Mister Grey and I sat upon his deck after reviewing certain books on video and he said,

“James, I know that your interests have expanded and deepened since we met in 2001. [1] What I am really interested in, is what books helped set up your initial viewpoint? First you did a violence study because you knew that the martial arts magazines were bullshit. Then you rewrote the whole history of boxing because you knew that was bullshit. How did you know that things that other people believed were wrong?

“Some people might write it off as instinct or alienation—and those factors are there. But I have seen you look at the same book material as other people since 2011 and you see thru the veil and others do not: white Indians, slavery, crime, societal decline. Maybe two discussions, early books that influenced your viewpoint and later books that affected it?”

-Amish Country, Pennsylvania, Monday, April 15, 2024

…

Groan, I wanted to write two chapters in Nihil today. But this fine fellow is coming to town today and his interests, as a reader, trump mine as the writer. I should preface this with the fact that my two major history projects were the product of reader inquiries, not my own curiosity, and that my major journalism categories, Harm City and Travel were thrust upon me by the poverty inflicted by the infotech system that banned and now shadow ban [2] my most salable books. So keen the wicked Norns for our souls.

The books I read as a boy, youth, and young man in my 20s which influenced my worldview, in the order read:

-1. Sea Hunt, multiple short, graphic novels, about a four man crew of pearl and sponge divers in the Mediterranean, instilled in me the ideal that a handful of men could outwit evil doers and also resist oceanic forces. This really struck me as an alienated boy who was among four other retards consigned to the special education reading class. There were no girls in this class. The World Hates Boys! I knew that, which set me on the path to discovering why, and how I could stab Gaia in her all-drinking eye. These stories influenced me largely because these were the first books I could read.

-2. Guadelcanal Diaries, by a reporter with the troops, whose name I do not know. This was the second book I read and convinced me that the World’s hatred for boys was expressed in industrial extermination of men.

-3. The Marshal Cavendish Encyclopedia of WWII. I read these 25 volumes about five times. This basic information on WWII was utterly pro-American, but did include photos of German peasant girls working in rural fields far away from the front who had been machine gunned by American aviators. As the histories of WWII expressed in documentary, movie, TV, and American news media mythology became more and more cartoonish, I have often reflected back to this relatively deadpan account. It was not real history by the standards of Herodotus. However, in my dawning mind, it gained stature and towered over the increasingly emotive rewrites of that titanic war of extermination. All other wars I studied were covered with decreasing emotion over time. Only this war, was and is, viewed with increasing emotion over time. This realization has grown over time as WWII history has continued on this course. This has convinced me that the leaders of all of the warring nations were cooperating in a great cull of the best and brightest lower order men and that the only disagreement, the contest if you will, was over what version of the mass mind ideology would use that global attempt to eradicate men of agency, as a veil behind which the thousands years conspiracy against mankind would be hidden in service to the emotional farming of the surviving masses. This is my deepest and least popular view, that the greatest war ever fought had no good guys, has a pre historic ancient analogue, and that whatever world leader you think served your cause, merely sought to cull your kind in favor of the fervor in his mind.

-4. Mastermind of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs. This old time pulp novel attracted my youthful desire to fight enemies, and to mate with a dark haired woman with the stunning cover. Upon reading it, I found that the answer to dealing with the constant mind control attacks of adults, and the frustrated insanity of my fellow youths, was to escape, like the hero John Carter, to other realms, if in mind only. While my friends all through teenage years drank, smoked and did drugs, I read. I have since discovered, that by not doing what all but myself and two other students in Trinity High School did [drink, smoke and get high] as a teenager, and retreating into books instead, that I emerged into adulthood with an ability to remember events, actions, books etc, that eludes most people, despite dozen of concussions of a brain that had been sub standard in boyhood. Indeed, as I live with numerous folks in various states, half of these families assign me the ask of remembering what they did, what they said, where they laid their hammer, etc. Edgar Rice Burroughs saved me from the stupid juice while my brain was growing and forming in its most vulnerable stage of becoming the brain of a man… who, if he becomes and remains a man, is Enemy of All the Civilized World.

-5. Conan the Wanderer, an Ace paperback by Robert E. Howard, edited by L. Sprague de Camp, I found in a Walden’s book store in the Washington, PA mall, at age 13. My hand was broken from a fight with a 17 year old. I had become enemy of the neighborhood. Seeing the Boris Valejo painting of a small barbarian with a knife standing up to a giant of iron, brought instant identification between the author and my yutish self. The headline story, The Devil in Iron was a brutal piece of social commentary against civil society, that our rulers on earth MUST be evil and that defiance must be informed by wits or we are merely meat that complains before it is placed smoking upon the God’s altar.

I shall continue with the rest of this odd literary memoir in #2.

…

Notes

-1. Yesterday, here, at the Brickmouse House, the Webmaster told my host, “When I met this guy he wasn’t interested in any of this conspiracy theory stuff. It was just better ways of fighting, history of fighting and weird fiction. Now, this guy is as deep into the rabbit hole as any of us.

-2. Try searching my books and you will be given mostly used listings, not the books I get paid for; and expanded distribution retailers whose cut comes directly from my royalties and not the publisher who makes the same either way.