Author Description

One day I was out for a walk, and met a friend who said “Out for your daily constitutional?” I replied, “No, just a little Preamble An odd prospect, don’t you know, to consider writing the biography of someone unknown and highly eccentric, a failure in all his works and most of his relationships, who makes a hash even of his miserable attempts at self-pity, impoverished and in poor health his entire adult life, betimes within spitting distance of raving lunacy and moral turpitude, a seeker of truth enmeshed in illusion, attempting a form where the author must discard any hope of objectivity, with no particular target audience and little prospect of publication in an era of dwindling readership for books. {Does he always talk with his hands? And what’s with Mr. Positive Attitude?—Ed.} No stranger to such situations, I sat myself down at the auspicious time of 11:11 AM on January 1, 2011 to salvage at least some literary object from a peculiar series of experiences not generally combined in one lifetime, including expeditions into lofty psychedelic heavens and gritty physical hells, adventures on the low seas and high deserts, skirting the ramparts of radical cults and training for the priesthood of Science, attempting to contribute to the dead-but-alive world of classical music while unable to perform, and doing it all with a one-piece back, bad ears, no money, and a tin hip. Whooda thunk. {Displays a hackneyed but somehow appealing, almost Twainian talent for vernacular. Very charming. Either that or he turned off spell-check. Teach him about run-on sentences and abuse of comma privileges.—Ed.} My experience in writing is mostly in technical pseudoscientific screeds, random and anonymous chat-room monologues, macrobiotic rants long since hunted down and destroyed, and exotic poetry frequently used as lyrics for vocal music yet unsung. One such poem was in place of a final exam in an astrophysics course, where I described Steinhardt and Turok’s cyclical universe cosmology in heroic couplets in the style of Alexander Pope. Another poem was for the epic song “What I Hear After Submitting a Score”, where I attempted to rhyme physical, mystical, and testicle for the first time in literary history. None of this experience prepared me for the task ahead. {Where does he get his material? Remind to urine test before publishing.—Ed.} And so I humbly invite the dear Reader into this odd compendium of unsubstantiated rumor, hearsay, wool-gathering, navel-gazing, libel, bile, slander, perfidy and Absolute Truth hidden in plain sight and ten-point type. The important stuff, about Love, God, Devotion, Spirituality and Sacred Breath, I save for the non-verbal method of music. That leaves all the useless chatter for this Autobillography. Enjoy! {Pedestrian but adequate for pot-boiler stuff; keep him on board and feed him some formulaic material that wouldn’t rely on a writer’s talent to make it worth publishing. Put something bodice-busting on the cover, and avoid religious controversy. He’ll work cheap and do what he’s told after living in the woods so long. Make sure and remove my comments before printing.—Ed.}