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A Crackpot Book

Copyright 2024 James LaFond

Lynn Lockhart Publisher

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Dust Cover

In a mad bid to complete four history books, a table top war game design and four novels, during a steep health decline, the author has decided to leave the first home he has known since June 2018. Compounding his crime of polygamy with the desertion of his second wife, an actual Indian Princess, the author makes off with the 35 pounds his wrecked spine can hopefully carry in hopes of crossing the nation that hates him a few more times while finishing the execution of his extant big bad ideas.

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To the Reader

The conception of this journal, covering three seasons in the life of a reluctant journalist, is to not write it. I am obligated by five savage muses to complete four novels and a game. Also, there is the dead race screaming from its grave, and the million or so erased youthful souls haunting the precincts of my rampant mind whispering for some thread or another to mark their forgotten stain upon the loom of The Weaver. Only characters that cannot fit into a novel in progress, or observations that are not pertinent to the investigation into Plantation America or the ancient nature of the Sons of Arуas, will find their way into this book.

If my path remains as narrow as I’d like it to be, this front matter, along with my activity and expense records, for spring, summer and fall, will be the entirety of Trash.

Trash is an attempt to write my worst book.

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Dedicated to The Chief, the first man to introduce me, at age 60, as “My Son in Law,” not once but thrice, who has somehow managed to tolerate 88 years on this Planet of the Damned.

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Inspirational Quote

“It has not been too bad. After Sixty, time flies right by—just goes like that! I would like to make it to Ninety. My wife’s mother tried for Ninety; fell short by five days. My wife’s grandmother, brought five generations of her people into the village. She was the Mid Wife, Nanna T-ink. No one knew how old she was. So they brought the book to her and had her pick a birthday and year. This was some time in the early 1900s. She shaved a few years off, being a woman, you can be sure. Even according to that reckoning, she lived to be A Hundred and Four.

“Time walks on. At Sixteen I joined the [a Native American Civil Rights association] because they had a basketball team—I wanted to play basketball. Now, more than sixty years later, here I am, stepping down and handing it off to the young people. I hope it keeps going.

“I have to do some of those exercises with you, keep my strength up. It’s not good to get too weak that you can’t help yourself.”

“It’s good to see you eat something, and to go back for seconds! I was raised and educated by missionaries. Every morning we had hot cereal and read the Bible. It is a cause to worry when you see someone who doesn’t eat. With my people an appetite is a sign of health.

“Of course, there is a deeper famine in this world. But how is a man to fight it if he can’t haul himself up out of bed and out into it?”

-My Tribal Father In Law, [1] Sunday, February 4, 2024, some minutes after the sun went down over Tigard, Oregon

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Note

-1. A man’s word is the kind of law an itinerant, misanthropic, graphomaniac, with an allergy to institutional authority can abide.