Introducing a New Novel

over time and in rough draft form...

I write very seriously about the collapse of civilization, and I am not being facetious, nor am I exaggerating, nor am I a believer in conspiracies. In fact, I’m quite logical, no matter that within the current political and sociological climate I may be perceived as the opposite. Every blog post I’ve written over the last several years has, at its core, an insurmountable problem. Our Food System is what I most often discuss because it is the most obvious to me who has intimate knowledge of the subject. You see, every civilization before us has expanded until it collapsed. Collapse of civilization is not immediate, but, rather, gradual. It is entropy, not apocalypse.  You may not see our consumerism, our food system, and our climate crisis as problems that impact your individual life, which is, therefore, why you may immediately and viscerally push back against any notion of collapse. The systemic breakdown isn’t often directly seen or felt. Diabetes, for example, is something we learn to deal with, instead of choosing not to get it, and not to give it to our children. But, when confronted with the decision of what to have, or not have, for dinner, we are not answering the Question of Diabetes, but the question of what we will have for dinner.

We are dying earlier than the generations that came before us for the first time in our civilization. Our lands are less hospitable than they were before. We are adapting to these realities; we are not evolving from them. And we will not, though the civilization that will be born from our ashes will. We will not change the way we live. Big agriculture has gotten considerably bigger. Consumerism continues to increase dramatically. And climate change therefore follows suit, affected by the drastically increasing rate of fossil fuel consumption. Our civilization has tipped the scale, and we can’t go back, simply because, even if we were to achieve the nearly total cooperation of our global brethren, there would still be those who engaged in exploitation. It is our nature. And it is too much to ask of us not to engage in it. Cell phones exploit natural resources. You will not volunteer to do away with yours.

There are finite parameters, and we hit them daily, and adapt, until we cannot adapt as quickly, or at all. How many places in recent history have been ravaged by record storms, and have not returned to their former glory? But there are more examples than those “acts of god”. What of cities like Detroit? Or Baltimore? I know Baltimore intimately—it is far from the city it once was. The degradation of these cities is caused by man, not nature, and in them we can see the future of mankind. To my friends in Baltimore—I wish you only a great resurrection, though it is not the city itself that needs rebuilding, first, but us, and it is precisely this us that will continue its unwillingness to change. Cities like Portland, Oregon are not cleaner because they have more trashmen. They’re cleaner because they love their land. This is not a reductive example of the problems facing cities like Baltimore, but simple proof of a crisis of ideology.

     The point of all of this isn’t to criticize any one person or place nor civilization at large, but to begin to come to terms with a necessary reality, which is the necessity to begin again—something we will certainly not facilitate for ourselves. The collapse of our civilization will facilitate the rise of the next. In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return. Do you think our civilization will exist as it does two hundred years from now?

     So, here’s the deal: frankly I have no idea how many more of these moral quandaries I have up my sleeve. Possibly infinite, though they’re beginning to bore me. Considering my crusade against “facts” as officers of truth, and my penchant for making my readers feel uncomfortable, I’m finding the non-fiction is giving me claustrophobia.

I’m writing a new novel, and I’m going to be sharing it as it develops, bits and pieces here and there, perhaps full chapters, perhaps they may even be in some sequential order. It may read like short stories, it may lack any semblance of plot because whatever I happen to share has been removed from its context… What is this novel about? That will change as it develops, or not, as the man writing it will change, or he won’t. However, what would all that talk regarding the death of our civilization be without a dystopian counterpart? Enter this dystopian saga. It is about our Food System. It takes place on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, mostly. There is diabetes and heart disease. Animal inbreeding. Factory farming. Hunting and foraging and fishing. Environmental crises. Big Agriculture. Social Injustice. Education. Factory Education. Laboratory stem-cell chicken breasts and beef steaks. Chronic disruption of our circadian rhythm. Time. Self-Reliance. Sovereignty. This is a novel about the collapse of the American Middle Class.

     I can offer no promises on frequency of work, not because it’s slow-going, necessarily, but because I tend to be fierce in my protection of incomplete work. This kind of sharing thoroughly wallops my romantic, Salingeresque ideals of the responsibility of the writer. I reason with myself that these are different times, following the fall of the short story, or any notion of retained humility--hence my blogging. I do promise, however, that one day I will be counted among the great recluses of my dreams.

There is no title to the work. And I will exercise my freedom to say absolutely whatever I want in any way I desire. Oh, the pure unadulterated joy in telling institutionalized facts taken from third party research and pathetic citations to fuck off is already coursing through my blood. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. How dreamy.

This is not to say, however, that I will cease to engage in the written rant. And, while I poked at the frequency of my fictional posts, I have no intention of reducing my output, for whatever that may be worth.

No sooner had Helen Wilkins placed breakfast of eggs and maple pork sausage on the table, than the phone rang.