As I blazed through Jimmy, my pathetic childhood autobiography, writing the first 40% in ten days, I would take two days a week to walk to a working bar, eat some meatballs and drink a few beers, then walk home. This has typically been a good way for me to decompress after writing and be able to get to sleep. In Portland, it is very unusual to be befriended at a bar, as these are mostly hipster joints, where the Gods of Grief hold sway in perpetual coolness.

I was also looking for a place that was cheaper, had actual light beer with less carbs, rather then a light style IPA and had early daylight hours and wifi, so I could get coffee at noon and do posting and emails once or twice a week. This led me to The Bar, almost within sight of Mount Hood and full of retired men, working men, Native women and the occasional African American ladies night out. This is a place like bars of old in Baltimore where people meet to decompress after a day at work.

The bar maids liked me and began introducing me to people. A lady thought I looked like a good listener and began to talk to me about her life.

I had come to a place to be alone in a crowd, seeking no friends, starting not a single conversation.

Friends made me.

The conversations and the social flow in the bar resulted in my writing about 10,000 words of unplanned material, unsalable, unstructured, simple journalism about real people and real lives that no American in their right mind would be interested in reading. The entries do serve to fill a space a day on the website, which is the only real platform for my book exposure.

So, as the end of the year comes close and the shortest day comes near, I have to stop writing anything other than the miserable tale of my hatchling half-life and will wrap this monstrous collection of some hundred capsule oral histories, weird perspective articles and combat training notations in the order in which they were written.

Hopefully Jimmy will be finished before New Year’s.

I am titling it Blunders of the Divisible World [1] for the very American reason that it is the catchiest title of the hundred odd works of self-defamation, knuckle-head preparation and strange imagination that have no other place to go, but between the covers of a book that will not be printed for at least three years and probably five, if ever.

This preface, whore that I am, will take up a day’s publishing slot in January, 2022. All of the content should post by late March. If you would like a PDF complete with my endearing typos before the general crowd gets to read the postings just email me at jameslafond dot-com at gmail dot-com and say, “James, I sent a donation to the website. Could I have a copy of Blunders of the Divisible World?”

Thanks for your support.

James, Portland, Oregon, Monday, 12/14/21

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Notes

-1. That article was inspired by crime information sent to me by the man who lent me Wonders of the Invisible World by Increase and Cotton Mather, who I decided to rename Decrease Matter.