SKINNER BOXED

“And so the truth, Dr. Ed would maintain, is always a little darker, always a few shades more opaque, than one would prefer to admit...”

Dr. Ed, the professor of psychiatry at the university and the department head at University Hospital, woke up breathing heavily, and sat bolt upright, with an instant-on alertness that he had not experienced in years. His wife takes no notice of this. She is a self-medicating sleep-walker and an enthusiast of the narcotic action of (both over-the-counter and prescription) nighttime cold and headache medications, and would not regain consciousness until she was good and ready.

He dreamt. His yesterday’s dream had carried him over to today’s morning. Unusual for him. To dream that is. Details are forgotten, but he does remember the feeling. The sensation of a particular kind of presence, the presence of a kind of absence, in the thoracic region of his anterior body, slightly to the left of the midline.

Take note of this ‘presence’ or should I say absence of something? Dr. Ed sure does. But his professional life has to continue. Dr. Ed goes into work. Dr. Ed sees his patients: A pair of pre-pubescent male twins with attention deficit disorder and a severe personality disorder, medication-resistant teenage-onset schizophrenics, a privately paying queue-jumper pharmaceutical tourist with a multiple personality disorder albeit self-diagnosed, an overweight patient nicknamed ‘The Emu’ who suffers manic episodes after show more stopping her lithium intake, Mrs. Missy Plumtree, a doctoral candidate in English literature, who is also prone to periods of emotional volatility like hitting her head against a telephone pole to get her husband’s attention.

Now let’s get to know Dr. Ed better. Let’s talk Dr. Ed, or rather about what Dr. Ed hates in life:

Cats
Mushrooms
Physical Disability
Small Towns
Loud Music
Tears (Especially his Wife’s)
Dandelions
Aggressive Females
Chrysler Cars
Unions
Sports
Controversy
Arguments
Emotional Displays
Imitation Leather
German Opera
Evangelical Ministers
His wife’s TV preferences
Telemarketers
Politicians
Civil Servants
Spiritual People
Street People
Fat People
Loud People
Bald People
Messy People
Immigrant People
Foreign People
Old People
Young People
Little People
Sick People
Weak People
Other People

Quite a list, right?

Does this list truly reflect Dr. Ed’s personal opinions, affirms his world view? It was composed by his wife’s hand, after all. I mean come on, this is Dr. Ed we are talking about here. Dr. Ed with his legendarily even temper, the one who never allows himself to feel. The one who acts accordingly. With his steel reputation of dispassionate fair-mindedness. He fancies himself a beacon of light for the great many in the dark, a part of this unreasonable world acting well... unreasonably. Not a grudge carrier. Therefore, just trying to illuminate a path for his wife. A wife who also writes lists like the above example. But doesn’t a wife know her husband rather intimately?

List aside, his wife’s opinion aside, Dr. Ed is a busy guy. He is experimenting with an experimental new drug named Alba, the newest development on the pharmacological front, which targets the brain receptors for ‘feelings’ of overwhelming guilt, burden and loss. A clinical trial, free of charge curtesy of the pharmaceutical giant Eumeta PLC.

A for-sure, friggin’ bloody miracle for “…sub-clinical, functional patients...: those who ‘get by’ from day to day, those who experience no major, incapacitating crises, but who diagnostic profile placed them significantly outside the first standard deviation.”

Not all is bad for Ed after all. He gets to spearhead this clinical trial, has a nice office with refinement of civilised Rome. And he even drives a Mazda RX-7, the best sports car in the world. Not to mention, and this must be mentioned, he eats flown in Nova Scotian sauerkraut. That’s right. Do you? Do I? I bet the answer is No. But Dr. Ed does.

If only he could resolve issues with his wife. Stuck in a mysterious marriage rut. His wife never being home. Always out, shopping. It consumes her. But once upon a time, she wasn’t as predictable as she was now. She was actually very UN-predictable and wild, reminding Dr. Ed of his mother and an old flame whose heart he broke in his youth. She may be crazy. But the good crazy, electric crazy, crazy with energy, which a man like Dr. Ed finds appealing.

“A bit of drama, a sense of danger, the knowledge of never knowing where one stands, the necessity of risk-taking, the primacy of continual courtship.”

But it all came with too high a price for taming this unsuccessful sculptress and very much a perturbed, energized electron. Archimedean solids, acrylic cubes. Who one day ceased her sculpturing and commenced her shopping, a pattern of procuration. A person whose catalogue of needs and wants could never be assuaged. Single-handedly buoying up the local economy.

And now other issues pile on. Don’t they always. Max is missing (the sliver of bright light in Dr. Ed's life. Just Max & he, he & Max). His current wife is missing. His ex-wife pops up after a lengthy interval of 27 years. He is receiving cryptic messages from fraser@hoteldieu.org. And he is now a not-exactly proud owner of a hypertrophied genetically modified Mr. Potato Head nose which has been broken in place of a bad review. All leaving him in such a state where he is quite beside himself. And did I mention a secret ‘son’? Yes, there’s one of those, named Ted. A one sided reunion with his now-adult son. Ted. Teddy. Tedster. Theodore.

That’s a lot, isn’t it? But it’s gotten you curious, hasn’t it? About Dr. Ed and his abilities to overcome. To problem solve. This man who is usually... no, always, in complete control, now dealing with unprecedented circumstances. Dr. Ed has a switch. A switch he can flick located somewhere in his mind. Whenever he overreacts, he simply flicks the switch. Which diverted negative emotions and stores them for later processing. But his switch isn’t that easy to flick these days. Hack, his centre of gravity, isn’t even locatable.

It all feels like a weird dream, doesn’t it? Except this is Dr. Ed’s reality. And folks, what a reality it is. This isn’t skunkpiss beer, this is the good stuff. This isn’t that old Canadian novel about broken families and prairies full of wheat. This is the new Canadiana movement.

“Art was merely the expression of a kind of failure in life, and, if you sat and ‘thought’ it over for a second or two, who needed that?”

Well, I do. Imagine thinking W.D. Clarke’s vision was a failure. That this wasn’t the definition of art. High art. Great art. The man is a wordsmith, forever toying with the reader, leading us down labyrinthine paths. This is a carefully constructed, lovingly dotted upon work with Pynchonian intelligence and plenty of its own characteristic traits to stand on its own, while still paying homage. Witty, wonderful, clinical yet playful, diabolically clever really. Shame on us all letting this writer sit around. He should be read and reviewed weekly. He is that good. If no one has given him his flowers, allow me to do so now. Here you are, Bill. You deserve it.

LOVE'S ALCHEMY

A novella told through dialogue, with a multitude of characters and shiting time periods. One character named Ame ties it all together. That's A-M-E. Not to be confused with Amy. Everyone gets it wrong. But you shouldn't. Let me help you. Pronounced Ahh-may. Named by her Japanese mother after the rain. Also means 'soul' in French.

At a birthday party for a friend, everyone wants to hear a particular tale from her life, one which she has recounted many times before but not to all the people at the party. Not to David, The Entrepreneur whom she is being matched with (who also reminds her of Roger, but we will get to Roger in a river flowing second). This story takes us back in time to Tokyo. When Ame used to live in Japan back between '86 & '89. She'd spend some time there as a kid, returned as an adult with her then boyfriend, Tim, the Edmontonian Canuck. While also pursued by Roger Scruton, nicknamed the most approachable nickname in the history of nicknames, The Kid.

The Kid is a Tory speech writer with a compulsion for pissing in rivers. Don't ask me. Ask Roger why he enjoys pissing in the rivers. I prefer the toilet. A tree if stranded in the Canadian wilderness. But I do not go out of my way to find a river. That I don't do. But Roger does. Ame knows about Roger's dirty little secret but allows it to slide. On the whole, she finds him fairly entertaining. His banter takes her back, back to McGill, back to those heady classes in Joyce. They originally met as undergrads at McGill, she from Victoria, he from Shawinigan, but both living on St. Viatur and both double-majoring in Poli-Sci and English. There is something about him that draws her in. A magnetism not based on looks.

But Roger isn't particularly special, just one in a long line of suitors chasing after Ame. There was also Gerald, Isaac, Tim, Roger and now David. All interconnected. Providing us with episodic glimpsing. Making us piece it all together. Trying to piece together Ame and understand what it is that she wants.

Is Ame serious? Semi-serious? About love? About anything. Will she invest? Will she commit? Is she looking for something less demanding, emotionally? What are her thoughts on love and connectivity? Is there love? True connection? or are we "...too jaded to believe that what we see when we connect with someone is anything other than a reflection of our own desires and needs?" And will Ame forever be the one 'who got away' for so many from her past and perhaps present and near future?

This novella is a succulent Bosc pear. Take a bite. This story is a moment of transport, a rise and fall of breath, a shallow in-breath followed by a deep collapsing exhalation.

And now is the time for the test, dear readers. Can you eat the slippery mountain potato with chopsticks? If you can, you win a killer diller beer. Trust me, you want this beer, my friends. show less

What are we trying to achieve in a distant and fundamentally unknowable world? We may know the reason for being drawn to a particular book. At other times, the same reasoning escapes us. What happens when you stumble upon the right book, a book inside of which you are found alive, a captured perfect moment, a perfect alignment in which you become yourself, we become ourselves, and for any of the moments spent inside the book, extended or brief, we can assuredly state: We have finally returned home.

This book is home. This book has the answers. Imagine a book which helps you navigate through the complexity of our lives. How about a book which assists with navigation of the seemingly insurmountable vastness of our world? Helps you claw your way back toward whatever we actually are in the grand, unknown, impossible scheme of things.

This book can show the way. A way back to ourselves. A way back to recapture our humanity on which we have turned our backs. A guiding hand to help us get away from the precipice into the abyss.

We have forgotten. This book is a reminder. Before history becomes forever unchangeable. This book is not just another book. The book is a possible world.

And in this possible world, you have to explore tens of thousands of words in the underground word tunnels, witness Phillip Freedenberg write tens of thousands of words in his America and the Cult of the Cactus Boots, and only then will you stand within the fourth dimension tesseract, physically quivering show more in awe at the fifty-story glass fractal cactus rise before you as the monolith of the Unified Field, and it will unify the ascended minds of the reader as one, creating a new America.

You will become one inseparably vast reading mind. Become total consciousness. Setting free the imprisoned minds of humanity. Inhale, hold, exhale… Welcome dear reader. This is a possible world. Where you can enter the Unified Field. Become the ascended observer. Unlocking hidden truths, higher purpose and meaning.

Find the path to your true self. Bring down the walled fortification. A new crusade has begun. An absolute manifest expression pattern of the artistry of the human mind. An indescribably, incomparable quest. A psychedelic, absurdist, hyperbolic, complex, unconventional, experimental, reinventing, perplexing, inventive, delirious, esoteric, exotic, satirical self-referential metaphysical adventure. A creative renaissance. An impossible to stop stream of words. The definition of the creativity of the human mind.

Join the rebellion, the fight against mental and social control and enslavement, by which local political and religious institutions so vigorously monopolize. Cultivate control of the human mind, so that it does not wander unchaperoned into the far creative reaches of the deep unknown.

Meet Slimey Bear Foot, a textbook hamadryad wood nymph and a prophetic pamphleteer, a blackjack dealer named Olive Elizabeth Rendering and her fantastical storytelling acumen, meet Horus Divination Walton the 3rd, who relies on an eccentric methodological weather forecasting codex aka a correlation between the movement and position of his mustache, and that day’s weather pattern. Or read the Hive Mind Gazette, which keeps America unified and informed while President Ralph wages war against the written word.

A war on words. A war on humanity. When the world stops reading, and we finally murder the word, it will be then and only then that we may signal toward the decay of our brilliance.

All part of the current psycho-temporal mind space of America. A vapid, driveling soup kit of burrowed bog, annexed from a waste-wasteland, an outpost orbiting pure socio-cultural insanity. Roots of American idealism, dominant values strongly bound to genocide, slavery, war, power, control domination, oppression, subjugation, and an imperial hegemonic hunger for Empire that would lay a new foundation of power in America, that would be cultivated for by the American pyramidal power structures for another 500 years. All culminating in the selection of President Ralph, resulting in his totalitarian reign, and a devilish development of an all consciousness replacement program, a path to complete pure obedience. A forfeiture of each individualistic consciousness for government approved uninterrupted dopamine-releasing pleasure imagery.

Leaving it in the hands of FREEDENBERG/WALTON/HARSCH, the elevated threefold divine harmony, the ego, the self, and the soul. The trio that must un-map the world. Break the system with an explosion of information designed within the expanding fractal structures of the text. Bring forth a revolution. A new beginning. An exodus to a newly imagined, much less morose America. A new science. A pataphysical experiment in new ideas. So begins a new solution. So begins the Book.

I think it’s impossible not to use terms like prophetic and brilliantly observed when discussing this book. A book that looks at the price we have had to pay for our accelerated development and serves as a field guide to preventative measures. A way to avoid soon-to-be-mass extinction. Have we not been warned before of this? A hijacked consciousness. A plan for total control of the human mind. But have they ever shown us the way? A way to undo, strip away, return to the very beginning or before the beginning as we know it, and begin anew.

Phillip Freedenberg has created profound original art. Art that requires a daringly profound creative audience. A book which will inspire any bright-minded reader. A voyeuristic look at US, what we have become. Behind the satire lies true horror. But this book is also a tool. Let us chisel with our Stone Age implements and start over. Let us enter the word tunnels. This is absurdist theater where the audience finds themselves isolated participants in a sensory deprivation float tank experiencing a heightened hallucinatory psychedelic state. This is LSD. This is a new original art. This is a book to end all books so that new books could be created. This is Higgs boson.

POSTSCRIPT:

It was prophesied that one day Phillip Freedenberg with the assistance of visual virtuoso Jeff Walton and messages from publisher Rick Harsch would reconnect a dying species in the final stages of its dying world, to reconnect with the books, and reconnect with the words to manifest what they called the dawn of the Cult of the New Cosmos.

“I know the world will one day end, and these words will be its fossils, but you will set the Book down now, and try to go to sleep, but the sound of these words will never leave your head, as I dance around in the eternal barn fires of your imagination. Now I will say good night.”

Can you hear the words, dear reader? Can you hear Phillip Freedenberg’s voice? The fires are lit. Your imagination is set ablaze. A virtually unstoppable firestorm. You have been chosen. Initiated. Now go forth and spread the word. Remember, dear reader, this novel is capable of a perceptual shift which exerts a powerful influence upon the imaginative thinking capacity of the people that have read it. A metamorphosis of the mind. Submit to the word fever. Travel through it. Read this book to experience the newly expanded wakefulness of yourself looking back at you. A disconnected, displaced version of yourself living in an illusory simulation of a disintegrated America. Allow this book to penetrate the mind. Remain hopeful of finding a world of unnamed things. To find a world of new objects and structures untethered from traditional symbolic orientations. Let’s take one infinite deep breath together. Close our eyes and allow our minds to manifest dreams. Build the many new, possible worlds together. Let’s keep on reading our way through to the other side. This reviewer certainly hopes to meet you there.

FINAL THOUGHTS

A never been done before, unique postmodern literary experiment. An unraveling, existential mystery. Housing both maximalist and metafiction elements under one roof. Disorienting and challenging. A clever nod to Charlie Kaufman’s Adaptation, intertwined with bizarre worlds created by David Lynch and Alejandro Jodorowsky. A bottomless rabbit hole of original profound ideas and social commentary. Discovery and innovation among grand decay and great chaos. Forever nonconformist. Tackling power politics, scientific theory, historical development through time, philosophy, the arts.

A book which takes you inside the creative process itself, allowing you to stand witness before the brilliant turbulence of creation. The germ of an idea, the writing that follows, a Kurt Vonnegut-ian teleportation of being inside the actual book. Breathe freely, breathe deeply under the architecture of this text. Feel the electricity of the words, growing slowly to become the currency of a thousand deeply seeking interconnected minds.

The coming revolution will be a revolution of creativity. The revolution has begun.

[STATIC INTERRUPTION]

Transmission from the Great Beyond

Rick Harsch requests a short, concise review.

Kaleidoscopic, sprawling information center, multi-levelled/multi-layered, long-gestating, encyclopedic, reality disintegrating, satirical comedy or nightmarish reality-you pick, examining a dystopian future where a total consciousness replacement initiative is a reality, writers are terrorists, and the written word is in danger of elimination. It’s a non-linear story, intrinsically connected to Rick Harsch’s The Manifold Destiny of Eddie Vegas. Prescient and relatable. There are heroes, there are villains, and then there’s America. The first ever reading sensory experience. A book which is unlike any other book as a whole and unlikely to be replicated unless done by Phillip Freedenberg himself. A life-changing novel with profound impact. Incredible in scope. All connecting. An experience of human togetherness. Fully capable of changing the course of a reader’s life. (Complete originality without a point of reference). Thought provoking, conversation starting, limit transcending experience. A harmonized message of unification and resistance. If you have a dream. Start it NOW. This was Phillip Freedenberg’s dream. show less

A reading by Chris Robinson of Rick Harsch's masterpiece? Most agree. Although he might have two and the rest aren't far behind.

https://www.instagram.com/tv/CeXobdNge6e/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

Now available from:

https://zerogrampress.com/2022/01/26/the-manifold-destiny-of-eddie-vegas/

*** Review Forthcoming ***

Each new volume of The Holon Project keeps getting better and better. All volumes are a must. I am very honored to have a story of mine appear that wasn't part of Conversational Therapy: Stories and Plays, "One Scene Away from a Masterpiece Status." A huge thank you to Daniel Cockrell for the opportunity, and congratulations. The Holon Project is incredible.

Dr. Shabazz, a psychologist we met in A Survivor’s Guide to Engine Failure at 35000 Feet (available here: http://numerocinqmagazine.com/2016/01/02/a-survivors-guide-to-engine-failure-at-... makes another appearance. A welcome one. Although, if I can level with you dear readers, I’ve met him several more times. Sessions held, appointments scheduled, and those very appointments kept.

My thoughts from an e-mail to Lee, on Mon 8/17/2020 (Slightly edited to imitate a proper review although when have I ever written a proper review…)

“She’s saying Mouth Human must die, must always die, must die and must not take in the air or the light of the sky. What do you think of that, Doc?”

It’s a hallucinogenic tale, a mix of Jodorowsky and Lynch and Burroughs. It made me feel uncomfortable, enthralled. The fire scene made my thoughts race, images of arsonists setting fire to buildings. The Slow Loris is a seer. It’s a conversational piece, a psychological study, it’s about humans, humanity, what it is to be human, it’s about the human mind, poetry of the broken-down people, an undeniably gorgeous piece of writing, poetic and piercing and a must read.

“Fear, he doesn’t realize, is just a thought that’s reached a dead end. It can’t escape itself. And it panics.”

This story might be impossible to find now in the original chapbook format. Sold, all sold out. But I have a feeling this isn’t the last time we shall hear from Dr. Shabazz.

And remember folks, show more “Croquet is sedation, golf is the real fucking world.”

ENDMATTER

This copy is number 93/125. show less

“I know it’s doomed, that once I lose you I lose you, so of course I lose you…”

Walk past her closed door to your own room. Close the door. Lay down on the strange, sunken, yellow bed. Close your eyes. Dream a lucid dream.

You are alone on this strange, sunken, yellow bed, looking, needing to find something. You are alone, but when you dream, you are two.

Memories scrape against the flesh with a dull, rusted knife. The cancerous mole is found that is memory. Never allowing us to forget the most painful transpired moments.

In the shadow of a hurricane, a couple is in bed, unmoving, and exposed, one is turned, frigid and drifting away while the other dreams of the one on her side, her back to him. Because in dreams, possession is attainable. Almost believable. The kiss, captured, followed by caressing, made possible.

S. is the woman in question, the one who shimmers by the side of the road with her beautiful face and long soft curls. One you immediately spot standing amongst sidewalk spectators. Impossible to ignore. One whose footsteps you listen for in a silent apartment. Awaiting her return silently, eagerly. The one you are constantly dreaming of. Hoping. Remaining hopeful. Constantly waiting for her arrival, tied by one foot to some unseen pillar.

Is it a prison or a maze? Is the skyline a tangled nest of vipers? Are you handcuffed and are the handcuffs pinching your now sliced wrists in need of stitching by a doctor?

The narrator is alone, alone in a cold house show more that sits in the middle of nowhere in midwinter dreams that is no place to stay, yet he is staying there, recollecting, thinking over what passed, about this home, when it was occupied by more than just him, when it was warm, about the tears in the meshwork of their shared house which should have been repaired but neglected all the same (Perhaps a youthful-romantic-hopeful-thought it would repair itself, but while time passes, things do not take care of themselves). If only he, they paid any attention to this, got the tools from a cabinet beneath the kitchen sink. He could have repaired it, he was sure of it, he was handy, and she could have helped, if she’d just stopped moving about so much, stopped leaving and slamming the door. Stopped with her impatience. She was good at that. Slipping off. Slipping away. And he was good at searching. Searching the entire city for her. Trying to find her trail, wanting to hold her hand even with the glittering metal claws on her fingers, which would surely cut him. Perhaps hand holding would soften her up. Remind her of something, give her reason to stay.

“Sometimes all you get are wisps, the tail ends of them.” This book: Is a collection of dreams. Fragmentary recollection captured on a page. A sequencing, brief yet powerful enough to explore the deepest human emotions.

Are dreams trying to tell us something we need to know, must know, but we are simply unable to hear? We analyze the fragment, trying to identify what it was, then dream another dream hopeful that it will continue where the previous one left of at the cliffhanger, a two men fall from Reichenbach Falls. But the tumbleweed keeps tumbling down a lifeless road past Wormwood Motel without any signs of stopping, of end destination in mind and purpose revealed, of telling us something of value. We just keep watching. Waiting and hoping. Spectators trying to interpret and fill in the blanks. As Lee D. Thompson states, nothing here is historically certain. One moment she bids her goodbye and tells you she is disappearing and the next you spot her red Renault 19, allowing for dreams to intrude once more. To continue the chat, the chase, for there is no such a final moment as the end of dreaming.

“What a silly dream that was, that one where we weren’t together? That one where I couldn’t kiss and kiss and kiss you? Where I couldn’t tell you, as I am telling you now, over and over, how beautiful you are? Wasn’t that the strangest thing? Oh, I’m glad I can hardly recall it all, as I kiss and kiss and kiss you.”

Deception, this dream of S., but in this dream the narrator sought shelter. A storm was coming, and the trees were wild with loss. The wind howled, picking up, as a streak of a tear appeared.

Summed up in a few lines, if that is possible: A haunting melody of loss lingering lovingly, lying in a heap by the curb awaiting to be discovered. A lost life reexamined. Stripped down and unflinchingly raw. This is humanity. This is what it is to be human.

End Dream. Closing this book of dreams now having read the final chapter. Time to wake up but never to forget this slim masterpiece under 100 pages. show less

Dear Reader, consider the curse of the bite of the man in the mosh pit with the venomous bite who bit an anarchic law graduate Shay ‘Shaman’ Mughannahan, who now has an Anubis animal head, jackal jowls and a set of wolfish ears. Consider opening an umbrella to stay dry from the exclamation marks raining down from above. Let us consider this book, a book more beautiful than could be thought possible. I know what you are trying to do now, that is, right now... you are trying to make heads of it, but all you have is a moon head. That’s right. A moon head / moonhead / Moon Halo Head. Now you are puzzled, you feel you need to research the topic more, but first... this review must be read to the last sentence... word... .

Review first, hulkish skullfirst collisions later, I mean... research. OK, back to it. This book will bash your head in on the banister. You heard me. I did say this. It’s a statement. Bash right in. Blood and all. Cranial bone fragments. A book that will cast a shadow on the wall of your mind’s bedroom. A book that you will remember. No, you don’t forget a book like this. Just like you, don’t forget a Hypo taxi going over speed bumps because of an emergency in a museum.

Now that I’ve got you going with the whole ‘emergency in a museum’ thing, now you want details. You want plot. You want me to spill the beans? Is it a hero’s journey type-of-a-thing? Sure is. A quest for the soul of one anarchic law graduate Shay ‘Shaman’ Mughannahan. show more A quest for the esoteric owls of one David Victor Wool. What about characters? Especially weird ones. OK… how about the members of the Aquatic Alchemical Caves of Pazin Scuba Diving Club who spend time swimming the Adriatic sea troubled with waves of social anxiety, or Kita Cordeiro and her latest art installation piece, The Autonomic Kaleidoscope of Robotic Butterflies? Does that work for you? Do you like horseracing? I don’t disagree its animal abuse but hear me out… this is a different type of racing, sure yes it involves a horse, but it also involves humans who occasionally get trampled by the aforementioned horses, that’s right folks welcome to the: Man vs. Horse Race of Llanqwerty Wells. The competitive human-equine cross species athletics. Let the abusers get a taste of their own medicine, I say. And since we are on the topic of animals. Who doesn’t like animals afterall right, well there’s a grey Dalmatian donkey tied to a fig tree at the top of the shattered steps. Yes, right at the top of the shattered steps. Okay, you say, Dalmatian donkeys are cute and everything, but what about some intrigue like a death cult? Well hack this book has that as well, The Order of the Five Forty Four (54.4 Members - .4 is a dog) chanting mantras in The House of Sacred Calculation and doing the occasional killing of any new members. All hail!

Do you wish to escape this cranial way, dear reader? If you do, read this book. It will bring back your original head. Don’t you want your original head back? Well, dontcha?

But I don’t want to be absurd anymore. I want to speak from the heart.

The dilemma remains... this book is not being read.

A writer with no readers doesn’t see the world. He sees a cage. Allow the writer an opportunity to experience this beautiful, strange and incomprehensible world by unlocking his cage.

A great knifesman in a big army coat who ventures to the graveyard in the middle of the night on a dare and ends up govno’ing himself may not want an audience. Who would be in a shitty situation such as this. But this young writer needs his audience.

This book is a message in a bottle, a samizdat to all the lost souls of the world to be read while listening to voluminous Schubert sonatas or the heavy metal band Kvelertak on secondhand speakers.

A book trapped in its inky perdition looking for a reader. A book into which you will fall FOREHEADFIRST. A book I picture was created one night when the author sprinted across cracked out pavement, running inside the local redbrick library, his non local home on the rim of the realm of the reams of the world and logged on to the public computer and devised a word document plan to save himself and the world with this work. This very book right here you aren’t reading. Standing keyless outside a house of paranoia.

Okay, let me try a last hook. Did I mention the lead character spent a hundred years in a goddamn flower? A flower… come on, folks. Drop whatever it is you are doing now and get this book. What happens if you are stuck in a goddamn flower? Don’t you want to know how to get out? Or are you just going to accept your newfound placement and twiddle your thumbs around?

The flower warps time… oh why do I even bother? You don’t care about time warping flowers. You are too good for them. You think your life is figured out. All I can say is, the joke is on you when you are stuck in one. Then you will remember Nick and his advice on getting this book. “Oh, this is the netherworld, and I am stuck in this damn flower… Nick did warn me, didn’t he?”

Welcome to the great unfurling. We are now inside this inversion of a great unfurling, all holding copies of Mneme’s Stoned. Let’s all join Luke in his house of words. The grandest of galleries exhibiting greatness across three hundred exhilarating pages.

Nick finishes the review as David Behrman’s On the Other Ocean plays on loop. His hyperhydrotic hands, bionic hands, connected to elbows resting on thighs, are now still. But just wait for tonight. When these same hands become somnambulant. A mind not in the head but in the hands, adding and revising this review. But for now, the Review is over. Please resume your day, but don’t forget to purchase Mneme’s Stoned on Amazon or Orbo and the Godhead on corona samizdat dot com Let’s support a living writer. A writer with a bright future. A writer with a glorious vision and impeccable rhythmic prose that will capture your attention. Give Luke Delin a chance. Show some love. Show some support. Unlock the cage. You have the key. You are the key. The reader is always the key.

Brought to you by The Imaginary Friend Corporation: Words are friends. I like the weird ones.

“The purest form of art is one that cannot be expressed in words.” But this sure does come close.

- Nick Voro show less

“Let me clear up a few things before judgement sets in. I say I am a man in a sheep’s body, but is that entirely true? I breathe into a sheep’s lungs, and sheep’s blood flows through my sheep’s heart. I eat sheep food and shit sheep shit. My hormones are a mixture of man and sheep.”

Things are ahoof.

You feel what I felt: shock, terror, denial, sorrow and back to terror.

The Name’s Bones... Bones the Wooly Blue-Eyed Sheep with a Human Brain. There’s a scar on the back of my head. I know it’s there. I feel it throbbing. It never ceases to throb. It’s a crescent moon that I can’t leap as children in their beds count until sleep enshrouds them.

The bastards have done it. Look at how f*cked I am. Pretty fucking funny, isn’t it?

Just a minute Bones, let me tell Your Story for this condensed Review. The full version is yours, of course. They’ve taken your freedom, but they cannot take your story away.

So where did Bones leave off... Ah, yes, the operation. The f*ck-ness of the surgery, dear reader. The throbbing makes more sense now, the persistent headaches, when you are conforming the human brain into the confined space of a sheep. But only criminals get this privilege. The guinea pigs for the program known as Constock.

This is the futuristic world of Lee D. Thompson’s Apastoral. A world where technological advancements have made this possible. Innovating and Frightening. Immoral and Concerning. Ethically and Morally Questionable. A world where Bones show more becomes part of the program. Bones, with his honest face and troubled past, the unsuccessful insurance fraudster/petty criminal caught up taking the rap for a jewelry store heist gone bad. An Einsteinian in its brilliance, fool proof plan to rob a jewelry store, The Carat Top, and leave no shiny rock unturned. The smoothest heist ever... NOT. Now... abandoned by his petty criminal friends and their plea deals, Bones is alone, and in the hands that are not his own.

He is, in fact, in the hands of the government. The Big Brother. The Prime Minister’s hands. Prime Minister with his Nation’s Joke of the Day, a gag reel slash visionary madman. In the hands of Constock, while Constock Watch televises everything, the righteous television brainwashing the masses, pundits pondering who would be next and trying to match criminal with animal. Bones, the unlikely protagonist, paraded, televised, made an example of, although not the first (No, Sylvester Moll was the first, the accused mass-murderer of children, forever squealing in rage when his brain made its way inside of a pig) but certainly part of the earlier batch, the first waves of test subjects/convicts to face such a punishment. With his rights stripped away, his trial begins. A monkey trial, or in this case, sheep. A trial where the trial chair spins with a push of a button from the presiding Judge, the same controller that controls the lights, guilt meters, and the advertising panels. Court Technicians are stationed everywhere. Attorneys attached to harnesses fly past large monitors displaying Trial Scores, past the jury made up of the audience in attendance and paid subscribers.

Frightening isn’t it? Frightening because this can be our reality. Bones’ only rights are to be fed, housed appropriately and collect a minimal pension which will pay for his yearly medical check-ups and finally his funeral. What a world. A world of woolly trouble. The world which is depicted here is a regressing world. No one wonders if this is ethical. A stolen life. A stolen mind. A stealing of control over oneself. Animal/Human Testing is at hand. Bones is the subject. Will the program succeed? Would it ever be stable? “You can graft an ear onto a potato, you know, but you can’t predict what it will hear.”

Switching narratives, plenty of drug ingestion and created dream-like often nightmarish states, planning of a heist that will have you in stitches, the CCC Complex-The Constockade-The Isle of Conquestador where human bodies roam around with animal brains, a watch tower patrolled by wolves with brains of prison guards, a sequence involving a Musca domestica on the drums in a Kafka Metamorphosis fashion and a favorite involving a Colosseum-like gladiator battle between a sheep a goat and a mass murdering pig wearing a cape.

The glorious unpredictability of it all. Whatever you need, you will find it here. The cure for terminal boredom. The book that brightens up any room. Enlivens any conversation. A comedic Tour de force, a novel for our Now Times as we look toward our collective uncertain future, and finally a book packing enough Don DeLillo’s prescience to serve as an astute observer’s commentary and a warning all at once.

They gave Saul Bellow the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976. In-part for his work dealing with those, “...disaffected by society but not destroyed in spirit.” Hope. Not hope-lessness. Hope. Something I’ve felt while reading Lee D. Thompson’s novel. No matter how bad things had gotten, and they sure did escalating’ly get worse, there was always hope.

Before I wrap up this review, I also wanted to say, there is also something to be said about Lee opening the barnyard doors on what we often as individuals want to lock up to make ourselves feel better about, or not think about, at all. Imprisoning animals. Keeping them locked up. Breeding them for food. This book allows us to spend time with them. Walk in their hooves. To literally humanize animals. Animals that know death. Saw death by the billions at the hands of the human. Saw death’s head come flaming from the blackness. Spewing fire. Killing everything it could reach. Turning everything to ash. A wasteland where we are surely heading. And this has nothing to do with the ethics of eating meat but is more of a reminder of how we are contributing to our own extinction through our hunger and greed for the evermore, always more. Perhaps, therefore, the humans having animal names, and the animals having human names makes perfect sense. Because we are One. A reminder. And yet, we imprison. We segregate. Are we not all allowed on the same farm with the gates unlocked, allowed to graze without monitoring by guardians with shotguns and razor-sharp knives? Ah, grass for thought.

So join Bones as he navigates labyrinthian passages while getting used to the foreignness of a body that is not his own. Let deeper into the darkness. Noose tightening, teeth sinking in. He keeps escaping. But he is tired of escaping. Who can escape anything, anyway? One trap to another. Is the answer in the mind? Can the outcome be changed with the power of the mind and the body of a sheep? That’s for you to find out, dear reader. But I can almost hear you screaming now, “Justice? What the hell is justice when you have no control over the placement of your own brain? The storing of that complex organ. When one day you are a man, and the next, a sheep. A man in a sheep’s body and men sheer sheep and eat sheep and imprison sheep...”

And what I have to say is, “Close your eyes, little sheep. And hopefully you won’t dream of wolves. There’s that word again, right… Hope.” show less

“Don’t be silly she would say, don’t be silly we have to live with this…”

A bird-bedecked Penny. For this is the story of her, this Penny. A truthful story, a story of how she is, how we are. She was a body of a hundred gazes constantly gazed upon by a multitude of glinting black eyes, eyes belonging to encircling aerial stalkers. Tell me, dear reader, of this review… Tell me, when you look into a bird’s dark eye, what do you see? Do you see nothing? Or do you see a world that’s more shadow than light, that’s paper thin? Do you see the future? Our future. Does she belong to me, or the birds? Should I not get attached? Attached to my wife. My Penny.

- Why Do Birds? by Lee D. Thompson is simply incredible.

Recommended to lovers of Ornithology and psychological dissection.

Since conventional reviews are a thing of the past. Let us begin with an interpretation. This reviewer’s take on a set of events that will capture the reader’s attention:

Relentless rain falls. I wet my face. Is it obscene to wet one’s face in front of others, especially if a lady is present? A lady who has a very tempting little nose I would like to nibble. A nose with a striking resemblance to a radish, or so I think as my mouth fills with too much saliva. A toothless fidgety ginger boy laughs nearby with a face that generates a desire for violence. A respectable lady’s bag suddenly breaks open, scattering rolling heads on garlic on the floor. I find myself on a streetcar, public transport, a den of bestiality, with a driver who is a vile destroyer of umbrellas. I do not focus on them, just her, I think only about her, the departure, a waveless sorrowful farewell.

And just as the true review begins, we encounter the protagonist, soaked and miserable, trying to pull himself together from a pitiful state, a state of mental obscenity, broken down and unfulfilled, wanting only the return of his Helena.

A tortured soul, born at the wrong time, for he could have been a figure from Greek mythology, a god fallen into disgrace, a condemned eternal sufferer facing the absurd.

Instead, he is a feeble bronchitis-sufferer of the present age who translates the scribbles of others for a living if it could be called that. Working tirelessly in a room without heat. A dark and cold show more room with just a bed, a chair, a closet, a desk covered with papers and books, a basin filled with water and the complete absence of natural light. He works by candlelight. Candles he has to beg his landlady for, a shrewd woman with sinister facial contractions every observer of human nature would love to study.

He navigates a city, a den of rubbish, a sewer with an everlasting reek while worrying about contraction of double pneumonia and the meaning of the mysterious word that keeps popping into his head: Kartofler. All the while longing for her, for his Helena. Helena with her dark eyes and dark hair, a dimple that appears on her left cheek when she smiles. But she is aboard a disembarked ship heading elsewhere, and far, far away from him.

He is alone. Without her, his immediate environment resembles a freak show, a circus. He cannot help but to stare askance. He encounters warted women, misers, stingy publishers, rogues with goatees and twisted mouths, aberrations-batting eyelashes, scoundrels, diabolic entities with mummified reptile hands who don’t know the meaning of a proper handshake.

They all inhabit a city, his city, his country. The country that has gone to the dogs. To the way of general coarseness. What remains is the pestilent stench of urine, tar and filth, the stench of concentrated humanity. Is the protagonist the only normal person left, the only one able to smell the burning sulfurous smell as he walks through the cobblestoned streets of a country still stuck in the Stone Age?

And all he wants is Helena. His solution to life. To gain redemption through her. She who can absolve him by locking away his pain. Close the doors to the antechamber to hell and retrieve his lost outer conscience.

Root for him, dear readers, this trembling match flame of a human on a cold, windy, wintry night. To get his Helena, to purchase that little pink house of his dreams. He demands his money. Demands his respect. Wants to seize visiting one den of ignominy after another. He wants to stop being a wretched man, with a greasy tie, a tramp presenting himself in disarray, dirty, hatless, eating peas and mushy rice for the rest of his miserable existence.

For he is wittiness personified. A one-man show. A Bernhardian character fighting the good fight against the bootlickers and the sellouts, those disgraceful parasites inhabiting a rotten, dismal land. The gruesome comedy of life. But a life worth living. For there is always redemption to be had, joy to be found, love waiting for its cue and curtain reveal.

João Reis has undeniable talent. This book is undoubtedly a great success. You feel the pain, you will laugh uproariously, you will be awestruck by the mesmeric prose, you might put this book down after completing it, but I guarantee that much time won’t lapse before you will reach for the Dublin Literary Award nominated Bedraggling Grandma with Russian Snow from corona/samizdat.

- Nick Voro show less

Certitude

“When they look around with disgust masking incomprehension at how things have changed they pray for the world to return to how they think it once was.”

A tale of once-friends hitting mid-thirties and not doing too well inside. Although, the friendship is up for debate. Debate because, according to the lead character, there isn’t anything reliable in this world. So, while he may remember a-coming-together because of similar hobbies, his detestable treatment within the larger group of friends always remains debatable to how much this friendship was really a friendship and not a classic case of abuse by fellow school peers.

A psychological tale awaits the reader. A tale of resurfacing dislikes. A tale of people distancing and separating and then coming back together stuck in some sort of time warp, but not always for the correct reasons. A tale of complaining and complainers. About somebody who always thinks he is better than somebody else. Comparisons and cutting down. Bitching and bludgeoning. An angry tale and a tale of anger.

“You could be a little nicer.”

But this can apply to every single character in this story. But you won’t be able to look away. You won’t be able to put this book down and you won’t be able to skip this longish tale. No, this one stays. Stays with you as you will stay glued to your seat, unable to look away. Stays with you a long time after you finish reading it. This is how it’s done, folks. A masterful display of a writer in show more complete control of his pen and his thoughts. A harrowing psychological tale of so-called days of innocence remembered by grown men with foggy memories. A reality desaturation. A friendship that should have ended with “…copper skyscrapers, royal blue dinosaurs, and golden trees.”

The few remaining poker players gathered around a single table playing late into the night waiting on their luck to change, soaked in sweat and desperate having the kind of conversation that goes around and around in a maddening way. No one at that table is a winner, but they grin when a chum fails on a hand. Choices are made, but no one understands the other’s choice. Miscommunication is forever prevalent. Suitcases full of emotional baggage are always near and can easily be unlocked. Think quick, speak quicker. Get wrong ideas and speak out of turn. Suspicion and hatred. Success pitted against unemployment. Failure and square one. Smugness and class distinctions. Condescension. Ego. Education-importance debates. Small-minded exclamations. Ambitious ladder climbing. Discussions or argument? Identity questioning. Provoking/Triggering commentary. Lack of Compassion/Trust/Truthfulness/Principles/Guarantees. Living in cells of their own making, feeling daily, the rotten crawling sensation of a generally miserable existence. Where conversations amongst themselves feel like being lobotomized in stages. Friends we all wish we had. People we all wish to know.

What is your purpose in life, dear reader? A question the main character once asked himself.

***

Charm

Noise from parties travels down the stairway, keeping Lana and Jack from nights of much needed sleep. A knock on the noisy upstairs neighbors’ door brings the music down but also amplifies the loud voices complaining about the couple downstairs that don’t know how to cohabit. A characterization occurs by people Lana and Jack do not know. Then the next party, and the next turning up of the music, and more characterizations, mutterings and go f yourselves. “...relations deteriorated into daytime stereo wars.” Vibrations, sound traveling down, music accompanied by shouting, by voices edged and rising, constant pacing of angry feet forever locked in confrontation. Fights tinged heavily with blood and despair. Slammed doors and smashed plates, beeps of the microwave and roar of the television.

“I can suggest is that when it happens, just grin and bear it.”

A relatable story to every reader out there, including yours truly, locked in a never-ending legal battle with his own uncaring and selfish neighbors upstairs. Nearly three years later, countless written letters, phone calls with lawyers for the management and still I can hear them. Can you hear your own noisy neighbors, dear readers? Well, if you can’t, you are lucky. Enjoy your sleep, while the rest of us grit our teeth and put in earplugs to cancel out the noise.

***

Reliance

A story of Doris, a seventeen-year-old with ambitions of joining a dancing troupe living with a boyfriend her mother Sharon does not approve of. Or is it their unwed status that bothers her more? Displeasure and coolness. A mother wanting her daughter to stop dreaming her life away. A daughter that just wants to get away from her mother. A cautionary tale of the extremes a mother is willing to go to when she believes she is right. A mother always knows best… or so it goes.

***

The Island

A man is alone on a small island after his ship goes down. After learning how to survive, he feels the loneliness of a man for company other than the sky and the sea, longing for a life no longer his.

He dreams of a delightful apparition, a woman beckoning him. Illusions were of little strength and no permanence. But what if he could make the apparition a reality?

A cutting cautionary tale of a Robinson Crusoe type fashioning a woman in his mind and uprooting some serious consequences.

***

Fugue

During an especially miserable English winter, in a ferociously crowded car, commuters sway and stagger as the subway moves too fast, or too sluggishly imprisoning them, the air always poisonous, a disgusting sulfurous mass. In one of these sweltering rocking and stalled cars, four passengers intersect.

An older, recently retired stockbroker trying to close one last philandering deal, his blind wife who casts suspicions with acuteness unimpaired by blindness, the beautiful young red-haired girl who is the beneficiary of the stockbroker’s conspiratorial winks and wandering eyes and lastly the fly on the wall, a visiting Canadian laborer who is a witness to this messy publicly displayed love triangle. Although he eventually forfeits the role of a mere spectator and becomes a full-fledged player.

What one sharp look can do by an individual who feels his partner is straining him daily. What emotional and physical distancing can do to a wife who depends on her husband and now finds herself completely in isolation. What the reciprocations of that look can do. And just who the onlooker might be voyeuristically taking it all in. Four lost souls trailing off into a trembling inner silence as the wheels screech to a halt at the next station.

***

White Night

Dark dreams. Interrupted sleep. Middle of the night walks. Gregory is awake. Grudgingly. Not of his own accord. His wife Danielle cannot sleep. She can never sleep.

“I’m going for a walk, to tire myself, I’ll be back…”

Sleeplessness gripped her, haunted by her past. Forever a victim of her memories. Something Gregory never understood, not then and not now. In fact, he understands nothing at 2:30AM, and yet there she is, going outside in the middle of the night not fearing being mugged, raped or murdered. This is his wife.

But what can be done? Gregory takes the safety chain down and outside they go.

“…a woman, half-lurching, half-stiff-legged, shambling forward with a surly man in her wake, his face averted from her as much as possible.”

And thus ensues a battle of wills. Memories assail both, as each pursues the other, or something else beyond at a relenting quickened pace while the reader reads on, unnerved and thrilled, simultaneously, wishing only for the couple to slow down, to come to a full stop, to connect via direct communication.

Pause. Listen. Do you hear the echo of their footsteps outside?

***

Night Attack

Melissa and Daniel are on the run. Planes thunder overhead with their crimson mouths gleaming bloody with a set of jagged teeth. They want Melissa and Daniel. But will they get them? And where is Melissa’s aunt? She has disappeared. Did they get to her? And who are They?

Will Melissa and Daniel escape the Nightmare? Will you, dear reader?

***

The Frequency of Alarm

The Lieutenant follows an unfamiliar trail hacked out by the enemy, defeated now, a time for diplomacy and negotiations. She walks alone, a lone figure wrapped in thoughts. Beyond the bombed horizon. She is a communications officer tasked with monitoring communications on radio bands, both a receiver of enemy broadcasts and as a booster for the transmissions from Central. Now she has a duty to entice the civilians to accept the new hardships a treaty would introduce.

The war is over. The remaining, a skeletal crew. She feels the uselessness of her position. The end is near. Inglorious and without decorations, back home a discharged officer in a country of disgruntled civilians suffering the domestic fatigue of war. She wanted a promotion. Advancement. More combat.

But the brass wants everything to be dismantled and the personnel to ship out. She awaits the signed letter confirming this. Two things are on her mind. A phantom noise she’s heard across the airwaves. A whisper. A hissing, like air out of a tire, except with words in it. A fugitive noise. A ghost. And the mysterious sign she discovered on her walk through the forest and out by the ramps leading to the highway. A warning. DO NOT ENTER TRESPASSERS WILL BE PUNISHED.

She concentrates on the puzzles before her. Biding her time. Knowing once she leaves, she will never return.

***

A Torch Did Touch His Heart, Briefly

Another never-finished letter addressed to Juliet Stevenson. A far-off love. She created lust where there was none before her. Her tender gaze awakened an erotic charge.

“I first saw myself as this... heartless man, this sexually inactive - no, be blunt - sexually incapable and uninterested man.”

The protagonist is confessing. Getting to the details. A researcher with a degree in library sciences. He knows how to do this. Learning the tips of things, the fascinating and the mundane. We bear witness to this confession.

He reveals that he is fond of theatre. Wrapped in the sublime power of it. He feels at home there. Yet, he considers it less art than mere entertainment. Less a play and more of a show. Except for Juliet. She is art. Juliet is an actress, in both movies and plays. The difference to him, is that she embodies her characters. Makes them real. Much more than a typical actress. She can incarnate spite, envy, fury, love, desperation, longing and passion! His heart is hers. He belongs to her. She becomes a part of him, even if she is unaware of his existence.

“I’ve chosen not to have partners, except for a few meaningless relationships here and there. I couldn’t force myself to be attracted to anyone for long...” / “Actresses are safe to crave.”

So much is alien to him, so much he will never feel. But he is feeling. He has feelings for Juliet Stevenson. The woman on television. The woman up on a stage. The woman performing for him, for others. The woman that was out of reach. But that’s just what he wants. To reach out. To be comforted. To be held.

Or does he?

***

A Livid Loneliness

She is alone. Her spirit is weak as she unpacks her suitcase trying to dispense with her past, finally reaching this idyllic land she longed for all her life.

“From childhood she had memorized charts and graphs on waterfalls and dry seasons, learned names of trees and flowers, studied the native language, assimilated every piece of knowledge available in order to build a future. She understood everything but was completely unfamiliar with the place.”

She tries to ease into this tropical life, staying in a hotel for a month and a half off-season and on dwindling money. The creeping paralysis is always present. The constant terror and ever present knowledge that she is so painfully alone. The hotel clerk she meets fingering her wedding sitting ring alone at the bar staves off some of the loneliness and thoughts of her ex-husband.

She levels with him. Tells him of a, “A half-life, that’s what I know, half-measures, pleasant moments, but I’ve never been happy.” Introduces him to her hopeless world in need of healing and hope. Will he help her? Can he? Paradise or Purgatory. A spirit on the verge of giving up or finding peace.

***

What in Me is Dark, Illumine

Martin looks at paintings. Drained paintings exhausted by thousands of eyes and monographs, articles, books, and studies. Now a void exists, held in place by slight brackets of wood. He stares, horrified, into the abyss. Then he can’t help himself and starts shouting. Tearing the fabric of the afternoon apart. A dinner party awaits him later that evening. He is the talk of the town, or rather his outburst at the gallery. The room bends in, rippling, wallpaper sags, exposing damp rot, paint peels off the ceiling. Will Martin make it through the evening entangled in obscure conversations, barely staying upright in a world bending in on itself.

***

This book has eight ratings on GoodReads. This book deserves better. Without a doubt, Jeff Bursey deserves more. More sales, a wider audience, to be read. This is a fine collection. There is nothing to skip here, and it deserves your time and attention. The psychological elements, the dark humour, the explorations of characters who aren’t mere cardboard cutouts, there’s depth, there’s tragedy and it all scarily resembles real life. Captured all too accurately. True to life yet remaining a work of fiction.

Now do yourself a favor and get a copy of this magnificent achievement. show less