Everyday life is more terrifying and bizarre than vampires or zombies. A potent narcotic called Routine numbs you from its primordial strangeness. The seven stories in this collection peel away the thick callus of familiarity, revealing the world in all its raw horror.
Got trypophobia? You do now. Stare at the eyes of a lotus pod. Concede the depravity of the universe. In a world where all beings survive by devouring or parasitizing each other, where the “pinnacle of creation” routinely massacres his counterparts en masse, it’s an inanimate pod on the end of a stalk that demonstrates the sinister essence of Reality. Don’t trust your computer screen. An issue of this magnitude can only be resolved by research in the field.
The idea that enlightenment requires a seated posture of meditation is wishful thinking. Accessing the Chandelier of Consciousness, the transcendental mind of which each sentient being is a crystal, demands great exertion and sacrifice. Unfortunately the first amendment doesn’t cover felonies.
While mowing the lawn you experience a shattering epiphany. If you live to be seventy you will spend twelve-hundred hours cutting the grass. This heist of your time is too organized and systematic to be a coincidence. Occam advocated the simplest explanation. Some parasite from a parallel universe is bleeding you dry, devouring your time, undetectable by your senses. Other calculations prove more devastating, one in particular.
Dachshunds, defilers of burrows, scourges of the underworld, are they not magnificent? Yet it comes as a surprise that the purpose of creation is them, not us. When you meet a wandering sage and his wiener dog, worse news follows. Apparently Schrodinger did not have a cat.
Letting your girlfriend drag you to Burning Man, what were you thinking? Her brainless ideas — foolish in theory, disastrous in practice, subjected to the analytic rigor of a child at Chuck E. Cheese’s — why don’t you act as the brake of sanity? This is worse than meeting her parents.
Why does a man climb a mountain? To taste the distilled essence of life, to glimpse the clandestine maneuvers of his soul, and to learn the illusory nature of personal identity from a prehistoric ground sloth.
