Revolt from the Singles Table
The thoughts and mental images portrayed here are those of the author, an unavoidable response to his attendance at the wedding of Mr. Michel R. Summers and Miss Melina M. Maxwell, and reflect little else.
Conceived as a piece of Gonzo persuasion, it’s meant to toe the divide between perception and event rather than purely recording the facts as they transpired. The truth is: recording and remembering facts is a shady business calling for precision and exactness. Attributes the current writer does not possess and has expressed no desire to acquire. Instead, it seeks to emulate the feeling of the writer as induced by his chosen environment.
The players in this production are the same as ever before. They’ve performed this act a thousand times from the dawn of civilization. Names and faces may appear to be different, but the universal telling of this tale is fermented into the redundant collective history. So don’t be disappointed when you don’t find anything new.
That’s not what an editor would write to introduce a timeless commentary on the human condition – heavy aspirations, to which the current work does not aspire. Do not be fooled, this is not a story for the ages or one, which needs to be remembered. Rather, it’s a pulp-jacket misalignment of run-on sentences and pointless recollections that would be best buried in a time capsule as a practical joke to be played on the dimwitted archeologist who finds it 100 years from now.
If parts of the following work appear familiar or original, it’s not a coincidence and their origins in this context can probably be traced back to one of the main influences of the author: The Doors, Hunter S. Thompson, Chuck Palahniuk or Howard Hughes. The critical eye might catch a wisp of Ursula K. Le Guin or even accents of Lesllie Marmon Silco, but those influences are less prominent in the current collection. An honest effort has been made to document the corresponding literary influences via identification in the footnotes. According to our last conversation, the author still isn’t exactly sure why he wrote this recollection of thoughts, as a self-serving exercise in ego-mania or because without a television the mind needs to wrap itself around something to keep from dropping off the edge.
If the portrayal of events as recorded here seems inconsistent or embellished as compared with conflicting eyewitness reports, then it should be noted that a quiet marriage of fact and fiction bears the most interesting fruit. Although these events may or may not have actually occurred – at one or another point in time, the writer has attested to the notion that they did transpire in some capacity, but it must be noted that independent fact checking was never conducted. Reality is a hard thing to grasp. Facts and figures are all fine, but five eyewitnesses to an accident can easily give ten different accounts of precisely what happened. The feeling though, that's the important thing - the element that we keep of past events. It’s the tangible aspect of history that we either hold close or try to come to grips with. Paintings and photographs invoke sensations that tie our minds to days and emotions now long gone. That's what this is, a transcription of the feelings and impressions of the writer, not of the participants. Their names have for the most part been changed by the way - not to protect them as such, there’s nothing to be ashamed of from their viewpoint. But this was an uncommissioned work, and as such has been filed under the umbrella of fiction. So, elimination of the legal identities just seemed like the logical thing to do.
Worse still, it's transcribed all after the fact, pulled from a haze of alcoholic excess and interpreted through the social prejudices of the writer’s mind. This transcription will inevitably prove irrelevant to everyone and nothing to someone. Chapter II titled, “It means not looking for a return on your emotional investment,” is a particularly pointless and run-on collection of words the reader would be well advised to avoid. As this work is a transcription of the emotional realm, it’s conceivable that this collection of words and images isn't really about the wedding.
It’s permissible in fact, that these thoughts have been writing themselves for the past thirty years and they all just seemed to come together at this precise moment. Exclusive of the reader’s reaction, no truth or inspiration should be gleamed from these pages, for they will soon exist only in your memories.
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