Chapter 1 

"Sometimes my brain feels like an elephant wandering off toward the high grass of the plains, full of muddy water in its belly. It paused at times to trumpet at some fleeing Mastodon or Tigress. Isn't the bloated feeling symptom of shadows trying to fill themselves? Great danger in wrapping oneself in shadows disguised as artificial light." So said Fid who, unlike the philosopher talked about women all the time.

"A woman always embodies something; what is it now? Perhaps it is the personality of history itself; the contradiction between power and responsibility. A woman as an ideal type would be difficult when the whole mind is concerned with exposure." And when he said "exposure," he drew it out and flattened it, eyeing me like there was an oracular meaning in the way he'd expressed it. He wanted to impress me with his experience with women. That had come to be a way among the footless young who hung out in the urban parks smoking and playing guitars, flashing smiles and nodding heads as people went by, inconscipuously, headed for their important meetings in life.

I saw him with one woman who walked all disjointed with a pained expression on her face. It was disconcerting listening to her. She was always making pronouncements as if she were the smartest person in the world, yet, when one looked closely she lived like a gypsy and probably knew how to throw knives against trees.

The city made him a storyteller because even knowledge was only participating in a good tale. Tales enter other realms where we can not participate. Vanity kills the effort. The storyteller goes out and asks simple questions: "What creative principle are the living people dependent on?" "Have you recognized yet that separation from this principle is death, the center of it life?"

"Every shitty thing," Fid was saying, "has tried to knock me off some perceived pedestal. I laugh at the effort and commend the shits for trying but, eventually, it applies a few drags on things. The shits don't want to see. College, family, clowns, actresses, bosses, lovers, it doesn't matter. I just make 'em into characters. You want to hear my list of characters?" He was in an old bakery turned into a cafe and had a binder in front of him. A man had just entered the bakery and declared he was a god and they chased him out. "Well, there was the wicked, half-crazed drug dealer; a big talkin', cigar smoking contractor and his daughter addicted to something harmful; the big talking, big dreaming, little talented rock musician, the old, bitter professor "against the war,", the macho primitive working for the utility company; the jazz guitarist who works blue-collar during the day; the neurotic, suicidal woman who suffered in childhood and read Hesse novels; the left-liberal professor and his wife running an alternative newspaper; a lonely Marine in his apartment watching TV while his ex-wife throws a brick through his doors; pot smokers a plenty; loud, dark-spirited Trotskytes; the blonde, neurotic rich guy; Judge, the ganja smoker; golfing bureaucrats; bubbly, nubile innocents; parents of the middle, upper-middle class; young toughs who carry knives into bars; a young counselor training to be a minister who rides a bicycle; young Jewish writers on the make; a mother with her young children in the lonesome mountains; loud talking, smart-ass bureaucrat who drink too much; a New York exploiter of college students; lonely and rootless fellows suffering the bowels of the city; Nigerian student wanting to be "apart of the action:' astrologer healing woman; the steel-eyed stentorian librarian; a bookseller balding on top; loose women sitting in the saloons and clubs, pregnant and just in from the eastcoast; the computer company owner; Filipina nurse working full-time to support musician husband; single women in mid-20's roaming the land; an ex-Peace Corps worker desperate to find someone and build her career; the Greek girl who bragged that her boyfriend was in the Mafia; an effeminate ship steward trying to pick up middle-aged women on trains; the crazy Finn who belongs to the communist party or brags she does; a professor and his peccadilloes; a rich jewess who threatened suicide for 15 years and finally does it; a middle-aged lush who sleeps with stranger black men; kindly women lawyers, tough as balls feminist/lesbian lawyers; quiet, suspicious librarian; the ne'er-do-well relative that floats endlessly from the east coast to the west coast; the doctor and his huge stone castle in the crevice of some obscure mountain; and more, brother, and more."

David Eide
January 24, 2014