Flow/Frame

Spiritual activity is addressed more directly and less antiquitously than spiritual agility and acuity, as befits a practical handbook for post-modern use. This reader regards Andrew’s work as a manual for individuals intent on contesting the fully Beast-leashed world of Modernity in a post-modern revolt. He does not us ethat term, but operation, in an insurgent context; which is to say rational warrior revolt, rather than emotional ideological revolt. I suggest maintaining revolt level resistance and not escalating to rebellion or revolution, as all such movements have fallen easy prey to the machinations of the Enemy, deeply embedded in the web of lies we suffer discord by. All ideologies—yours, mine, my father’s, your hated enemy’s—are all, yes, ALL, traps contrived and set by The Enemy of the human soul for upon us to hungrily dine.

Paul is invoked in the reweaving theme of flow, in the advice for a returning home. That Paul returned home via Rome, which was not his earthly home, but his executioner’s block, being visited by an “angel of his God,” in storm off Sicily, reminds this reader at the top of page 25, that Odysseus had a like journey, and that this hero of “many-devices,” is mentioned in the inspirational overleaf featuring Homer/David/Bob Dylan. As much as the third leg of that selected poetic tripod makes this reader cringe, such is necessary to make the connection from our deep pit with our twisted path. For, “The Enemy has introduced a situation wherein the mystical relationship between flow and repentance is lost.”

Homer gives this story whole, with Odysseus being visited by God’s messenger [Hermes, conductor of souls] and God’s sisterly angel, Athena, who alone knows the mind of her Father and resides in storm, a storm which is a shield for the righteous. [See Exodus and Hesiod’s Shield of Herakles.] Since the twisted modern mind, and by extension the anemic postmodern mind, has been corrupted beyond the ability to read ancient codex, the author links the most neutral and soulful sections of the Bible [Psalms] and modern folk music with the Odyssey as a thread. Congrats, this would be quite beyond this curmudgeon’s reptilian charm.

The language of the birds is briefly discussed directly, that is the language of sight-across-into Time. Homer, Hesiod and Apollonius of Rhodes sung of birds as the messengers of God more often than angels, bearers of hints for the discerning mind, rather than instructions such as those brought to Odysseus and Lot. Andrew mentions of the knitting person weaving on the like plane of the musician, and I would add the fighter. This recalls to mind the two most intuitive female souls I have known, Danika and Leanna, women who discerned many things, without much of the information men tend to require for such deductions, and spent much time knitting. Leanna recently showed me a hand loom, that permits her to weave still in the wake of a stroke. The unknown composer of Beowulf places God as the war weaver upon a man-testing loom, placing the Creator in interaction with the Fates or Furies, indicating systems put in sync at creation of which the Creator must take care in handling, imbued of sub-wills as they are.

On page 26 madness and narrative are placed in contrast as polar aspects of psychic cartography. The twisting of our narrative sense, to include the monetization of song and its witless repetition recalls the hall of madness so many of our smartest men remain trapped in. It is a central aspect of our present condition that our logic and reason have been chained to opposite poles of emotion. This results in the smartest among us either using their minds to acquire money, thus slaving for whoever shares it out, or to justify their womanly emotions, their hates, hopes, fears and desires. Without narrative skill—largely taken away by short form entertainment music for money as the modern mind loops along ever shorter spirals of nonsense—our keenest minds have no loom on which to weave. [2]

The author suggests ten minutes of trace to begin entering narrative space. The entranced boy I once was, trying to span the world in my mind, was continuously punished by bullies, teachers, coaches, parents. Trances of hours, nights, days were not uncommon as I tried to frame the life that so confused me in the absence of information to coherently inform me. Recently, as I took a bus, and five trains from the Pacific to the Atlantic to lay one last kiss on my dying mother’s forehead I was entranced. The seizing eyes prevented reading and made of speaking a torment. From Wednesday Dusk 4/29 thru Sunday Noon 5/3, I sat, stood, paced, stretched, prayed, mused, in crowds and alone, in darkness, dimness and eye-searing sunlight. All of Thursday and Friday I spoke not a word. Many people have described to me the insanity induced by being alone and in silence for mere hours. Beyond the curtains of sleep most are unable to remain silent—unable thence to conduct bad-odds war—and must babble or seek the addle of noise piped into ear buds. It was not so when I was a boy and youth. Many adults and other strange children could be seen keeping their own thoughts, conducting muse houses within. On that bus and five trains, this silent cipher observed not a single silent soul, all seeking others or, even more often, seeking conduction by the ether shepherds held in the palm of their supplicant hands.

“Our reports are not from the frontier but the war front,” assures the Author, Andrew Edwards, on page 29 of the manual he has musingly left for a few odd fellows to consider before they take to quivering knee and kiss the ring of The Enemy.

Agon and Tripod

The choice of “game” when something higher and deeper is meant, is an example of abstract operation, with the author declining to directly challenge the diction of The Enemy. He works within the semantic rules enforced by a self-aware beast polarity. In 2000, when Chuck Goetz and I agreed to found a free-flow combat system, an interactive experiment in what works in hand weapon combat—held taboo by all establishment law enforcement and martial arts instructors at the time—we had two goals. As he put it,

“You’re already the scary white guy with the knife who the bruthas don’t mess with, that wants to know how Maximus kicked ass. Me, I wanna be a better fighter. Make it as real as you want it. You come up with the name. ‘Two dudes stabbing each other in the park,’ probably doesn’t get us many recruits.”

Chuck’s simple genius would have done better. I chose Agonistics, Modern Agonistics. Agonistics is the suffering of the sacred contestant as he trains for the sacred contest, the agon. It is the root of the word agony, a very unpopular word among the plush-living occupants of Modernity. Every time I posted an ad for an event, that was five times, the City Paper, and the Dundalk Eagle, posted it as “Modern Agnostics” or “Modern Antagonistics!” Every single person who repeated the term back to me said “Agnostics” the first time. It is the worst handle ever, for it is core truth in ancient WORD. The word is sacred of old and therefore taboo of new.

When Sean Glass fought in Knoxville, the announcers pronounced it correctly and wondered out loud at what manner of maniacal fraternity he hailed from. Is this simply the arcane whisper of agony shivering the bones of fat, fetid Modernity? Or, is their a deep, substrate of revulsion focused upon True Antiquity by our vile beast mind of Modernity, that causes supposedly individual minds to revolt against the idea of positive transformation through suffering?

Andrew provides a clue in his three-part “narrative dividend” for the Abstract Operator. The ancients contested in agon and war—which was the Agon Magnus of Alexander—for prizes. From the Iliad set in the 1200s B.C. down through the victory with the fist of Varzadates, Prince of Armenia in A.D. 385 [maybe 383 or 4] victors often received a tripod. Trophies at battles were based upon a tripod. A tripod was something like a bronze butcher’s block, a three-legged stand that sometimes held a culdron, sometimes a suit of armor. The automated forges of Hephastion, his three-D-printers, moved upon tripods. The significance of the tripod is balance. The removal of one leg crashes it to earth. It, like the three-part story decreed by Aristotle as embodying the balance of worthy narrative, is a prize of achieved, necessary—not optional—balance, of transformation.

So Andrew Edwards reminds us in Abstract Operator: A Speculative Manual For Inner Survival.

Notes

1.) I have observed that westerns, black hat/white hat dramas with a masculine face, which set the narrative tone for post cataclysmic [post 1945] were possessed by an exclusively feminine ethos until rescued by Italian movie makers briefly, across a few yarns in the late 1960s. That actor and those themes would then be co-opted back into the feminine Beast System in 1971. This induction/conduction theme remains intact and un-apposed in major media. In a world where most Christian do not read their Bible and few Arуans read their epics, false, bipolar, narrative sense rules our subtext.

Written from memory 4/22/26, Portland.

The tramp writer is slipping, waning, falling into sloth and disrepair. With a new trip dawning in three days, the last trip, near two weeks gone, is already yawning, threatening to close its eyes forever. If I don’t write it up before the next, it gets dust-binned in Memory Hole Annex Z.

Mom has been suffering for a couple months, calling me daily to seek advice on dealing with back pain. It did not type for mechanical cause. When the diagnostics came in, My Brother, Tango, flew to Baltimore. The other family members were busy and/or emotionally disabled. I had one round trip coast-to-coast plane trip banked and had told him, “If something goes south with Mom’s health, I have one chance of coming back for a bit. You make the call.”

As I entered the hotel room in the Chehailis Rez. Casino, the night before Theresa’s funeral and burial, the phone vibrated on my hip. Answering it in the dark, I said, “What’s up?”

“Now’s the time.”

“I’ll see you on Tuesday or Wednesday. Send me the hospital address…”

The Wife bought a round trip ticket with Southwest: 8 AM to 10:20 AM Portland to Phoenix, 1:30 PM to 8:00 PM Phoenix to BWI, and then back again the following Monday night. It cost $468, about the same price as a four day train trip across the nation. As a science-fiction writer, I enjoyed the spaceport aspects of the airports. The security check was not as deplorably dehumanizing as it once was in 2017. I still HATE it, having to be disarmed of even a steel pen. The boarding process was of interest, as I found that a plane generally carried the same number of people as a train. Due to having to cram everyone in through a single hole, a train boards quicker than a plane, by about 20%. What is impressive, is that the airlines people are so much better organized than the train people, having a super efficient boarding process. Still, 270 people going through one hole in a giant steel bird takes longer than the same number of less organized people climbing into 6 doors on the side of a land dragon.

The plane has more carry-on luggage capacity than the train. The bags may be bigger. I now see that most of the passengers on trains have so much trouble with their luggage because they are used to more heavily assisted plane travel. Four stewardesses are ready to slam luggage into top racks with wide capacity, where on a train, one has to handle your own. Also, one climbs up into a train, where to board a plane, one rolls down into it. Four stewards to 170 to 270 airline passengers compared to one conductor or attendant for 74 on a train is not a huge manpower difference. But they are all together in the same space. The stowage staff features one Hot babe on the phone, one crone, MILF or cougar, one big broad, and one man, working as a team. The hottest mike babe was the Asian suffer girl on the return flight. A train conductor or attendant is usually alone.

Plane passengers are much more rude than train goers. There are more families of recent breeders, mostly blond, I note. The boarding protocol is the same with elderly and injured first, then by how much one paid for the ticket. There are more black passengers than on a train, and they tend to be highly needy. The staff had far fewer black staff than the trains. Of interest was that after the ticket was bought, one then had to buy a specific seat. That seat purchase determined your boarding order. One postmodern imperial plane difference over the industrial era train edicuit [tried spelling this 7 times!] is that active USG military board first! Supposedly the most able-bodied folks, are given feudal style warrior class privilege over those they supposedly “serve.” This strikes none of the slaves as odd and serves no practical pupose. Most interesting is that plane fliers are handled and behave much more like livestock than train riders.

Few look out the windows. No curiosity or care about how the machine works is demonstrated. Full immersion movie, music and video game play is the rule. Feeding is not individualized, but basket fed. The seating is jammed, with one hoping not to be seated next to a fatty. Three plane people occupy the space of one train person. The air system is supremely unhealthy, the air close and thick. The altitude change at 5% to 10% assails these damaged sinuses and ocular nerves. The flight part, however, is fun. The day before, Dog Soldier and I watched scores of air frames streak the sky with horizontal and diagonal clouds. I notice that the climb to 34,000 feet takes half hour and is conducted gradually, giving a nice view of the Cascades. We pass some 45 degree angle chem trails, which Dog Soldier and I notice took only a minute to transit hundreds of miles of sky from Mt. Hood to Mt. Saint Hellens. We never saw any of the many airliners taking off or setting down at PDX leaving chem trails, just as over Baltimore, Pittsburgh, San Jose and Salt Lake City. The chem trails are traced by planes moving at twice to thrice airliner speed.

Only able to view the ground taking off from Portland to Phoenix and from Phoenix to Portland, I noted that air turbulence over the Superstition Mountains is expected and roller coaster-like in intensity, which made me smile, wondering if Banjo’s Chosen Reptiles were down there thirsting for the fear- basted souls of gentiles.

Of course, this tech-tarded Luddite had to screw up. I went to departures to get picked up—after all, I was departing the air port. Ghost Girl One kindly informed the visiting primate, “James, it is an air port, not a car port.”

The Brickmouse and I did discover, that despite him having to circle back around to departures, that getting picked up at departures saves time, as so few people were congregating at arrivals in compressed time. I made the same mistake at PDX, to which the Eskimo Wife laughed, “Oh, My Yeti Honey—and I thought you were a whiteman when we met!”

Ouch.

From the darkened pit within which our self-image has been cast by our sinister shepherds, how may a man arise truly defined in the mirror of a higher mind? We are inducted to believe, with the fervor of a negating faith, that we are the spawn of iniquity, that we are a weakling brood nourished by unearned inequity. How does one raised to such self-hate, take on the qualities “of light and running water” [0] in a world where time itself is held captive?

Andrew’s second leg of the inner tripod is discernment, that quality that preserves rather than protects us from a soul-eating system that relies upon a central pillar of delusion. That wounded, skewed, shrouded and twisted image of what was and is and SHOULD be, lacks balance and relies upon weight. The one thing that the innocent child lacks, discernment, to apply his Metis, must be acquired if one is to find an anchor outside of the field of lies, which the author names a simulation and wisely relates to medieval ritual, being such practices as modern doctrine instructs us is childish. Such implosive instruction is a form of revelation of the method. The author contents himself with a mention of the positive antique worldview rather than amplify the hand of The Deceiver.

Saint Cyprian, my favorite martyr, who forgave his executioner, even paid the weeping headsman, and was attended by many disciples that wished to savor death by the profane hand in order to attain reunion with Eternity, is invoked as one who asserted the agency of the departed. So too did Odysseus, in the Land of The Midnight Sun, in concourse with the mere doomed and a seer departed, gain discernment necessary for his quest to save his bloodline. The dead are our unseen partners, our sidelined fellow-fighters conscious of the higher battle that we forget in our earthly skirmishes.

Andrew writes cautiously, “When belief is the nutritive, decisive, ingredient, the recipe is dangerous… let belief then be attended with the highest human care.” With a reminder that we reside within “God’s mind,” the author eases into methods of cultivated discernment. This was suspected, by classical thinkers, to begin naturally among mindful men in the 35th year, that threshold of reflection, of seeing death as a portal rather than a hole, tending to dawn at the “midpoint of life,” as described by Dante. Even so, Dante’s journey had just begun into that “forest dark,” and its depths would only be navigated with the aid of a departed seer, the ghost of Virgil, that pre-Christian saint who, [1] the late ancients suspected of having prayed for the intercession of Christ in the generation before his noted appearance.

The author employs music as a method of discernment. Here this tone-deaf reader does recall that Alexander, upon his return form victories in Thrace, Scythia, Illyria and Hellas sponsored agons to Heaven and to the Muses. The later was mention by Arrian with a whisper of dread, that he, a mere mayor of an academic town, and his life work, might be in danger for mentioning this 500 years on. This hints at an ages long “game.” Alexander’s crossing to Asia, regarded as a sister to Europe not to be approached in her ample, seductive repose without a proper wedding, was conducted with numerous sacrifices to God and to the patron saints of Troy, including penance for the sins of his two ancestors, Herakles and Achilles, who warred there. Then, when Alexander faced minions of The Enemy at the Granicus, his first test in Asia, before taking the first risk, as proof to his men that God approved, his war horns called upon Heaven to witness and judge.

His were the days when a mere king might challenge the Beast System. Our world has sunken so far that no king, president or money mogul may call so brazenly on Heaven for help without all of the tentacles of the beast devouring him and his, chained in his stall of “power.” Hence, even as music in the guise of entertainment is used to usher millions into darkness and doom, the author declares that he who fights the system must attain musical acuity. As a non-musical, even anti-musical person, this reader agrees, as I have made a conscious decision to observe rather than fight the Beast. No saint or hero chaffs in this soul, only a curious shade content with asphodel.

Madness is described as another chamber in the “psychic mansion” the operator passes through in his trial. The person with more contact points with reality, with time and space, has a better chance at preservation on his road, a road increasingly obvious not to be “his.” It is my observation that the man who has not achieved independence from his mother is doomed in this, obviously why The Beast has degraded the Father and promoted the Mother. Andrew makes this allusion briefly. The memoirs of Urnst Junger and Audie Murphy, the battles of great captains such as Alexander, Hannibal, Attila, Arthur, Lee and Forest, contesting reality against the ever-growing leviathan, do demonstrate temporal mastery of mystery, which the author states as a use for discernment. Cyprian’s anchor of death, tethering the soul to a point beyond this world of dearth, recalls, in this third reading, Roland, blowing his horn into eternity from the place of his pending death, of Charlemagne being informed in totemic dream of the demise of his right arm on earth. Note that to Blow one’s “own horn,” once a signal of mutual peril to a comrade, is in our Beast Cage, regarded with utmost disdain. For my entire 63 years in this pen, my elders have declared that to “blow your own horn,” is a base and selfish sin, where once it was a high, selfless prayer. [2]

The Operator must conduct himself “beyond the weight of belief and consensus” to gain and maintain discernment. It is for our plunge into ignorance and blindness that the mortal mire of social hysteria has been the focus of Beast Culture since 1787, when that all-devouring dragon became fully self-aware. [3]

“The critical takeaway is that discernment is not binary, despite the binary actuality of moral truth.” Here, on page 24, the author politely acknowledges that most of our teachers have been duped into a lack of discernment. This alone, the need to access minds in possession of shards of the situational construct, ignorant of both its structure and inhabitants, present a portal, at once an obstacle and an access-way, depending upon the nature and handling of its ushers and guardians.

Notes

0.) Inspired by and quoted from Crowbar, Andrew Edwards

1.) Virgil and Ovid were poets held captive by Augustus, perhaps the most totally Beast-owned king of Antiquity. Ovid candidly begged for an intercession from Heaven in his Metamorphoses. The reign of Augustus would span the lives of these poets and Jesus Christ. His successor, Tiberius, was the king of the Crucifixion. Augustus, the last man standing after a generation of banker-funded civil wars, was haunted by demons in his lonely halls and probably poisoned. Heaven’s displeasure with his beastly reign was shown in A.D. 9 when his governor Varus and three legions perished in Germania.

2.) See the Song of Roland, Second Jest. The death of Roland is hastened by his swallowing his pathological pride and blowing on his horn so strongly to warn his fellows that he aggravates battle wounds, causing head wounds to gush with the musical effort. Academia, though teaches of Roland the selfish fool rather than as a just tool.

3.) This contention is not made by Andrew Edwards, and is a sinful utterance of the reviewer, based upon blasphemous deductions. For a clue, see God in the Government, and The Reason for God, by doctors of belief, whose names elude, and who serve their own declared enemy via the false polarity erected to disable individual discernment, by slavishly and witlessly weaving lies about a codex of truth.

This morning I found a 3 month old email from the lady who discovered my work and brought about 20% of you good readers into eye-shot of this final step at the end of the internet. I asked her to send promotional links and was thrilled to discover she is writing adventure fiction and doing a puppet show!

Aw that’s so kind, I am glad I could help you! Here’s my YouTube channel where I do my sitcom:

...

And here is my Substack where I publish essays and talk about writing… I also announce my stuff here since unfortunately I can’t stand Bluesky, X, or Facebook. I write a lot of stuff on here that is free to read, and some of it is fiction:

Here’s the new edition of my Mirbeau translation :

...

And when my action series comes out in August I will let you know! I have another re release possibly coming soon as well!

Prior to the 16 instructional chapters;

1-4 on Biological Equipment

5-8 on Ancient Instruction

9-12 on Navigating a world of sinister curation

13-16 on rediscovering and engaging higher worlds,

The subject is reminded of his basis.

Metis

Between the two scenes in a fabricated story resides a potential abyss to be navigated. This juxtaposition, in our world operated by evil forces cloaked as entertainers, is defined as “operative” space, the place owned by Philostratus [1] as as he instructed his students in Pictures in a Gallery, gliding between one and the other. Quintus Smyrneus, in his Fall of Troy [2] describes the use of boxing as a rite of induction as “The quick play of cunning hands.”

“The working of the crowbar into the margin space,” provides the fictional reference for this work of overt nonfiction, providing Andrew, our messenger, his margin space. Technique, expertise, knowledge, as it is worshiped today is deftly shunted aside for metis, an aspect of Arete embodied by such men as Odysseus in Antiquity. The ancients warned against the corruption implicit in the pursuit of mere techne. When Isomachus [3] warns Socrates against taking up a manual trade, he speaks of deformation of body and mind. Artisans were slaves for a reason, so that his visionary master would not be bent to a functional groove. [0] Likewise, when Phillip the King reprimands Alexander the Prince for pursuit of musical excellence, he warns against specialization. But, as his exploits and rites proved, Alexander was training for mass conduction, for his quest for transformation, having never abandoned his childish metis in the face of the machinating adult palace. [Likewise his taming of Bucephalus.]

Branching from modern philosophers’ working in Antiquity through the Latin prism, the author uses the term “game,” perhaps as a diversion to throw counter-investigators off his trace. For “game” denotes lack of inner gravity, lack of the sacred, lack of divine focus. Game and games has been used by Modern European thinkers to translate two classes of rite that far exceed any modern notion of play, of interactive risk management and contrived secular power struggle. Ancient Greek Agons, were sacred contests dedicated to, and striven before, the higher powers. Their analogue for a game would be playing ball with their women and children. The mortal duels of the Romans, dimunitively impugned as “games” today, were munera, rites due the dead, in such a way as to provide lessons for the living. It is apparent that the author has in mind these deeper contexts, not the caged play of the modern “game” mind.

The author’s observations on the inherent functional wisdom of children, is lost to so many of our fellows, who fail to hold an awareness of our conducted decline downward into darkness from bright childhood. For so few of our fellows have children and many who do so, take the codex brutal in hand and obey the religious axioms that declares the natural child an enemy that must be forcibly colonized.

I recall, all in one day, a cold January morning of 1991, at about 10:00 AM, on Luerssen Avenue, in Baltimore City, attending my six month old son in the front yard. He was lightly dressed as was his dad. He made three discoveries that morning. He gave over the fledgling attempts at crawling and went to hand walking, cruising out onto the concrete sidewalk. He then found a stick that had blown out of the neighbor’s tree and began, wide-eyed, constructing it in his mind to some assertive purpose, looking at a squirrel venturing to the ground on the unseasonably warm day and seeming to wonder if this stick could bridge their mobility gap. Then he looked up at the moon, almost full in the deep blue late morning sky, and said, “M, mh, moo, Moon!”

And so my youngest discovered the gravity of his marooned situation and related it to the system meat-bot towering above him, the prole assigned to crush his wonder. In old age my saddest conversations have been with Christian Church ladies, all protestants, some mothers, some Barren Karens, possessed of the very vocal opinion that no child may be brought to Christ until he or she has been spanked, beaten, scolded, punished and otherwise deprived of the naturally arising devils implanted at birth, as if The Enemy brought new souls into the world rather than God. I have sat for sermons on such, with sacred references on why one must beat the children.

The author, in Metis, simply points out that the natural metis of children is compromised by lack of discernment. But, traditional beliefs that have clung to us in this Cage System must make peace with the whip hand reflex and ordain it. Christian Indians in the Pacific Northwest [2025, interview with Dog Soldier], as late as the 1980s, had rites in which the child was spanked on a blanket before the congregation, in a blatant attempt to interface with Beast System anti-culture.

On page 16 of Abstract Operator the activation of “dials in heaven and hell,” bring to mind the plight of Job and of Goethe’s Faust. The author’s suggestion to watch cats was given to me by another while residing in rain forest Cougar Country, which happens to be home to the author. The Major said, “That cat [4] gliding along the back of that chair, scale that up to 250 pounds, and that’s what’s waiting for you and your knife on the other side of the mountain.” The dials are described more like event horizons by Evola in Metaphysics of War.

Edwards points out, “Time, space and identity are all co-regulated, inseparable, and necessary for each other.” Thus the genius of Modernity, the erasure, corruption, negation and re-allocation of identity, inflicts a critical imbalance upon each and every person defined by the Beast System.

Metis is described in terms of music by the author. I propose, because I prefer, the silence of the broken dance, of combat. Having spent 40 years helping karate fighters, who own superb technique but cannot effectively fight in free flow, how to adjust through the cultivation of the time, measure, rhythm and sensory adjustment core to boxing and dueling, the reference of music fits, clicks. Not a musical person, never having played or sung a note, having been jailed for weeks in a dark room in 8th grade for refusing to sing in music class, this stranger has found more endurance in training, laboring and writing while in sleep-deprived states, by using music as an energy modulation conductor. Unable to recall a song title or lyric to even my favorite song, I recognize the motion of those few songs when I happen to hear them. For I do not, ever, play a song through this machine or others. The author reminds this reader that, I tonelessly understood when I found the carving in sketch of the two Babylonian boxers crossing fists to the music of an “Illisu’ drum.

“Metis is required for the passage,” writes the author, bringing to shadow in this reader’s mind an image of Odysseus, man of many wiles, living within and beyond Odysseus the King, Lord of Ithaka. Andrew Edwards has crafted a handbook for journeying back into our own usurped lives, retooling those maligned identities, reminding us that we are challenged with a passage whose toll-keepers require more than the sordid fruit of mortal accumulation. [5]

Notes

0.) See Alexander’s dedication to the 38 fallen Macedonians with individualized heroic statues executed by the best sculpture of the age. We might call Polycrates [check name spelling] free. Yet he had no choice but to accompany his Hegemon into wicked Asia, 334 B.C.

1.) circa A.D. 220

2.) circa A.D. 450

3.) Xenophon, Estate Management, circa 370 B.C.

4.) Annie in the novel American Dog

5.) Gene Wolfe’s priestly protagonist in Litany of the Long Sun comes to mind

From a small mountain town in central Oregon, this old tramp writer occasionally receives a parcel by mail. Within is a book, neatly wrapped in meticulously folded brown-to-mauve packaging paper. A green index card is signed, in considerately slanted fee-hand, unusual for such a young man, an art lost to most men born after 1960: “Thank you, James -Andy”

Twice I have read King of Dogs and twice Crowbar. The first is a highly structured survival story, the second a genius-level action-mystery-thriller written with no apparent plot devices beyond the eye of the author, something intentionally beyond the realm of artificial game intelligence.

Abstract Operator: A Speculative Manual For Inner Survival, is a thin volume, which makes the claim of Odysseus, in his device as the beggar in the doorway of his own grand house of Squaretime power, even as he swoops in from a Dreamtime tower guided by divine forces in his return. Abstract Operator declares itself as a work of fiction—which is to say of truth rather than lies—in the guise of a personal gift to a fictional operator. This operator is understood to be an actor in one or more of the above novels, mainly Crowbar. Within this truthful tale cloaked in story, much like Odysseus feigning to be an anonymous shipwreck on the seas of Fate, rather than the target of divine wrath and mortal greed, Andrew frames truth as it is, encompassing “reality” and dream, the divine and the pedantic profane.

My first reading of Abstract Operator was done in extreme pain and despair, as seizures of the eye set me beyond the writer’s door in a purgatory of pain. I found it helpful for the soul to read in those few hours when the eyes could see. This brief 121 pages is broken into two sections, a brief three-part overture, and four four-part briefings along a rising spiral of awareness. I will only address the three-pat overture: 1-Cartography, executed according to Aristotle’s dictum of a three-fold truth beyond the grasp of mere historic [investigative] “facts.” My goal is to promote the use of this book by men who find the worldview presented in Cartography tolerable. Many men, and all but a weird few women, must, MUST, look away and opt out of the meta-reality that Andrew describes as a game.

From 1998 thru 2020, I wrote some sixty books on physical and masculine autonomy placed within The Machine in which we have been incubated, inducted and conducted by The Enemy. Our three-part, cultivated corruption, meant to separate us from the divine, the sublime and our own mind, is often fought in the plane of madness, resulting in our temporal damnation as a square-time commodity tainted with taboo awareness. Andrew, through his Odyssian device, advises us on navigating the membranes of our fact-based and philosophically debased “reality” in a manner intended, not calibrated, to place the Operator [the inner truth-seeker] in coherent contact with this material world of illusion and the functional world of dream.

In the Iliad and the Odyssey of Homer, in the Theogony, Works and Days and Shield of Herakles of Hesiod, in the poetry of Theognis, Solon, Simonides, Archilochus and Tyrteus—even in the epics of Gilgamesh, the Psalms, Beowulf and the Song of Roland, Dreamtime and the solitude of the afflicted seeker, even the woe-fall of the strident hero, are informed, blessed and avenged thru the divine hand reaching into the mind through dream and trance. I shall humbly attempt to promote Andy’s work by amplifying his axioms, navigation notes and superior prose with observations of obscure congruence from Antiquity.

During my career as a self-help writer addressing physical combat within our distorted reality, the actuality of instinct, rhythm, evil and of hate-thirst injected from beyond our material plane, of the splintering of our identity to facilitate our digestion, encroached over two decades. Me, this misbegotten suburban child failed and fallen into urban spiritualcide, slowly stumbled through gross encounters with hundreds of hereditary, racial and systemic foes, into an involuntarily inducted understanding of my Great Enemy, looming ever invisible beyond the blue claws and brown tentacles sent for my body and soul. What this goonish fist and knife survivor learned in hundreds of violent encounters with the underthings of The Enemy [1] without understanding the mechanisms, as a musician who cannot read music but rather mimics and repeats fortunate interactions, Andrew Edwards is to that evolved survivor, a professor, a mind versed in reading the notes that the gutterman has grown to mimic and than wonder at his own success from his witless recess.

My lady here, has just arisen from her apartment [2] to sit by me and asked of what I write, of Andrew, of his book. She asked for an explanation, and I gave it just now as such:

“This is an educated man, versed in philosophy, who has managed to exit the economy and found a family in the world that we know is so designed to destroy our family.”

She nods, both of us poor, street survivors, having shielded our children from the violence we endured, yet estranged from our economically inducted and conducted children.

“The basic concept is that Evil, The Enemy, holds the upper hand in this world.” She nods, having been forced three times, from subsistence-level jobs for the unforgivable crime of defending younger women against sexual predation by coworkers and customers in retail settings, “Step away from the young lady, Sir,” she snarls to a towering, lust-spewing, menacing exemplar of America negrocity, in a public setting with many witnesses. The brute steps away from the tear-streaked petite. End of day, a customer complaint by said public rapist to the White store owner, gets my girl terminated, her unemployment blocked by an employer willing to call witnesses to her untrammeled aggression and racial hate. All of this is encapsulated in her nod at this kitchen table.

I now say to her, “Imagine all of these terrible jobs we have had, jobs that place us in harms way, in which we were not permitted to defend ourselves, or the weak.”

She nods, ‘Yes.’

“So, those dozen people who came at you this week, at the cashier’s desk, threatening you, cussing you, cursing you, spitting at you, blaming you for all manner of things not in your power. They are elements of this evil system, the hounds of The Enemy, there to draw you out so that you can lose your livelihood, your social media status, or, for a man like me, my freedom for enforcing my physical autonomy with my hands. Every time a person such as you who does good for others and protects the weak, is punished and disabled economically for good acts, the system gains more power. These screaming negroes and evil crackers spitting in your face, might be acting on impulse, but that impulse is an expression of a higher, evil power. Andrew here, gives men advice on avoiding direct combat with this High Evil, while reminding us that there is a higher power, that is Good, that is God; that even alone, a man in his trailer wondering when The Beast will let its hounds loose from their leash to feast on him and his, a man without a meat-made friend, is not alone.”

She nodded, “Baby, I just wish you could kill ‘em all while I fixed your dinner.”

Back to bed she went, seeking a dream beyond the hate where her pauper life has been spent.

Abstract Operator is a very near American brother to Jethro Randolph’s Digital Anarch, crafted in a smaller, starker reality prison.

From page 21: “Mastery in a manufactured dream is not true mastery.”

Notes

1.) Read 40,000 Years From Home

2.) Living in an apartment is a true sign of a spiritual incarceration in this prison

The recent proliferation of "Data Centers" in the United States is not about a race to create Artificial Intelligence (official narrative), nor is it an overhaul of the national security apparatus for the purpose of fully monitoring the citizenry (unofficial secondary narrative), but rather, what you are hearing is the mining of the new crypto-coin version of the new Globo Dollar in real time.

2010: A mysterious new currency called BitCoin hits the wires. It promised the user complete anonymity, where one could buy anything they wanted in privacy. It promised instantaneous funds-transfer and bill-pay. But most especially: the user could Engrandize their fortune by mining new coin themselves! Buy a bigger computer, nay—an entire server rack! And make sure you cool those suckers down! Keep at it and watch the wealth grow! Later, when this currency vehicle takes off and replaces the dollar, you and the other Early Adopters will be the new ultra-rich!

"It subverts the banking system and gives everyone the ability to self-custody their wealth" (Reddit nerd)

2014: Mostly people sit and watch, as bitcoin becomes the defacto payment method for drugs on the Silk Road. When that 'underground' marketplace was raided and destroyed, the Borough came in and seized the crypto, and that was the last we heard of this new shadowy currency for a while. But, despite the insisted connection to the world of crime and malfeasance that continues today, the currency was never outlawed, but rather, allowed to proliferate slowly. Latins would use it to send money home. Investors would sidetrack inflation without a fee. Speculators would ride it up, and down, and up.

2026: The hum of the $1500 GPU is all around us, built better and smarter (sometimes coupled with nukes!), except the coin isn't ours. It's somebody's. Did you really think it would be yours? If I had to guess, the people who are the rich and powerful now are going to take ownership of the coin, or have the authority to distribute it. Or sell it.

Over the years, USG allowed crypto to be adopted slowly, allowed it to mature, and gave it status, while simultaneously spreading the narrative that is is cartel money, driving climate change. Nancy Guthrie's kidnappers want Bitcoin, god damn them! As do tax cheats and drugheads. Truly bad stuff. And there it will remain until it is redeemed by a story, and sanctified for official use.

I predict that sometime in the next few years a new (US/TransNational/Globo) crypto coin will be revealed, with or without advertisement, and will be accepted as payment on Rent and Taxes.

You will be able to buy-in (finally) on the new coin, as it was quietly invite-only for the first decade. The script writers like everything to be folded into a flashpoint or crisis, so it will likely be rolled into one: domino-like collapse of Wall Street lenders? Wait we did that. War bankruptcy? I dunno, China and Russia are real shitters... something Trumpy? The whole world has been waiting for the Trump boat to explode or sink in some sort of final proof of the necessity of change. Maybe he "destroys" our economy and we're FORCED to use new currency? The narrative's cause to our effect is the only unknown.

Below is a the string of thoughts that brought me to this idea.

1. Sixteen years ago Nvidia was a $8 Billion video card company. Now they are #1 Company in the World with a Market Cap of $5 Trillion.

That quickly, with video cards? From Google: "Video cards (GPUs) dominate mining because of parallel processing. While CPUs have a few powerful cores designed to handle sequential tasks, GPUs pack thousands of smaller, specialized cores. This allows a GPU to process the highly repetitive, brute-force mathematical equations of cryptocurrency mining at speeds vastly exceeding CPU capabilities." Boy Intel must feel stupid.

2. The security apparatus for monitoring citizens and storing all their info already existed prior to the data center boom.

(also referenced on #9)

3. Facilities are not geared for storage, but for Processing.

"While traditional data centers were essentially vast digital filing cabinets optimized for storing information (archival data, videos, files), modern AI-focused facilities are computational powerhouses." (Reddit nerd)

"They're called GPU farms, and they're mostly used for training deep neural networks." (Reddit nerd)

Redditors [hardened retards] are a great tool for revealing the op because they memorize the narrative verbatim, and without insight.

"Modern AI facilities are increasingly built as massive computation factories rather than mere storage lockers. While traditional infrastructure focuses on storing and retrieving structured data, modern AI data centers prioritize processing..." -Western Digital

4. We already know AI is a puffed-up lie.

Sure you can write a book summary in 3 seconds or make deep-fake revenge porn, but lack of context will forever forbid genuine arty intelligence. That being said, we can still *hope* for it to get there. We could use a god on our side!

5. America is taking the lead in construction. The same lead they take in spending currency and tanking it.

"The U.S. significantly leads global data center construction, possessing more facilities than the next 14 countries combined. America accounts for roughly half of worldwide hyperscale capacity and consumes nearly 40% of all global data center power. " -Otium

6. Death of the Franklin note is imminent as a tidal wave of federal debt looms.

"The U.S. national debt has officially surpassed $39 trillion, with annual net interest costs exceeding $1 trillion, consuming roughly one-fifth of all federal revenue. This massive debt burden—which now exceeds the size of the entire U.S. economy—has officially made interest payments the fastest-growing component of the federal budget." -Fortune

7. Emerging standard

Crypto has already proven itself functional for consumers, individuals, businesses, governments. It's now legal tender in El Salvador. There's bitcoin ATMs everywhere. It's traded and tracked along with all the other investment vehicles.

Crypto-backed mortgages are now available!

8. Uneven construction

Some states have zero data centers. Others are ablaze with private equity, highlighting a preference for cheap power and large undeveloped tracts. I see this as a -1 for the theory of weaponized noise and resource war against the people. They just need to be many, and somewhere.

9. Data Centers are built like Fort Knox

10. Satoshi Nakamoto

Credited inventor of Crypto that has never stepped forward in-person. The name roughly translates to "Central Intelligence". Yeesh.

11. AI is unprofitable and unsustainable economically. Construction continues.

"Despite surging consumer adoption, end-user monetization remains highly uneven. Many foundational AI companies still operate at a loss due to astronomical infrastructure costs." -J.P. Morgan

"While companies have poured an estimated $1.2 trillion into infrastructure and research, direct AI revenues sit at around only $140 billion." (Reddit)

12. eMoney = the perfect tool to swiftly and discreetly excommunicate

This is where I merge with the Orwellian security narrative.

People don't realize that we now live in an era of software, that does the tedious job of handling 'divergent data' in order to produce solid findings, brilliantly. This electronic money that you will soon earn and remit, is just one source of info about yourself. There are many, and big brother will use every last one to triangulate person and purpose. Stop thinking of it as a singular trail through the woods that only an expert tracker could follow one day. On your back are the greatest trackers of all time, working together, with the power of light, and they possess all the records, all at once. No rock will remain unturned, all things becoming unprivate.

Data centers are about coin, not security. The coin IS the security.

It's not in planning stage, it's in finalization, with 17 years of trial observation and codebase tweaking complete already. The greenback dollar, which now exists in its sleaziest form, can no longer be trusted. It's been rode hard and put away wet. It's about time we retire the ol' gal. But we can't just lose the greatest country's greatest metaphysical asset, it must be preserved! That's why we're gonna do the ol' switcheroo real soon, because some things are too big to fail...

On yet a higher level (there's a higher level than money?) it is crucial to the framers of our reality that:

Which is why Indiana Jones will carefully lift the dollar off its pedestal, while applying the new crypto-dollar with even pressure, preventing a lapse in continuity.

The new coin will save us, our country, and everything we've come to know and love. It also guarantees we will never escape.

My grapho-prohibitive mind is now fatigued, having been shoved up against a wall of no-thrills awareness, and is pushing for a graceful thematic ending. I am no Lafond, so here are some simple interrogatives...

In what other Earthly timeline could the same things occur and NOT result in the uniquely destructive fates that define our reality?

When will we realize that every new development in Modernity is a dynamic weapon intended to sustain and maximize global suffering?

When do we stop looking up for the next instruction?

I was going to write that I have avoided this article because I am adverse to writing about decline—that set off my BS meter! I wrote 60 odd books on urban and masculine decline. I get used to my levels and adjust poorly. I might take a look at a job that I did in my youth and say, “Oh, three hours and out,” and there the Brickmouse finds me, 13 hours later halfway done, having mistaken my youthful capacity, when this identity was formed, for a potential, productive actuality.

Recent physical declination has shaken my confidence in writing. With that, Alexander, prick of the ages, brat king of hallowed Antiquity is calling down through time. According to Arrian, it was a shame, that the best poet had for his subject a poorly disciplined brigade commander named Achilles, and that the best warrior, Alexander, had no such immortalizing luck. Alexander’s ego is summoning another one of those substandard poets from the prolish muck.

On December 11th, 2017, a cold Monday night, I was, limping on a cane, hounded from the streets of Baltimore—quitting my $10.25 and hour job—by two pair of men, two drug muggers in the city, two giant Nigerian babe baggers in the county. Fighters who had left town and readers who wondered how long their morning blogger would survive his home town, had long suggested I move.

This is how I lost my first job, when the News American paper boy, a burly Polish youth, scattered my Baltimore Sun papers at Loch Raven and Aberdeen and threw my red rubber bands into the street. I just told my parents I quit because I couldn’t recall the addresses by heart since I lost the address sheet. That was a lie to cover my powerlessness, the stupidity plea was easily believed as I was just emerging from special reading class. I didn’t need the sheet, because I recalled each house, not by number, but by sight. Lost wages of $3 a week in 1973/4 and $140 a week in 2017; a loser driven from his hometown streets as a boy and again as an old boy. I do recall feeling good once when a man in suit rolled up in a nice powder blue car, a long boat, and gave me two quarters for the 25 cent paper. I got 4 extra papers I could sell.

I decided stubbornly, to stay and write. With two months rent in the bank, a pot of renewing coffee and a bottle of Trade Winds cheap rum, I decided to write forever. When I got too wired from coffee, two shots of rum—then when Morpheus crept cat near, a pot of coffee sent the word thief away. This ended in disaster, after being up for just shy three days, I think, when I unwittingly opened some door and was punished for misunderstanding the message delivered by the ebony giants, who graciously—and it was an act of grace—let me go, after I foiled their abduction of a $30,000 slave girl.

How many novels could I write set in Baltimore and its nears? I would travel and write novels in those invited places. As well, the small biographies that began with The Violent Project, could be expanded to memoirs of various persons with whom I stayed. This latter effort has been only lazily pursued when I visit my scattered hosts. Fatigue has put me behind… age has its own kind of possessive mind.

I began writing in earnest with The Violence Project, which became Harm City, its own crooked brick genre, and in The Broken Dance, which became the Aryas Project. The things that connected them was fight writing, which Jeth Randolph is taking over the last of with his insightful collaboration.

Over 180 Alexander romances were written, historians tell us, along with the notion that they contained little of fact. Arrian speaks of “the popular tradition,” and notes how Alexander acted as a local liberator and accepted enemy soldiers into his ranks on their word. From the bare facts, it can be seen that the unit he used the most was a tribal unit of some 500 highlanders. Here, the working class angle, “the fighter’s view,” begs for the only attention I am worthy of giving. I have to find points of connection for a subject. In most ways, Alexander and I are polar opposites, in dozens of ways. But, I share most things with his Agrianes. This gives a handle on how they might have seen him in their hearts.

He was the best of his kind, me down near the worse of mine, the least accomplished of my family line. He went from prince to king of kings and I from middle class to tramp.

The three things where I can form a joining are in:

1.) work rate; he conquered the most, where I have done the most as a grocer, writer and stick fighter, both by far,

2.) Alexander fought hand to hand against mostly bigger men. I am a fighting man, have physical trained and competed in the arts [except for riding] that he knew

3.) Us both being slightly smaller than average and unable to beat men like Hephasteon, generates a pathos welling up this ladder to 1 to do more, by way of 2, fighting, where experience trumps everything, causing a feedback loop that must, and has, ended in disaster…

Okay, not precisely a plan. I am a worker/writer, unschooled, who had recently outlined a book on work, my boring worklife, which I have no heart to pursue. What hurts, is the good men—better men then me—younger and older, whose biographies I have adopted as a part time gig, need be left behind if this ailing old mind, with a siren in one ear, sometimes both, and an eye that sizzles like sausage on a griddle, I’m running out of writing time. I have outlived Dad now, at 63, and Mom is still going at 86. Many people have helped me with alternative and standard medical care, otherwise I would not be here. I might linger for decades yet. But, I now spend 10 to 14 hours in bed just to generate an hour or two of writing time before the eye explodes. I’ve been deep down in this pain hole often, and believe I will crawl out. I plan on going to the gym and hitting the bag enough to deaden the damaged nerve in my head. It hurts my head to land a punch, like getting staples in the skull, which is a pinching feeling. I will climb out, may be feeling right as rain by the time this posts in June.

To do the toughest subject I have taken on justice, from a history and poetic perspective. I need to focus. It’s grand opening: Jomo is laid up with his girlfriend, Earl passed out in his car from working three full-time jobs, Alan is on a crack binge downtown, and Ed is in jail… I can either face-up the canned good aisle or build the front door display. If I botch the display, the GM will find something wrong in every aisle—time to wow the old man.

Work commitments have been stripped like so:

-Aryas project, canceled short

-Plantation America, wrapped up short by December at 22 books.

-Head coaching, history, no more, will no longer schedule a clinic, this hurts my ego

-Assistant coaching, only for Sean, Paul, Alex, and other fighters I have worked with, checking videos of opponents, etc.

-Canceled the novels: Porch, King Klan, Tinman

-Wrapping up biographies this month, this just hurts, maybe use that pain in Seven Sons

-Reducing travel destinations during 2026 to permit the above work to be done

-Journalism limited

At 5:54 AM I was awakened by a loud ringing in the right ear, a stabbing pain in the right skull, temple and eye, jaw and nose numbness, tooth pain, all right side.

Got up, took a triptain [1], an aspirin and hosed out the once shattered nose with salt water. Went back to bed and rested. Woke to write at 7:30.

It is 8:34. the ear ringing is back and it feels like a fist is being ground into the ear. I can push this, write another piece. But, I know from experience, that the only reason I am not puking in pain just now is the triptan. [1] Apologies to the hard working men who will be incompletely memorialized in Work. I already spent this writing day.

Notes

-1. Triptains come in 5 brands I use. Typical dosage is maximum 9 50 mg pills per month, used for severe migraines. My private doc writes me 100s and I break them down into 18 doses. My HMO doc writes me 9 50 mg. I use Blake’s script, for 9 more 50 mg. I use Gina’s dose for 9 50 mg doses. I then get 40 10 mg and 30 50 MG doses from SaySay. I am taking roughly 10 times the maximum recommended dosage. This is carefully prescribed because it can cause racing heart, which I have begun to experience, and have been fitted with a heart monitor wrist watch by SaySay, who keyed it to my email, which is actually controlled by my editor, who will monitor the reports and further them to my private Doc. I now have two women in my email. What could go wrong? For me to take even more triptains in order to podcast, spar, fight, this all goes against what Alexander demands, and I am a performance anxiety slave.

Now I go to waste a day in hoped of rising to write something better with the dawn.

I was #2 in line to board. At SLC, one gets the ticket scanned by the mass transit railing, crosses the mass transit “Front Runner” tracks, then walks up the concrete incline to the platform two feet above the freight tracks. The Amtrak trains, east and west, both pull up on the outside of this platform, with additional freight tracks to the outside of that track.

The assistant conductor scanned me and gave me a seat check for Emmeryville. The Conductor told me, “Last car, the 510, just past the 511,” which is the other coach car, the one with the lower level seating for gimps. As I walk past the dining car, I see a tall, black man, with dignity beard and captain’s cap holding court, being worshiped by three white passengers, all men, polite fellows, all now certain that they are not the most evil being on earth, “a racist.” The black man might be in a uniform. But it is one I do not recognize. He yells to the young fellow ahead of me, “Did the conductor tell you which car?”

The young fellow answers. Then, the man eyes me, my bald head, white beard, and yells at me, “Did the conductor tell you what car?”

He knew he had, had seen that conversation happen. If I satisfied his loud vanity and raised my voice enough to be heard, I would experience extreme pain in my eye and jaw. So I nodded, “Yes.”

This would not do, and the man yells louder, though I was closer, and I see he has an Amtrak name tag on, it turns out he is the diner attendant, the guy that runs the diner, “Did the conductor tell you which car!!”

I nodded again, smiled, and raised my ticket and he yelled, “Oh, he can’t talk!” his tone suggested he did not believe it, and that I was snubbing him for some reason, the OBVIOUS, ONLY, MOST EVIL reason.

It was breakfast time. I should be able to get something to eat, so went to that car as soon as we were off. The car was partially full with sleeper car passengers—as there were three sleeper cars. One more, and they would not have to feed us scum in coach. I opened my mouth to ask, and sure enough, Old School was in my face, “Oh, we are not ready to deal with you coach people yet!”

I went out into the cafe car, went downstairs, ordered two egg cups and two coffees, got the coffee on the house for the 8 hour delay, and went upstairs, sitting at the only table that had but one patron at it, a small, cute person, facing the dinning car door. I slid in with my back to the dinner car and the woman said, “Oh, good morning,” and I looked up and waved.

As I began to eat, the dinning car door opens and the boss of eating said in silky sweet Motown tones, “Oh, darlin’ it is time for you o eat.”

An hour later he comes out with a pen and pad and asks everyone if they wanted a complimentary breakfast. He came to me and I looked up, giving him a thumbs up. He said, “That won’t do—I need to hear it.”

I raised my voice to a hoarse, whispering rasp and said, “Sure.”

He then snapped like a black mamba, “See, I KNEW YOU COULD TALK!” victory against racism in his voice.

When I came and got my covered dish, I rasped, “Thank you,” which was so hoarse he could not hear it, and he turned his back on me.

The irritating Chinese traveler, the Old Prophet who knew the trains, and who I noticed had a hitch in his step from some accident, sat with me to eat, and spoke, I nodded politely “Yes,” to him, but made no conversation.

Come free lunch time, Old School announced, “I will be roaming the train having that conversation about complimentary breakfast.” I decided now, that I would eat no more, indeed had enough already, with two helpings of eggs enough for two days. He came to the last coach, looked down at me, looked away, and asked every person but me. Later, when he got on the intercom, he said, “If, I Say IF WE—you and me—had that conversation ‘bout a complimentary lunch, come and get it.”

He was waiting for me, to turn the conductor against me, and I never showed.

At the train platform at RENO, he tried eye fucking me while I walked and exercised, but got bored and went inside. The tall black doll who is the coach attendant and does a very good job on the bathrooms, stood by Coach 511 the entire time. After I was done my fifth set of squats and stretches, some distance down the platform from her and the rest, she clapped, and cheered, “If I wasn’t so lazy, I’d ask you to lead us in exercises,” she cheered, as the various smokers clapped and puffed. I waved and went to the hamstring stretches.

When I went for the last round of walks, past the thinning smokers, a cute older lady, thin and lithe, with a teacup Yorkie whose hair she brushed like a queen, said, “May I approach?”

I looked at her and the 4-pound beast in her arms and said, “If it is alright with your owner.”

She laughed, “Her name is Gem. Might I say, sir, that you demonstrate remarkable flexibility and fitness for an adult, especially for a man your age…”

We had a pleasant conversation about flexibility, her past as a ballerina and double hip replacement surgery. I never asked her name, assuring her I was a bad man and deserved my crippled state as we boarded.

I feel like such a crud declining to talk with people and declining to get to know people who I slip up with and speak to. But I have books to write and with the eye and brain failing I need to cut projects and decline to begin more. So many lonely lost folks take the trains that are failing as quickly as my humanity that I am eager to quit traveling so much and hide in places of soft darkness…

By the time we arrived at Emmeryville, at 3:30 AM, end of the line, Old Prophet wants to Uber with me, but I look to the lady running the station, a pretty and pleasingly fat, woman of the sable race, who informs him I want a bus. I was the only one with the patience for the bus, which meant a two hour wait in a station inhabited only be me and HER AMPLE GRACE.

While in the east, canceled lines cannot find buses or drivers. In California, 4 empty buses await, drivers scheduled to arrive 5 minutes before departure. California has a better rail system than USA, could be its own nation it seems. The driver who arrives is a super cute, friendly, Latina/China doll, a 95-pound exemplar of her hybrid charms, who is strong enough to sling my 39-pound suitcase like it is a purse.

California agrees with me.

Bisch was inspired by an unusual occurrence on the train. In that groove, as I minimize travel across the face of a national notion that has begun to unravel, I will present strange rail transit experiences, with the promise that these events have been used, in some part, in the construction of the novel.

The small Salt Lake City station is a square temporary office space. It is dwarfed by the reviled Greyhound station, less care taken in its make than the light rail pavilions next to it. The FEDs have a week boot print in Utah’s HQ, a reminder that the LDS is still a government in waiting.

An old lady with oxygen is behind me, addicted to smart phone games. An old man next to me is headed back to China, practicing Cantonese with his Smartphone. They were both brought in by caring Gen-X folks of their same sex. A Gen-X SLC couple, he from Sacramento, headed west sight seeing, sit to my front, across from two boomer retired couples on vacation, one from Carolina, the others from Chicago. On the flagship California Zephyr Line, the #5 headed west through the Sierras and the #6 east through the Rockies, vacation business is coming back. But, most of us, are still the recent Amtrak customer, the economic refugee. Among these are us Rail-Pass folks. We are becoming hated by some of the staff because my fellow, rail-passers, being single men, seem to by slight tippers and cranky boomers besides. I tip well, too well I am told. This gets me some reprieve from the sneers.

Amtrak sends a text that the 11:40 PM #5 is a few minutes late, then 20, then 40, then 2 hours! Then it inches up, and up, the people groaning as their phones go off with tardy, and inaccurate updates, like the weather broadcast under retarded crypt-made skies updating by the minute and erasing its false prophecies…

The staff: a bald clerk of 60, a hard signal man of 65, a wimpy youth with beard for baggage, a soft young Asiatic mix track technician—and a hot, lithe babe with deep, curly, red hair who has good man skills and elder empathy, the ambassador. Redhot has a sense of humor and serves as the event narrator. The clerk says, I wonder how long?” She responds saucy-like, “You know what engine it is!”

The old man next to me says to his driver, “You should leave. I don’t want you falling asleep on the way home. I have my journals.” He turned out to be a prophet, acing the exam ahead of time. The young fella, an enormous, hippie-haired 410 pounds, with kind voice that trusted whatever this wise elder said, asked, “What is it, you think?”

“Above Helper, Utah, on this side, headed up Soldier’s Summit, that is why they built and named helper all those years ago, to provide engines and fuel for that ascent. I suppose they no longer help at Helper. One engine cannot do it alone. It sounds like they sent a bad one east and aren’t surprised it can’t get back—might wreck the other...this will be a while.”

The old vacationers built a suitcase corral between the door and the office cube. A family of Polynesians, including a college ball player and his three siblings, invaded softly and began horsing around in seated giggle mode. I went outside to observe and listen. For the rest of the trip, the unlikely snatches of conversation by conductors, engineers and clerks are due to this old runt moving about on foot doing limbering, mobility and stretching exercises away from others, and listening to the snatched words on the train platform. Even whispers carry along the rails and slabs when the great hissing trains are not there.

Two locomotives are required to tow the 9 light cars at speeds up to 81 MPH. Engine 14 died on Solder’s Summit. E23 was losing water. At 2 AM, the #6, headed by E37, pulled in to SLC, which has no facilities and is just a crew stop. E37 detached and rolled east to save the day, and he did, towing a train with one dead and one lame engine along. A freight engine from Union Pacific, with its American flag waving in the wind on a yellow grime background, took the lead east. The freight engineer explains:

“My engine has 14,000 horsepower [1]. It weighs 140,000 pounds and can pull 140,000 tons, that is 160 freight cars. It only goes 42 miles per hour—its a different animal, good for the mountains, but will lose passenger time across the flat lands. E37 is hurting, like asking a greyhound to tow a dog sled, and will need another freight engine to lead her over the Sierra’s—expect that just before Reno. We have a freight yard there…”

He was a rough, clean-mouthed man. The supervisor of he and his, of the eight gathered engineers [who made Redhot thirsty in her voice, being close to so many rough hands], who may only work limited shifts, is a lean, whip-like man of 55 in a truck as white as his hair is black. That man swears like a sailor. All would be according to what he and Old Prophecy said. The boomers would increasingly complain as we rolled west by train, having lost a day of their precise activities.

This one had the great pleasure of 3 hours exercise and an hour seated nap, then leaving at dawn, so pretty along the Great Salt Lake. Rolling across the snowy peaks of Northeastern Nevada, usually done by night, was a beautiful sight. The Sierras would be lost in the night as freight locomotive 8154 gave an indication by its twice-painted black-on-yellow and twice bright-lit digits, of how many more massive engines were in the freight fleet than in the passenger line. The freight men loved the passengers. The conductors liked working up to the standards of the freight men, who were more experienced engineers than the passenger men. The freight engines, which I now hear roar and clarion call from the comfort of Nimur’s small palace in Fremont, are like land ships, great steel dragon-heads with ladders, decks, roaring engines and hissing brakes. The brake power is so mighty that when they test as we stand track-side in Reno, the hiss almost blows us deaf and away.

To be continued in ‘He Don’t Talk!’

Notes

1.) 14 and 140 were accurate on all three numbers. I could not recall the digits he named after 14,000 or 140,000, 1s and 2s, I think, but am not sure.

I took the #11 train, the Coastal Starlight, south from Portland to Sacramento. As with every train in the west since Covid, most of the passengers are dislocated, economically or due to a relationship; perhaps a divorce, the death of a spouse, the ailing condition of one’s parents back east requiring a family member at home… We are living through—dying during—a great die-off, a top-down cull of people made obsolete through the silver-tongued atomotons of Vulcan’s workshop.

Half of the passengers, including all of the single women—mostly middle-aged—are asking for a guide a seat-mate, a luggage handler from among the their fellow passengers in coach. I decline stone-faced. My eye has been very bad. Speaking is agony. A big brown man, a “su chef,” he says, is a weak late for his new Sacramento job, as the train line has been down five days. The conductor assures him, “At least one freight train derails every week. It is a constant problem on this line.”

It has not even been a wet rainy season. I sleep sitting up next to a big bicycle man, who keeps to his smart phone. I feel bad for my Eskimo wife. She dropped me off at the train station after her savage Cheyenne Son was circling like a vulture, ready to pounce on Fort Eskimo, as soon as The Magic White Man was gone.

Two displaced middle-aged women, and a middle-aged rail pass weed head hippy, try and befriend me. I look away. I have serious writing to do. I don’t need to write five life stories of the ever-expanding army of the USG displaced. Most of those on this train, of both sexes and all ages, are alone. Rolling into Sacramento, which was a homeless nightmare three years ago, I see some feral homeless, but mostly very nice, three-section, C-shaped tiny houses in fenced parks, free of trash. The problem has been shifted to Reno and Oakland.

A young bald fellow, leaving Portland, in heavy clothes with torn black hood and eye brow ring, tries to make eye contact with me. This is usual across the country, from Amish elders to teenage hoodrats, looking to the crumbling cracker who alone need ask no directions of the crew, or driver, for guidance. This pale cοοn still feels giddy on every train platform. There is something nerve-addling about waiting for this great steel dragon to roll up horn roaring, hiss, and open its armor plates for us meat stakes.

Arriving in Sacramento in Platform 5, at 7 AM, I look forward to the quarter-mile walk through the covered tunnel and raised garden, across the bus lot, into the large marble station. I get the code to the very nice bathroom. I read a Vietnam War memoir and ponder until 9:50. A pretty black girl, the chocolate baggage-gimp pilot, asks me if I want a ride. “No thanks, darlin’ I’ll walk.”

Just before the bus park I pass her extra long baggage-people cart. Seated in it is the eye-brow ring guy, who nods to me. He is perhaps 21. I make the walk before the transported lazy and old get there. I used to make this on crutches until last year. He is lazy. It marvels within that these folks, facing days of sitting, would rather sit for this short chance to stretch their legs.

The kid lands next to me. He is moving, displaced, with a large carry-on, a back pack, and a duffle. He says, ‘I see you everywhere,” from seven paces. I wave and smile slightly.

He walks to me and says, “I’m Austin,” and extends his hand, shopping with good will for a daddy. His frame is potentially rugged, but non athletic—at least not fat.

“James, nice to meet you.”

“Nice to meet you, Sir. If you don’t mind me asking, where you are going?”

“Salt Lake City.”

“I’m headed to Nebraska. Never did this before, it’s strange, kind of disorienting.”

“They will wake you day after tomorrow, early morning, before dawn. You’ll hit Denver about sundown tomorrow.”

“That’s what Mom says. My mother is tracking this on her phone.”

“This is an interesting, fatherless cat, with no smart phone. If I still wrote human interest, still wanted to coach, I would have let him befriend me. This kid was down on his luck, not addicted to, or even it seemed, in possession of, a smart phone, smoked cigs but was not jonesing for weed. Sean could make a better man of this kid. I turned away. Over the course of our trip, he nodded friendly like to me, even to sit with him in the viewing car, and I ignored him. Maybe the extreme pain in my eye and face for three days now is punishment for this sin.

A seizure so bad I could not speak or open my eyes had the old boomer cafe attendant tapping his keys on the only open table and accusing me of sleeping. I managed to point at a pill with my shaking hands, rasping weekly, “I’m having a seizure,” and he let me be, still unable to drink my diet soda. [1]

Above, an old lady tried to make friends in the viewing car, speaking about the beautiful sunset I was afraid to look at. I nodded to her and ignored her. I could feel that it hurt her—she had been cute once and adored… Now she was lonely luggage. I did take her lunch trash to a can when I left her.

I was seated next to Mike, a big, kind, rail pass man, who introduced himself and shook my hand. “Nice to meet you, Mike,” and I avoided conversing with him there after.

Chico, the Chicano coach attendant, best of his kind, who knows me by sight, took me from Mike and gave me my own seat at Reno, “When you get back on after your exercises, you can spread out, sir.”

“Thank you,” I managed to hoarsely whisper.

Noting that I go down stairs a lot to exercise during travel, he sat me at the top of the stairs. Exercising for 40 minutes in the concrete trench at Reno, Mike and Chico and another rail pass retiree bachelor speak of the natural wonders and of the troubled train. The crew is on tight service. They normally have half a sleeper car. That sleeper car was pulled, and passengers downgraded to coach, accounting for the lonely middle-aged and elderly women in distress, headed to a death camp for serenity called America. The crew had to sleep sitting up in the back of the cafe car at those tiny diner tables. The equipment is starting to fail.

When I return topside, a 12-year old girl is sitting on my jacket! She has no luggage, just a ticket in a small hand.

I said, “Miss, I’m taking my jacket from under you.”

She smiled, happy that a grandpa was sitting next to her. “Would you like me to move, miss?”

“No,” she shook her head.

Chico gets on, looks at her, having chosen to sit with someone rather than alone, as a giant man from Durango seated in front of us, said, “That young fellow gave me this signed Bible—how nice!”

I shrugged my shoulders to Chico, both of us knowing than an unaccompanied minor may not sit with a strange adult, and is supposed to be seated in the cafe/crew car.

“Sir, come with me. I promise this is your last seat change.” No other attendant tries so hard to maximize customer comfort. The lass objects with a frown. She wants me to stay. Chico says to her, “Just trying to make everyone comfortable—you did nothing wrong.”

I said, as I took down my suit case, “Nice to meet you, young lady,” and she smiled.

At three in the morning I offloaded at Salt Lake City, and, as I passed her, she waved to me, the ticket still clutched in her hand, seated cross ways, back to window, feet together, facing the exit stairs with her sneakers pressed against the arm of the aisle seat.

Cross country trains have become a combination of an orphan and elderly refugee wagon, a conveyor belt of soft dooms for losers, and a magic carpet ride for to hospice for dashed hope.

Notes

1.) The onboard service staff with seniority, the boomers who run the cafe and dinning cars, have been getting so mean, that I no longer order food or drink, fasting instead. The passenger switch from vacationing middle-class boomer couples to broken retires, widows, widowers, orphans and economically displaced Gen-X and Millenials has soured their dream job.

As I try doggedly to complete Plantation America and do justice to the hundreds of thousands of souls, mostly young, overwhelmingly unknown, interred in the mass grave of Plantation America, where we are told the white picket fences of Colonial America shone, a sadness encroaches. My family, for one, has been as doggedly resistant to the idea that America is not a Utopian meritocracy, as I am increasingly insistent that we abide atop an edifice of lies.

Over the course of the previous 21 volumes, the Planting of America has come clearly into focus:

1.) Men of means and ambition, [Rileigh, Grenville, John White, Smith, Rolph, Bradford & T. White, etc.] deprived a place at home at the crowded political table, are encouraged, at their own expense, by the established power brokers, to find, explore and PLANT new lands; to make a place for themselves at the table of power by expanding that table, adding planks cut from virgin timber.

2.) Such lands are planted with “wastemen” “white trash” “vagabonds,” orphans, half-orphans, waifs, criminals, debtors, conscripts, as well as some adventurous souls seeking a hazardous fortune. We are only permitted to recall this final, tiny category as our working class progenitors.

3.) Cited as key to plantation success by Dee, Bacon, Berkely, Smith, Standish, Mort, Calvert, Penn, etc., was that the Planter Class make and maintain military alliance with indigenous tribal folk, as a ward against competition from other Planter nations, but primarily, first and finally, as an alliance between Planters and Warriors against the Planted wastemen. This is where the real rub came, as expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the other founding documents of USG, that the Planter Tax Farming Class, that is the Colonial Managerial Class acting over the Planted Class, maintain exclusive rights to deal with Indian tribes as foreign nations of sovereign ilk. The goal was to contain the flight of forced labor to the tribes as adopted members [which the disease and war-depleted tribes, eager for adopted members, resisted] and into the “front-tier” as competing free clans, a notion the tribes took to heart, to include adopted members passionately defending their adopted homelands against incursions by their same-race, same-class analogs, who came with ready ax and gun rather than with broken shackles.

Phase 3, was not even interrupted by the Revolution 1774 thru 83. That act of separation of Colonial bodies from home governance [Colonial and Colony referred only to governing bodies, not “The People,” the people being in fact The Plantation, both residing within the geography of the Province and later State,] did not alter this dynamic at all. Nor did the American Civil War.

A close reading of American history from the journals and letters of Mort, Morely and Franklin, to all of the Indian War and front-tier accounts, reveals that the British Crown and Later USG, either allied with tribes against runaways, squatters, prospectors, settlers and frontiersmen, or allied with the recent departures from state control into the wilderness, against the tribes, with offers of legit ownership, in order to abrogate treaties and expand territory. USG thence employed legal action against the frontiersmen to take away what they had won with ax and gun. See the life of Dan Boone as case study.

As a non-political, non-voting, vagabond myself, a latter day tramp, I have noted that USG has turned, via a two-party system of sinister convenience and a sham “free” yet captive press, existing American natives [those born here] into frontiersmen and Indians. Every rural Red state is invaded via universities and government postings with urban and suburban Blue settlers. Likewise, every immigrant, legal and illegal, is aligned with Blue civics against the Reds. In both kinds of states, and I now reside in half of them, Red folk have fled along former tribal migration routes to increasingly remote locations in order to escape their ideological enemies. Others, ideologically overrun, hunker down in grim silence, arming themselves for the final battle of Blue versus Red, both sides in constant fear that USG will side with their enemies.

This binary hatred is all that is required to fuel the political feedback loop that is the power abstraction of The State, as it seeks to transmogrify into a post State organism of global expanse. The machinery of power is so enticing to the Binary Mind of the Planted Soul that it will never be dismantled when it may instead be taken up. Thus, the tool of power has become self-aware, perhaps in some distant age, and more keenly again in ours, as its enemies, the impulses of autonomy and concord, have been drowned in the feral dichotomy of discord.

I have been stricken by this, keenly of late as more and more of my loved-ones succumb to a six-year long phase of increased mortality. Every year since 2019, has featured more deaths, at an earlier age, of Americans, then demographers had calculated. All-cause death keeps going up. In the mean time this is blamed by the media and government on voluntary dietary and lifestyle choices, when this six-year trend began with a factory made plague pioneered under USG supervision in Maryland, exported via other nations back to us, and then nefariously unleashed, as treatments for it were withheld by international corporations during a media gaslight campaign.

In those dark days of 20-22, I was harangued by family for not getting USG international corporate approved treatments. I had to wave to loved ones from the street. There was a time, in my 20s, when our family suffered a great die-off; a grand parent, aunt or uncle died every year. Now, I lose a friend or family member every second month. Here is one example.

The Chief, a good government guy, twice retired from USG posts, declared his daughter to be my wife, despite the fact that I was not vaxt. [I’m still afraid to use medical terminology. Five of my Australian readers have vanished since the Plague Op.] He and all the other Honest Injuns at the weekly elders powwow got vaxt. I did not and talked my wife into not getting boosted. The other elders got all the boosters. He said to me, “To each his own—it’s your life; good luck to you!” He was convinced that his government was trying to save us while I was equally convinced that USG was culling us. Since then, he, his wife, his brother, Lakota Mike, and many elders, who normally live longer lives than they have, have passed. So many are still dying of turbo cancer, stroke and heart disease that every powwow has a moment of silence for the recently departed elders. When I went with him to oncology he said, “Look at this, who would have thought so many people would get cancer at the same time.” Since then, stroke and cancer are treated as out-patient, and bronchitis has been moved to in-patience treatment. The vaxt are constantly getting new versions of the plague they were treated against. Yesterday, the Wife and I drove by a Toys R’ Us that is now an oncology center!

Some of my readers, recalling Blue Folk declaring that they should be sent to camps for not getting vaxt, and that if they died of the Brovid they go what they deserved, will be tempted to dance upon these many graves. I recall the Chief, who was simply sad that I would die for not getting the Jab, not wishing it as a doctrinal punishment. In our medicalized, atheist world, this man-made disease/cure strife yet remains as a great divide inserted by Leviathan to keep us addled fish swimming in easily gobbled schools. Please, as the folks who were turned against us for not getting vaxt, perish in huge numbers, for doing what they were told was “the right thing,” lets not suffer The Beast to keep us divided along civic lines beyond the veil of this sorrowful life.

A clinical scientist told me in 2021, “We are looking at the fact that everyone we know now, who gets vaxt, will probably not be alive in ten years.”

With a bakers dozen of friends and family already gone according to the most common vax side-effects, and Juan’s celebration of life due this Wednesday, April 2, I feel only sadness for the Fear Departed.

Tomorrow, I begin, in earnest, writing the satire Skinnies!, which many will see as a brutal, tasteless, jest. It is, on the face, an attempt to take an absurd proposition and, by honing narrative skill, make it violently entertaining and humanely reflective. As strange as the idea will seem to many, American truths, from the Plantation America past and my own life, will appear on every page, in a fictive form that might hopefully survive the current Dark Age prohibition against truths great and small.

From the Scholastic, My Name Is America, series, this work of fiction is disguised as nonfiction. The actual copyright is in the back, not the front, of the book. The subtitle, “United States Marine Corps, Khe Sanh, Vietnam, 1968,” seemed so matter of fact, I was taken in and went right to the journal entries. I was steadily disappointed by how heavily the ghost writer had inserted standard boiler plate, World War II propaganda, such as the clean, distinctive, ethnic and regional nature of the men in Patrick’s unit. I about had enough when the most weighty episodes of the entire book, which depicted every man in in Patrick’s unit, including himself, being maimed and or/killed, came down to three episodes concerning the only two black marines. The death of Mooch and Behop, being the most heart wrenching deaths, and the fact that the murder of Martin Luther King was the most psychologically traumatic event of an extremely brutal six months of combat in a distant jungle.

Afterwards, I find the actual copyright material in the back of the book, declaring it bogus fiction by a broad.

There was something too passive, too feminine, about the story of the high school football star from Boston fighting in Nam. As I considered approaching this subjects I had three things in mind:

1.) Arrian wrote of how most the things written about Alexander were fancies. Hammond seconds this with his review of the sources, showing those sources other than Arrian that survived time, come from effeminate arm chair thinkers, who did not serve in combat as Arrian had.

2.) That a vast body of popular tradition claimed by Arrian to reflect popular traditions has been mostly lost, and that the discussion of Alexander’s campaigns tend to focus on major State level military formations, both conscript and volunteer, and downplay the units that did most of the fighting, the volunteer, tribal Agrianes [mountain men] and the Archers [mostly Scythian and Cretan: nomads bandits and pirates.]

3.) “Men as they were,” a phrase by Homer, used often in the Iliad, contrasting the weaklings of his day with the heroes of yesterday. Bob asked me today, as we walked pasta deer carcass recently taken by a cougar, about the boxers of his father’s time, a man who boxed in the 1920s, who saw Dempsey box. “James, the boxers of that era, as small as they were compared to today, how would they fare against today’s boxers?” To that question, I answered that the giants of today would be taken apart: lacking childhood encrypted instincts, base childhood skills, experience—fighting 2 bouts to every old timer’s 10 bouts—as well as toughness, against men coming from a time when every boy boxed.

I went on, “Take any activity, shooting, don’t start until 12: you have a retard. Don’t start hunting and trapping until 18, like modern Special Forces: you have a retard.”

That then took me down the road of the soul. Ancient warriors reported ZERO PTSD! None, nada, not at all. Modern veterans need drugs, support dogs, support groups. This places the modern veteran of industrial and post-industrial wars, shell-shocked, combat-fatigued, PTSD’s, after having been declared victorious by the propaganda ministers, in the position of the ancient slave soldiers of the Persian armies that faced the Agrianes, and were defeated, of being broken. There are the natural disaster-like effects of artillery, aviation, machine guns, etc., Yet, the key is obvious once one has spoken with dozens of American soldiers from a dozen wars. How is it our victors act like ancient losers?

The modern war fighter is taken from a non-war culture—indeed, an anti-warrior domestication system—and made into a temporary killer. As such he does not operate within a warrior culture, despite the lies calling him a warrior. He operates under a managerial system, directed by non-combatants who come from an alien social strata of college-educated mind-slaves, who naturally resent the war fighter’s on the scene action, which grants him actual war culture honors. This war honor is denied. The enemy is denigrated as subhuman and unworthy. Graphic victory is not permitted, but mere cessation of managerial hostility. The war fighter, who has committed acts and survived frights that in any age would have granted him warrior honors and admitted him to a lifelong fraternity, is now, not only denied warrior status, but returned to Money World. Marooned there, either as a denied soldier [contractor whose death will not even be noted by his nation] as he fulfills his contract, he is as contractor or civilian, returned to an anti-heroic, anti-warrior society. In this society, he is not even allowed to defend himself or his wife or child, without being shackled and judged by system functionaries.

This unnatural system is so dehumanizing, and so unmanning, so hero-hating, that a vast stock of drugs, therapeutics and Jason Statham movies are required to maintain the fiction that a temporary war fighter is not always hated by the machine he serves. These state machines are very similar to the Persian system that Alexander led the Agrianes against. Indeed, both the Archemedian Empire and the American Empire were and are entirely controlled by international banking houses with a fully obscured international profile.

Alexander went after Civilization itself, restoring tribes, towns and folk faiths wherever he conquered. He faced mutinies by most of his army and conspiracies from most of his high ranking officers, which I am naturally inclined to place at the hands of banking agents. Only two units are known to have never wavered, to have never mutinied, to have always been first, to have gone where no other of Alexander’s warriors went—into forests, swamps, mountains—those were the Agrianes and the archers: barbarians and semi-barbarians all. By definition, slingers, darters, and archers were lifetime warriors, men who learned their skills from boyhood, in traditional societies, among remote hinterlands.

The histories of Alexander that affront Arrian, and place him as a source equal to Plutarch, Diodorus and Quintus, project sissy, womanly concerns backward upon an ultra-masculine war culture. So, also did the brilliantly written fiction of Khe Sanh, by a broad named Ellen, who in antiquity would be washing her subject’s feet rather than inventing his internal morality, appeal down trough time, as an ideal projection rather than as a reflection.

It is the mission of The Areid, to reflect ancient war culture, not project modern whore culture upon that hallowed past. There is yet a value to such corrupt and womanly screeds as pass for war stories under USG, they depict—whether accurately as in To Hell and Back, or not—the plight of war fighters whose heart is only partially in the fight, who also enjoy overwhelming, even godlike material superiority, over their foes. In short, modern USG war memoirs depict the viewpoint of the Persian combatant: if, he had no radio to call in for air strikes or evacuations, being managed by rear echelon commanders via messenger, facing a smaller force of more experienced, more skilled, better armed attackers, who were following their leader.

As I write The Areid, any war memoirs I read, shall be assigned to the purpose of connecting either with the Agrianes or their foes.

Here is the link for Skinnies!

-Montius

Montius and I sketched this entire novel on location, over a few beers, casting folks who happened by as staff and customers. During the composition, I lost my sleeping place on the couch to Norman, the giant dog hero of the novel. I tricked Norman downstairs, for a beer, which he drinks out of a bowl at the home bar. He returned upstairs to find me sleeping in his spot. He gruffly flopped on the floor with an offended snort. A few hours later he barked, waking me, pointing at the back door, indicating he needed to go outside. i got up off the couch and went to the door. Turning to let him out, i saw Norman leap onto the couch and stretch out. Outsmarted, i went back to work writing his hero tail—tale...

Royalties will go to Norman's beef & beer fund.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0H6BT9D7V

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Independently published

Publication date ‏ : ‎ June 20, 2026

Language ‏ : ‎ English

Print length ‏ : ‎ 147 pages

ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 979-8196026218

Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 9.9 ounces

Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 0.34 x 9 inches

Electric Dan

Electric Dan’s story is perhaps three-quarters told in the material that is complete. Like many of the readers I meet, he turned out to be a strong man. The last time we sparred it went great. Then the next morning he was up to do it again. I demurred, feeling like I had just been hit by a car. Dan is a patriarch working in the trades, still gathering on Saturday nights with his children and grand children to play family games, an example that Gen-X seemed to do okay in small town settings where they were almost erased in big cities.

Dan is a kind, barrel-chested man. Associating with him and other Midwestern Men, I have noted a type, a natural football player physique common to the region. I think, that of college and professional football teams had to be staffed by men native to that state, than the game would be truly worth watching, with distinct styles of play based on regional types, with men like Dan crushing skinnies on the gridiron. Some of his family lore is tucked into a journal written in 2020, during the year the world bent the knee. He was a devote Christian, even a Sunday school teacher, until the corruption and hypocrisy and anti-family politics placed him in the Camp of the Hammer.

Bob Johnson

Bob was the first reader to invite me to come and have a stay in his corner of the USA, back in 2015. He noted that I read sign in gutters and on sidewalks like he did in canyons and on game trails. I had never taken to a man so easily before. Bob was the first of many men who I met through writing that seemed like a long-lost brother despite a lack of shared experiences. Bob is just over six feet with shoulders twice as wide as mine. There is a picture of us together that looks like a viking hugging a pet Irish scamp who is quick to fill the ale horn. I have spent an entire year, over 10, living with Bob and his Wife, Deb, who is the toughest broad I have ever met. She is the only woman to ever outwork me; and sweet to boot.

Bob and Deb were married on my birthday and have done 50 years together. They are so family oriented they he calls her Grandma. She calls him Berto, usually with a slight comic smile. He’s as wide as a bear, and shambles, which bothers him. He used to be a light-footed big man who could outrun most and outswim all, like a Tarzan of the Alps. Working three jobs at a time for most of 40 years, earned him.

Bob has had more different kinds of jobs than any person I know: bailing hay, installing fences, pouring concrete, docking sheep, skinning mink, hunting guide, hard rock mining, machinist, feed store operator, water operator are on the redneck resume. Crafts like sighting guns, custom loading, reloading and fly making fir fly fishing are among the knowledge trapped in his battered body, stocked with metals hips, knees, and a lumbar cage so that the once graceful athlete has been reduced to shambling like an ox in his old age. Most of the damage seems to have been from the water operator job at high altitude, working with heavy materials in cold wet conditions.

Cousin Mike

A Gen-X fellow five years behind me, grandson to my favorite and smartest uncle, Mike has had more interest in our shared half of family than I have. I fell from touch and he found me and made contact. The material in this book is the bones I should help him hang a family album on. I intend to keep sitting with him at dinning room table for coffee and discussing his search. Just as the young fellows appear in this mind’s eye driving, Mike and the other elders appear seated, exchanging words, sharing a drink and a thought.

Mike is tall, middle-aged, with dark-shocked big head making his wide shoulders look narrow. His face is a considerate cavern housing friendly eyes that wishes they did not peek out upon such a wicked world, but grimly accept that they do. He likes print books, big books held in the hand and picture windows on a calm day.

Kelly Baker

Kelly’s biography is near complete in this volume. He was a big big man who took to this little tramp kindly as a long lost brother and would always pull me to him when we clasped hands, his one hand stronger than my whole body. His hair was still thick, and white, cut short, his beard trimmed around his square chin, his teeth flat, blunt and white, through which he had a habit of laughing in a sardonic way as his big face pinked and spread a smile that admitted that we just had this little while together at the ends of our crooked ways. The things he liked the most were fishing, swimming, Alaska, a good dog, a good friend and a woman that didn’t bitch “too much,” with a few shots of moonshine washed down with a light beer.

He called me brother and meant it, looking forward to hearing about me “getting your ass beat by fellas so young you should know better.” I hope I preserved Kelly’s sense of humor, as, even on his worst days, with his heart failing and his wife—who since passed—griping he was never more than a moment away from a smile, able to see the light even in the depths of our fumbled plights.

These came out pretty nice I think. As usual, epub and pdf formats provided, the epub is reflowable text / you can control font!

They're just $5 !

We have plans to roll the Aryas series into a single ebook, as well as Plantation America, in due time. Have a great day!