of the ocean gladden his nostrils

It is with a surprisingly light heart that I make the following, somewhat staggering announcement: The Sperberspeak team, the Millcreek Synod, was defeated at the rolldown death match last month, and I have lost the rights to the Parkland to the Planar Pentoidal Institute. Several factors, in hindsight, contributed to the loss; first, my teammate and former friend Gerald did not bring his best game to the event, and that’s putting it mildly. He spent most of the game looking at his phone, darting off unpredictably to count inventory for ten or fifteen minutes at a time, complaining incessantly about how long we were taking, and oh so tiresomely reiterating that he had to work early in the morning (930 to be exact, instead of ten, hours after the majority of the working people in this vast nation have already had to wake up, endure their miserable commutes, and begun their Sisyphysian labors for the day). His indifferently operated character perished under miserable conditions well before the midway point of the match, even before the Flounder’s sad superhero foolishly wandered into the mineshaft I’d cleverly camouflaged with the sissy camp, where I’d stationed my Spider Cult Nest. This should have ended the game, except for the second factor; Duane Papasideras, cheered on by his fiancée / life coach / Svengali, Eleni and an enormous contingent of the teeming Papasideras clan, executed, against any rational expectation, against reason itself, the game of his inexplicably continuing life, and aided by a nightlong lucky streak, eventually slew my character, Thomasina the Spider Queen, with a last flurry of improbable roll results.

I must admit that, at the moment Gerald’s character succumbed (and his body was actually devoured while Gerald indifferently counted the cheap, disturbingly sexualized Wonder Woman figurines that seem to compose the major portion of that pathetic store’s Christmas sale strategy), I experienced one of the most singularly unpleasant shocks of my life. A profound wave of nausea engulfed my being, and I was so overcome by existential panic, by an awful feeling of aloneness, surrounded by enemies and facing the abyss of artistic oblivion. It was the third darkest moment, emotionally, of my life, and the other two occurred many years ago, in my vulnerable youth, one during my brief scouting career, when the Flounder and Thomas Hilpert’s performed my Star Wars fan fiction in drag during an overnight hike, and of course the worst; Katerina Ek’s sexualized interpretation of my apprentice elf warrior character on the culminating night of her inexplicable campaign to destroy our original gaming group, the moment when she sat on my secret DM notes and meowed in the middle of my room treatment. These events occurred many years ago, but the emotional scars remain to trouble my sleep anon.

But careening back to the recent calamity we must go. To my credit, if the reader can indulge me, I rallied, calling upon the inner reserves built of years reading Churchill and Caesar’s war memoirs, and managed to slay my greater enemy before succumbing to the unfortuitous series of roll results that I would almost term an act of god for their singular and relentless one-sidedness. And I experienced a strange peace of mind, a philosophical calmness, almost spiritual in its mysterious intensity, after the last roll. I had lost everything, but like a castaway, awakening on the shores of a lonely island, I was alive, and filled with a sense of total freedom, accompanied by a surge of creative energy. I can write whatever I want now, I realized. I can let go of the Parkland, and venture forth, into the literary bush, pen in hand, eyes stern, but gleaming

We’ve Rescheduled the last minute postponement

I have a diffident and half-hearted announcement to make: We’ve agreed to reschedule our gameplay duel, for November 20th. My adversary seems to have developed a numbers and percentages fetish, and seems to enjoy spewing out random odds about this and that, and his “expansions”. It’s all nonsense of course, he has very little understanding of math, even for a half-baked artist, and I don’t need any illusory “expansions” to tell me to estimate that the odds of the roll-down happening on the 20th are very low. I seem to have gotten him into a bit of a spot, and he is squirming to get out of it; in our last meetup, to survey the proposed setting for the combat on the 20th, he took me aside (from Gerald, of all people, the second with whom I am honor bound to share all details) with a very serious expression, probably the most sober and serious face I have ever seen him with. I expected him to tell me that Duane had passed away of malnourishment or some other horrible news, but he proceeded to tell me that he had been running “illicit simulations” of the duel, and he needed to come clean. “I’ve used my special relationship with the pentoidals for personal gain,” he told me in a theatrically hushed voice. “I’ve disappointed myself and the Fellowship.” The Fellowship? I thought he was making some kind of reference to Tolkien for a moment, then realized that he referred to his sad and illusory Institute Fellowship, which he had declared me disbarred from. I suppose he had expected me to do something other than throw my head back and guffaw, because he became incoherent with rage when I did precisely that. Then he told me that the pentoidals had predicted my defeat in November or something, and apologized for cheating. I indicated that if he believed all this he should concede to me, and he had the staggering gall to suggest that I should concede myself. After I laughed this suggestion away, he indicated that I could wothdraw from the match and we would go our separate ways as if it had never been brought up. At this I immediately understood that he had lost his nerve for the upcoming combat. I do not blame him for that. On the contrary, I feel that his realization of the total unreality of his posture, his grasping of the basic truth that his participation in any board gaming competition with seasoned players can only end in his humiliating defeat, is a hopeful sign, a harbinger of growing maturity that in an adolescent might signify readiness for the grave responsibilities of a drivers license or a newspaper route.

Unfortunately I can not release him from the onus of his own word without his ceding the rights to the work, and this he does not seem prepared to do, relying on the bluster of his vacuous mumbo jumbo. That failing, he seems to have changed his tactics to the tried and true last resort tactic of all mindless animals, desperate wriggling. I glumly and resignedly await the next clumsily and hastily produced excuse, grasped at with the usual thoughtless desperation, no doubt to be vomited over the oft-polluted electronic pages of the Institute blog at around the scheduled begin time of the next agreed combat time. It will bear only a passing resemblance to reality but will, I hope, at least provide me the solace of a bitter and ironical chuckle at its invention. But even this meager hope may represent illusory thinking, on my part this time, a delusion based on fond sentimentality really, that an individual whose extensive deficiencies in character proved him to be an inadequate failure as a friend, might somehow make a worthy foe. But I am to be denied this and other consolations, I am all but sure of it.

I will continue to keep my part of a dead agreement: the Parkland, by Frank Sperber

I believe, foolishly I suppose, in old fashioned rules of gamesmanship, in obeying rules, in following agreements, in keeping promises. I made an agreement with people who I know from experience do not believe the same things, who see agreements and promises as barely worth the air used to voice them. I knew they might not follow through with their promises, so I practiced gamesmanship, in order to protect myself. I followed every single item in our agreement exactly and to the letter, out of respect to myself, not for the sake of my opponent. I was ready to publish the note below at the moment I saw that my opponents had published theirs. I didn’t care what was in their missive, and I certainly did not have any intention of choosing a different dungeon after viewing theirs. This is self respect. They did not publish or show up at the arranged meeting place, but I did, at the arranged time. They did not ever publish their dungeon, so I held off on publishing mine. This is self protection. Now I do not know if the aborted match will ever occur, but I see they have finally published their dungeon. Here therefore, is what I had prepared and ready well before the date and time of the scheduled match:
The Parkland

My brain has received an infusion of sleep for two and a half weeks, and I have slowly regained full mental functioning, enough to conduct a sober evaluation of my battle plan for the upcoming duel with the Flounder, scheduled for Halloween night. As a part of our agreement, hammered out over diet cokes and cookies at the gas station on 32nd and 19th, sitting at the curb without the distraction of seconds, we will present our competing dungeons on our blogs before then. The dungeon secrets have already been vetted by our attorneys to conform to agreed upon monster specs and room stats. Troy Paulson, a local crossword master, has been selected to referee the match. He will actually perform every dice roll in the game with his own cup, examined by both parties very carefully I assure you, as we both happened to have been members of scout troop 619, and our senior patrol leader, Alex Peterson, was an amateur magician. I had a deep respect for Alex as a scout and leader, so much so that I could not ever bring myself to ask him for an explanation of the absurd nickname; “Mr Cunningham” by which the scouts in the troop casually addressed him. I know all about the idiotic sitcom, I should immediately assure the reader, and am sadly familiar with the character by that name. My befuddlement arises more from the nickname’s total lack of any accuracy or aptness for Alex in appearance or demeanor. I despise nicknames myself, but I feel I understand the social rules of their generation, in most cases. Alex was an intelligent and insightful leader, far superior to any manager I have since worked with in the so-called “business world”, and on his way to earning over 100 merit badges by his 14th birthday, had attained full mastery of every facet of the camping experience, including knots, cooking on a campfire (I still remember his breakfast hash with a wistful nostalgia) forest navigation with or without a compass, and especially wilderness survival techniques (his conducted nature walks contained more useful information than has ever been crammed into the grotesque travesty we call a university level course). And this superior individual, who I am quite sure can be counted on to carry his family and a large portion of whatever survives of our culture past the coming collapse in comfort and ease, was referred to by the collected ingrate ignoramuses in his charge, who unless they are lucky enough to know his current address at the time of the Great Fall-Apart and have the wits to flee with their loved ones and cast themselves at his feet, surrendering their wasted and much-abused freedom to his wisdom as their liegelord, will most certainly meet their ultimate fate in the bellies of radioactive rodents crawling over the wasteland of their neighborhoods, these same numbskulls knew him by the cogomen “Mr Cunningham”. I would say I have no words for the mysterious eddies and vagaries of the vast oceanic waters of idiocy, but I of course I do, you’ve just read them. I just don’t have enough of them. 

I lost track of my thread for a moment to rage against the darkness, but as I mentioned, Alex was an amateur magician, and showed me several clever ways in which a seemingly innocuous dice roll cup can be altered by an expert illusionist or con man (they are often very similar in expertise, Alex assured us) in order to produce non-random, influenced results. The flounder undeservedly benefitted by the same lessons as I, so I would assume he gave the cup a comparable scrutiny. However, since he has known me for as long as he has had years of benefits from Alex’s wisdom, he would also know that there is not the slightest possibility that I would ever desecrate a dice cup for any reason, and certainly not to interfere with a fair roll. 

I had originally intended to call my dungeon; “The Parkland as it Should Have Been”, but that title, it seems to me, contains some fatalistic thinking that may subtly hinder my competitive performance Tuesday, so I’ve chosen to call it “The True Parkland.” It is the world I originally created, freed of the contamination of the gross superhero storyline inserted by the flounder with callous disregard for the complex assessment of ramification and probabilistic unpacking so intrinsic to the hallowed principles of world-building. These terms may overwhelm the neophyte; picture it in this way; in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, cartoon people interact with the real world in a zany manner, we do not mind because we accept the zany quality of this world. Toward the end of the movie, the villain’s language in the climactic scenes violate the zany rules previously established, and the movie falters. In Return of the Jedi, the Ewoks, awkwardly moving Teddy bears, quite obviously people in stuffed animal suits, suddenly appear in a universe of special effects driven realism, and a franchise that had drawn its special thrill and magic from the otherworldly quality of its visuals suddenly looked and felt like a hundred other silly b movies. 

And now that I have, with painfully real world comparisons, clarified the ineptness of the superhero intrusion (called “Camperstan,” with unintentional self-mockery), I present the living world that will resist and reject and outlast the abominable ‘Camperstan’ crew; my dungeon for the coming challenge; The True Parkland. 
The Parkland stretches out from the road, sometimes for a few miles, sometimes only a few yards. The road winds through wilderness and fields of cut grass, parking lots and houses may appear, a derelict amusement park, a busy shopping mall. This is the world of the future…what year is it? It doesn’t matter, they don’t keep track of years in the Parkland. There are no weekdays, only weekends and holidays, and the holidays are places, not calendar events. There are parks and campgrounds. There are campers and RVs in abundance, but there is mystery as well. You are Dallas Longtree, master detective, hired by your invalid friend Daveed Newsome, to find his cousin, Parker. We begin the game at your office, in one of the shorter towers in the Bouncy City on Antelope Island. You go there everyday on a bus from your home campground. You have your sack lunch and mail, and you open the only parcel, a black envelope with a spooky Halloween card inside, inviting you to lunch, and a murder! The word “murder” has a rainbow marker question mark drawn after it. 

And just like that it dies with a whimper

The real world, fully staffed as it is by depressingly rendered humans and callow beasts, overstocked with wearisomely ugly buildings and harassingly odiferous plants, has managed to disappoint me again. When you reflect, if you are one of the paltry scattering of humans even able to muster enough sobriety of thought to reflect at all, upon the great length of time that the real world has been operating, and the almost total lack of delivery of return on even the modest and simple expectations of average people that it has managed to sustain for that entire great length of time, and the unfathomable depths to which the expectations of reasonable people have plummeted to by this time, every year surpassing a new nadir of expectation, and you reflect that I myself have devoted my life, as have greater philosophers than I, to finding the lowest, truest form of expectation, the bedrock expectation that can not be dug under, it should be surprising to you, astonishing, a miracle, that reality has managed to limbo under that low low pole. But I am not surprised. And perhaps that is the truest philosophy; to be unsurprised by unpleasant surprise. 

I attended a meeting with the Flounder the other day, at my Arby’s, to discuss ground rules and acceptable conditions for the duel, as he has, unsurprisingly, accepted my challenge to game for total rights to the parkland. The day after the meeting, after my turkey and avocado sandwich had filled me with a temporary sense of emotional security, I attempted to calmly assess the meeting and gave it a score of 50%. Full disclosure; I score meetings by benefits to my life’s work. I have evolved the philosophy that any meeting with other human beings should net a positive impact on my work greater than time spent alone, or I have wasted my valuable time. So I compared this lunchtime meeting to a typical lunch taken at home. Since I consumed food, which I would do at lunch anyway, I awarded the meeting 50 points. I typically read while I eat at home, and since reading comprises a vital part of my life work, I score reading time at 75 per hour. With this scoring system, lunch, with its delightful combining of reading and food, represents the maximum efficiency possible in the course of the day, even more than composition, which I score at a straight 100.  

I could not read at the meeting, unfortunately, so I could not award those points to the meeting. I could award the meeting points if my interactions at the meeting had given me insight or inspiration that I could use in my writing. But the interactions at the meeting, with people who I have interacted with many many times before, offered no new experiences at all, I don’t think I heard any person at the meeting actually say words that I had not heard them speak many times before. The interactions attained the surreal, almost meditative quality that listening to the same song looping over and over might have. The flounder compulsively joked as always, but at this point I truly believe that I have heard every story and every joke that his limited ouvre has to offer, like an old comic strip compilation from an artist who could only ever write for local community newspapers. 

Gerald complained about his food and felt his usual inexplicable need to describe whatever self imposed dietary restrictions have lately absorbed any excess mental energy he has left unused after reading graphic novels and discussing graphic novels with unhappily adult graphic novel fans online. The Flounder did not speak to Gerald at all, but chose to confine his social interactions with Gerald to the occasional nauseated grimace at the repulsive food economy that developed between Gerald and Duane, a sort of trickle down interaction similar to relationships the homeless might enjoy with a pastry restaurant and it’s dumpster. I was compelled, as a socially conscious citizen, to express my curiosity as to what level of pay Duane had accepted, as an institute employee, that left him so enthusiastic for the condiments scraped off another diners sub sandwich. This light hearted jab was not accepted with the grace and secure ease of old, sadly enough, and the Flounder felt the need to fish a few miserable quarters out of his pockets and pass them to Duane with that same level of exalted pride that a billionaire might feel at the ribbon cutting for his foundations first charity hospital. Duane’s sad eyes gleamed with a pathetic eagerness as his thin fingers snatched at the coins with rattlesnake speed, and I felt the now familiar weariness overtake me, the disappointment I have begun to feel with the caliber of even my enemies/ former friends, much like batman might feel to find Robin has turned to crime, and to have his concomitant feelings of betrayal overwhelmed by a thrill of challenging fear, a zest for the impending battle of wits with an opponent trained by himself and obviously impelled by dangerous mental aberration, and then to find, to his sickening and soul numbing disappointment that Robin has not debuted as a master villain, but as a clumsy shoplifter, sometimes jaywalking for thrills. 

These desultory emotions sapped the pleasure of what I had built up in my expectations as a sort of preliminary Mano a Mano of negotiations and veiled insult, the beginnings of that delicious gamesmanship that drives all high caliber thought. I had to console myself with the curly fries and chicken cordon bleu and an order of jalapeño poppers that I placed to punish Gerald. His sad eyes, lazer focused on each popper as it traveled to my devouring mouth, provided the only non-physical pleasure of the meeting. I even offered some to Duane, but the Flounder one upped me by gleefully asserting that his employee had “eaten plenty” and shamelessly demanding that Duane return the quarters. I ceded the point. I had brought my finely honed debating techniques to a mud-wrestling match

Mano a Mano, dice roll a dice roll

I have experienced one of those singularly life changing moments, almost on a level with the visitation on the road to Damascus, an experience so transcendently overwhelming that my self, my mind itself, has literally been changed in the twinkling of an eye. Forgive the religious imagery, but I cannot conceive of any other way to transmit the entirety of what has occurred. Briefly, I have been surprised. By myself. I have somehow transcended my own law, the axiomatic truth, backed up by Newtonian levels of evidence, that no innovative thought can occur during the sleep deprived conditions of summer. I myself have lived so firmly in the belief in this law, in its infallible accuracy, that I would have cheerfully staked my life against its violation by any earthly brain, and even in the rigors of intellectual combat against an enemy who now menaces my life’s work, I had not even bothered to assume that I would be able to summon the full powers of my cerebrum against him until mid October. I expected no better but to merely forestall the main event until October, and dimly hoped with the Grand Remonstrance to ignite an online debate which might be prolonged until I could end his literary pretensions with a total commitment of intellectual mass in the fall. As provocative as I made it, the Remonstrance seemed to have hindered initiation of another hideous comic on the Institute website, I would guess the sheer volume of the information it contained must have overwhelmed the limited processing power of the feeble organic computers currently maintaining a semblance of operations there. Unfortunately, as inside sources informed me, no post, however Herculean its use of ironic imagery, could now stop the publication process of the book, as the manuscript had passed to a third party for editing. I passed the bleakest of nights with little sleep, feeling the battle had passed beyond the power of my verbal sword to control, when…it was not a bolt of lightning, just a quiet thought. Combat…Mano a Mano…dungeon against dungeon!  

My iron belief in the law of sleep deprived genius almost, paradoxically, crushed the thought at once, as I assumed that any idea born in this season must have a secret flaw. But desperation lent me a fevered courage, and without any preparation I called the enemy to drop my gauntlet before his eyes (ears actually, I don’t skype and never will), suddenly surging with confidence, with total surety, that he would not, could not resist the invitation, that the combat I proposed would present an inexplicably profound and unrefuseable offer to his dark, murky soul!

I don’t even need to inform the most certainly over-educated reader of this blog that the enemy has accepted my challenge. We will determine the fate of the novel, and the fate of my own hijacked life work, in combat, Mano a Mano, dice roll to dice roll, dungeon to dungeon. The complexity of the challenge, rules and refereeing an so forth, will no doubt necessitate some fairly involved negotiations, but the essence, the spirit, is simple: We will each create a dungeon based on our versions of the Parkland, and will connect those dungeons in a mutually agreed game space neutral zone. Then we will play the combined dungeon to win. So simple, so easy in hindsight to understand, but whence did this instantaneous and annihilatingly complete severing of the Gordian knot originate? A mere fifteen minutes after the phone call that literally changed everything I stood outside, in the silent darkness of my mother’s back yard, attempting to understand what had just occurred, that an idea of astounding, tidal impact, a mid-winter caliber thought, had clawed its way up from the aged, worn, irradiated and sleep deprived circuits that barely maintained the semblance of a subconscious. It was if a fountain of oceanic proportions had erupted like a blessed aquatic volcano from a sad, trickling well amidst a shabby, ramshackle farm on the edge of a dreary desert. I had seen, felt, lived an unfathomable event. I can only assume that my mind, trained from birth by disciplined reading to handle any level of thought, had received a transmission from a supernatural source. 

I must apologize to the reader for the mysticism, if I myself had read such a sentence not three days ago, I would have closed the page with contempt, and moved onto the comforting sobriety of YouTube police chase videos. Yet here we are. Stay tuned for the first stages of negotiations for the ultimate tabletop combat!