Like many authors I write primarily to vent, to depressurize my mind. Since childhood I have seen things in an unusual light. This has always made it difficult for friends and family to have conversations with me without becoming upset. Hence, I tend to keep my thoughts to myself, which ultimately leads to writing. I’m not a natural writer, but one that has been forced into this obsolete form of expression by the gulag of my overwrought mind.

My webmaster/publisher, Charles, has been very indulgent, doing his best to structure our website so that anything that I might wish to write will find a home here, and that it will gel and make sense. The one fault that tends to be endemic to people like myself is the inability to put our creations in context, which includes making marketing and editorial decisions.

Just as Charles had worked the site into a multilayered format that would accommodate everything from history, to modern urban micro-memoirs, to stranger-than-strange science-fiction, I went with my son to see the movie Thor. Although I enjoyed Thor, it was just Superman dressed up as a Viking. As we left the theater I thought, ‘What would the mythical god of thunder think of this depiction?’

The answer came to my mind like a physical blow, ‘Rage!’

That led me down the tangled path of my mind’s eye through the hundreds of books on ancient myth and religion I had read, to the very first one, The Epic of Gilgamesh. The central value promoted in The Epic of Gilgamesh still echoes down through the ages; that his might alone made his rule right. Keeping in mind that most ancient gods where in fact, notable ancestors such as Gilgamesh who had ascended into heaven, a story premise took root in my mind, ‘What would an ancient war god, even if he were just a psychopath who believed he were a god, think of our modern world, and how would he interact with it?’

So, although Charles had seemingly provided me with a sustainable outlet for my weird flights of fancy, I laid By This Ax! on him, which had no fitting place on the website. No sooner had I gone back to work the next night, I was inspired to write another strange tale that had no place in The Sunset Saga…

I have worked in supermarkets and food markets most of my life. It may disconcert you to know that they are never cleaned. ‘What’, you say, ‘the food I purchase awaits my trusting hands in filth!’

Yes, it does. Chain supermarkets are cleaned like so: the windows once a month; the meat case and meat room floor once a week; the sales floor, where you walk, once a night; and the deli case, seafood case, and bakery case once a day. The rest of the store; the stockrooms, bakery, produce prep area and produce cases, dairy, frozen and beverage cases, and all of the shelves on which the food you buy is displayed are never cleaned!

Why?

Because the man that runs the store works on a seven day business cycle, and hence a seven day budget, resulting in a seven day perspective. Psychologically a grocery store manager faces economic death and financial and professional ruin every seven days. Besides, why pay a janitor $30,000 dollars a year to keep your store clean when you can dish out $1,000,000 every five years to have the store remodeled [which generates a lot of fine dust].

Now, independent markets, that own the retail location or don’t have millions for remodeling, hire people like myself to train janitorial crews, or, they just hire Mexican women. Mexican women are to janitorial work what Kenyan highlanders are to long-distance running. One night, having gotten a part-time job to sustain myself while I write, I was confronted with a dairy case which had not been cleaned for the standard five years.

I knew what to do and got down to business. As I waded through years of human hair, mold, grime, bubblegum, muck and the inch-deep legions of hypothermic September flies, I began to doubt my ability to get the whole thing done in one night. Halfway through the night, as my coworkers came by to gaze in amazement at a supermarket employee that actually cleaned, I came to the realization that I was a second-tier janitor at best. I thought back to all of my best janitors, all of the really good cleaning people I had managed in other supermarkets, and I came to realize that they were all either very eccentric, handicapped, or were unable to speak English.

I also began to mull over the social ramifications, the sedentary devolution of the American male. I had just watched Sergeant York, with Gary Cooper, a 1930s movie about our greatest war hero. I recalled the fact that the rich snob of a general ‘Black Jack’ Pershing did not want York to be our hero for that war, since he was a commoner that worked with his hands, and did not represent the American way. Well, the rest of America agreed that a man who worked was someone worthy of being honored, and the hardscrabble hillbilly farmer became our most honored man. The movie went to great lengths to depict York working hard, tilling the land, with doom-shrouded skies and heroic music in the background.

It then occurred to me, that our modern world, which values only celebrity and shining seat-covers with our butts while we decide how to spend what other, less significant people produce, was the realization of Pershing’s aristocratic slave mentality. Today York would be depicted as a fool for working with his hands. I have not worked for a single company that believes in merit pay to reward excellent productivity. The only reward for hard work conceivable in our couch-bound society is promotion to an office chair. That movie, and that night of fighting filth, inspired me to write Soter’s Way, [which I am not certain belongs in the sci-fi genre] a story about a mute handicapped janitor, who is as much set apart from society by his anachronistic belief in hard work as he is by his handicap and eccentric worldview.

Two of my readers have since asked me to do a sequel to Soter’s Way. So, when the impulse to impose my standards of cleanliness, Archie Jones like, on my fetid environment, becomes impossible to repress, I shall pull up the outline for Janitor X: The Passion of Archie Jones and let Archie vent for me.

The very next weekend, while proofing Soter’s Way, I saw a Marie Osmond diet commercial. While trying to bury my 34-year-old crush on the Mormon babe under a philosophical mass of musings, I suddenly felt like a manipulated consumer, as I realized that this chick now looked better at 50 than she had at 20. If a nutritional company could pull this off, what could a worldwide corporation accomplish in the name of marketing in some insane future?

I had also been receiving requests from a few female readers to do a love story, and had a request from another sci-fi writer to do a more detailed examination of my ‘messed up version’ of the 24th Century that figures so sinisterly in The Sunset Saga. By the end of the week I had written Organa, a story about a kid in a highly manipulative future who falls in love with the lady on his favorite box of cereal...only he’s not a kid anymore.

As I was coming home on the bus today I began considering the plight of a boxing coach I know, and how different it is from the norm, as the guy is totally off the information grid. I was stricken with this thought while outlining a questionnaire for a group of genius level table-top war-gamers for whom I had agreed to transcribe the content of a rules meeting concerning an upcoming year-long game.

Then I saw a Nation of Islam guy in his black and white suit selling bean pies and the Final Call. By the time I reached my desk I had written half of a short novel in my head, and had to spill my guts in the form of an outline so that I could clear my mind to touch up this piece and finish Triumph, my role-playing game; so that I will be free to resume torturing Jay Bracken and Three-Rivers in The Sunset Saga.

That story will be titled Poet: The Enlightened Fate of Akbar Qama, about a retired militant Black Moslem enforcer, currently dabbling in his grandmother’s Native American beliefs, who, as Kismet would have it, is called upon to aid a frighteningly intelligent White Devil in distress.

That is the story of why Charles had to build this neat corner of the website to accommodate my compulsions. Any fiction which does not fit as part of The Sunset Saga will appear here. As of yet it is exclusively populated by my novelette length efforts at speculative fiction. There will be shorter stories available for free, and I expect a novel or two. Although I have no specific plans for doing historical fiction, I do not expect that I will long resist that notion.

Any questions, comments and suggestions are welcome. We hope you have fun with this corner of the site.

-James, 9/9/2012