Parallel Paths, A novel from Generation X

Parallel Paths,

A novel from Generation X

Table of Contents 

Chapter                                                                                             Page                          Section

Part 1

Either: Fiction

Preface: An Amuse-Bouche of my Compendium                                        3             

1) In Butter and on French Bread                                                                    5              1 to Chapter 1

2) Spiders and Turtles                                                                                         21           24to Chapter 2

3) Shepherds, Teeth and Concrete                                                                   37           49To Chapter 3

4) Letters from Saints and Dark Green Libraries                                           54           78To Chapter 4

5) Factory Farmed Intelligence and Spiderman                                           79           118To Chapter 5

6) Interrelated Fates, We are all One Roux                                                   106         167To Chapter 6

7) Bastille Day from Enron to Acorn and the House of Sacred Sod         117         189To Chapter 7

8) A Lonestar Education                                                                                    145         240To Chapter 8

9) The Debt of Dutch Doors                                                                              164         273To Chapter 9

10) Louisiana Snowmen                                                                                    174         295To Chapter 10

11) An Avalanche in Antarctica                                                                       188         318To Chapter 11

12) Provisions to Sail the Atlantic                                                                    214         359To Chapter 12

13) Bulldogs and Pinchers                                                                                 236         398To Chapter 13

14) Rumpelstiltskin Contracts                                                                          252         423To Chapter 14

15) Olive Oil Spills                                                                                               275       To Chapter 15 

16) The Pheromones of Coming Home                                                          292         465To Chapter 16

17) Origami Elephants and the Garbage Mountain of Lakeview              313         501To Chapter 17

18) Pascal’s Dinner: Mutton with Dressing on the Side                                325         525To Chapter 18

19) The Synthesis of Anthills                                                                            343         548To Chapter 19

20) Our Collective                                                                                               364         584To Chapter 20

Epilogue: Into the Glare                                                                                     375   To Epilogue

Part 2

Or: Facts

American Manifesto

One)       Introduction                                                                                         377

Two)       Democracy                                                                                           382

Three)    Health Care                                                                                          393

Four)      Prejudice                                                                                               420

Five)       Education                                                                                             427

Six)         Debt                                                                                                       448

Seven)    Prisons                                                                                                   462

Eight)     Taxes                                                                                                     471

This novel is a work of fiction and no character is intended to portray any person or combination of persons living or dead.  It was substantially complete and registered with the United States copyright office in 2011.

Preface: An Amuse-Bouche of my Compendium

I was born to write this book of insides.  Every sadness, joy, loss, want, and introspective analysis of continual iteration is on display.  This book is about the choice: love or fear.  Everything is poured into this self-indulgent soup: hope, love, anger, nonsense, genetics, politics, religion, economics, God, parenting gender, children.  All at once we are living.  Slurp my human compendium.  Pariah-discourse hot-buttons; all ten of my fingers are singed.  This is my photograph album of daily emotions in sentence snapshots.  This is veracious no-anesthesia exculpatory surgery of the spirit and psyche.  These words are quarter-blood-scribble side notes.  This is a pocket field guide to humanity available for residents and aliens alike. 

I avow my ignorance, but if you do not know the words I chose than I invite you to do your own research.  Sort truths before you pass the ball in these Kierkegaard-Either/Or games that connect us.  This is Generation X’s follow up to Kierkegaard.  This is Nietzsche past Nixon, Bukowski past Bush reverberating towards 2020.  This is a humble soul standing on prior generations asserting our voice, not in disparagement of our predecessors, but in recognition of embracing our responsibilities.

Part one is presented as narrative fiction.  Part two is presented as a Generation X manifesto blog.  It is the parchment nailed to the whipping post found in an escritoire.  Like all chasm-leaps of evolution it usurps up from the masses below rather than down from the politician.  We are the sweeping demanding referendum occupying minds and hearts. 

I told myself; “Scrape the canister in repetition until it is to the raw self.  That innate human will appear in droplets of oil-based paint.  Dab and swirl a colored life onto a canvas of bonsai pages.  You have sown and tilled this soil.  This literature is your crop, fruit, contribution kiwi.  This Gen-X straight-edge sober Bukowski is serving.  Feed on my rye-isolation, want and gape with empathetic maws like a traffic accident.  Compare common scars and blessings.  We are not alone in this.  These spasms of bifurcating self are not unique, but relatable.  Liberate loneliness and grace incarnate to bubble out in those grand universal human questions.  Do you see me?  Do you hear me?  How do you choose?”

This is turn-coat confession Prozac-poetry in novel form.  This is fear-detox.  This is American reality television literature for the voyeuristic nation of readers addicted to the serum of our fellow man, but immune to the absolute authority of the idiot box.  This is one man’s soul standing un-posed promising frank, ugly, and beautifully raw.  This is my filet, barely touched to the fire presented gratis in red flesh bleeding meat.  There are no bones remaining on this closet coat hanger to rattle.  This book is my skeleton key for any that wish to inspect the wounds and spoils.  

We trade blows of guilt and innocence daily.  I am a junkie convict seeking absolution while lifting a middle finger in the median against authorities.  Are we not contradictions barking dumb dependent on the audience claiming to be the minority?  These are my leaper words.  Republic swollen heads and democratic swollen ass, I am lost in the middle of this politico American hourglass. 

Is your mind at the absent handshake of ache yet; bearing these sentences berating like a chemistry formula?  For it is intentional to be unrelenting in this work.  I am aspiring as pebbles of Shakespeare to craft conundrum sentences, paragraphs froth with forensics of the psyche, calling for exploratory introspection.  This is formulaic English.  This is poetic-prose math.  Its goal is to see the variables sparkling in amber for a later generation to collect my own.

This book begins like a seed, slow, consolidated, appearing normal and mundane in the pittance encapsulating standardized life.  The story of one child, parents, and siblings is a testimony of relations.  If you tend to this seed, water it in attention you will see the tendrils of root burrow into you.  Flourish or wither the choice is innate to the gardener. 

Events once written here are no longer in my jurisdiction, but in the belly of each who chooses to pour his or her water into them.  Expect not a rapid opening sequence as in an opera or movie, but an amuse bouche to wet ones palate for the exploration of ones humanity.

These pages are a sculpture of sentiment formed from dirt smeared from the earth smudged in my spit to lubricate this clay of sentences.  I molded an image, positioned stoic, an infinitely bare human nude and alone.  Gawk at me naked or pass void of notice to return to a glass home.  The subject and the viewer, we are reflective faces of the crowd.  We are each emaciated to taste a true connection in this jostling pit. 

People and friends, we know one comrade to obtain a second and a seventh to get a seventy-sixth.  Humans extrapolate socially.  Our cortex web connects our cerebellum in spider-thread exponential neural tissue.  Our method of movement is viral.  We are no different than hepatitis or papilloma. 

We perish without a host.  Human encephalization pumps up friend counts and casts the arachnid shadow of doubt over the crows, ants, and wolves.  What is that man doing as a solitary Alzheimer’s pariah at thirty-three?  Generation X over both eyeballs bleeding aesthetic from our irises and ethical from our palms.  Napster-web-based step-children prompt democratic evolution!

This Freudian sexual Darwinism is everywhere.  Are we not all just animals making bank deposits in cross-generational trust accounts based on baseball card statistics and lipstick markups emulating arousal?  Map this topography for pathology of my encephalopathy.  No one can decipher all this mad disease.  Find the relationship clear between a hemisphere and paired learning of a single man in a single parallel path to who and those he thought might be out there in someone else’s seventy-seventh ripple.

This is my own Christopher Nolan inception planted dream world.  I am writing: a life within a lie within a life.  This is faction: fact and fiction.  Flip the pages and pick your pile.  What is real?  What is truth?  What do you see or hear?  Do we reside in symmetrical concentric circle consciousness burrowing down in a synthesis of interlinked ant hills searching for the one mammoth cell of our common dwelling? 

Wake me up or we are each dammed into this kick-fall apathetic ignorance to ignore our parallel realities and acquiesce to our fourth dimensional assumed restrictions.  Barter which is the greater question: is time short or why are we here?  Choose: love or fear.

This book is a testament to narcissistic thinking, transposed as the prayer propagating my playgrounds, beckoning you to explore your own.  If you choose to witness, if you choose to choose, then enjoy.  Relish in thorough savor.  These words are not for fence peekers.  I ask not for anomaly Samaritans to admire my pompous aphorisms.  These words are for this grass dweller as an individual, as much as they are for you as an individual inhabiting the same grass.  Every form of speech is an excavating internal conversation.

I am measuring the height of my own thicket lawn, plotting escape.  I may be a circus-folk blogger of this teenage century breaking down in a digital diary for ticket-taken web amusement.  I may be in Plato’s cave barking at crowded shadows.  I know the details will wash into the silence of New York sidewalks.  Poets pose as baristas and brokers.

I am foremost selfish, examining the intricacies of internal duty as the conduit for a broader vision to peer into our purpose.  I am a flawed human praying for the glint of God in every being to shine and reflect on every face in a reciprocating union of all.  I hope that this sideshow registers deeper than these fenced confines and emancipates desolation and joy en masse.  Ideas are how humans exhale the oxygen that is breathed in by our great grandchildren.

These are the times of reversal.  Socially indolent paupers grip the scythe of emotional perseverance.  Harvest this gossip in the grain.  Find liberation in the precipitation of these verbs and nouns pumping out like bullets for this Bible of lonely.  Validate just how alive we are.  We are not dead!  There are no zombies here! Unite!  Roar!  Live.  This is not about choosing a side, republicrat, democran, conservative, liberal. Fuck that. The solution is in the synthesis.  Who is Ethan Baker?  

Continue to Chapter 1                                               /,