Unlike you, our internet savvy readers, I am not active online. I use books, the cracking of their covers the metaphoric creak of my decrepitude. When I do a site or video review it is usually because Charles, my web master and sparring partner, or Erique, Adam, Brooklyn Shane, Jeremy, Bart, Maureen, Alex, Dominick the Hemavore creator and coauthor, or Mister Weirton, have sent me a link and/or asked me a question. Doing this site any other way would be boring. As Martha, my bi-monthly dinner date, said last week, “You know, you are my favorite author. Your stuff is so interesting. And what’s really amazing is that such fascinating stories and ideas can come from someone as boring as you. You are a total drag—never do anything to have fun, like Count Dracula without the starched suit.”

This site, aside from the various writing projects I have initiated, is pretty much reader generated. I see it as the only way to have anything worthwhile going on here. Also, since I have no editor for my nonfiction and most of my fiction, you men and women giving me a heads up becomes a lot of fun, when I treat it as an assignment.

Over the years, since the game publishing days of the late 1980s, I have had correspondents that pushed me. Of those who are communicating to my benefit and enlightenment now, the longest running correspondent is Dominick. He wrote me through Paladin Press in 2001 and we have trained together and socialized ever since. For the past three years we’ve been working on Hemavore. About six times a year he comes into town with some beer of much better quality than I normally drink, and we sit down to sketch out our storylines.

In early 2014, Dom, who stops in the black hole in the universe known as Camden New Jersey to get cheap beer—even after their police department dissolved and gave up that ghetto to the U.S Marshals—met a dude in the liquor store that goes by the name of Mescaline Franklin. This 35 year old man is a self-described “evil racist” who hates blacks, Jews and Italians, and comes driving into town with an indie comic book and horror movie buff named Mattero! Mescaline came to meet his new friend’s coauthor; the “elder statesmen” of their reactionary crackpot world.

Dominick had promoted me to this guy as a working class ‘scholar’ of sorts who has written many books and read thousands. Mescaline has always dreamed of being a gonzo publisher on the fringe and he has already put out An Arabian Terror Tale. Although I’m less than 20 years older than these guys it is as if I am a relic of a bygone age that they have set up like an oracle for the Lord of The Flies. As an author this is flattering. Mescaline brings a clip of money acquired doing God only knows what, with a name that was either the cruelest mother’s joke in history or worse—based in fact. He buys me lunch, drinks, dinner and drinks, plying me all the while with questions, primarily concerning history and horror. He brings me books and movies to review. Many of the titles I have covered over the past year from obscure right wing authors have been gifts from Mescaline in the hopes that I will offer a nuance or two this bright fellow missed.

It is quite a rush to be engaged in correspondence—and the occasional face to face and phone conversation—with someone who is smarter than you, but has not read as much or had the same experiences. It tends to be a building experience. The kid keeps me on my toes. From our brief visit last Thursday and a conversation yesterday I have enough notes to make a dozen short articles. I thought it was time he got his own tag. Here is a snippet of his driving dialogue from yesterday.

“You stated in that last piece that you have no answers on the site. I know—being an evil Darwinist—you don’t believe in answers, but they’re there on the site if you look for them. For one thing you’ve achieved a kind of don’t give a shit Nirvana. That’s a big thing to guys my age, in our thirties, who have just woke up and discovered that everything our parents taught us was a lie, that everything this country supposedly stood for was bullshit. You wake up like this and you’re pissed, you want to lash out. I look at you and I see someone that’s past that; in a mental place I want to be—serenity.”

“Serenity is not all it’s cracked up to be. It’s no fun being some cosmic oatmeal cookie that can’t even work up a good hate anymore. I don’t know when I turned this corner but now I feel like I’m just becoming a mistrusted recording device—I’m committing identity suicide. Quitting the job and writing like this began as a race against insanity, trying to empty my head before it imploded. Now it feels like a race to oblivion.”

“Then you go and piss us off by calling us a bunch of pussies and pointing out that we whine like women about this sick world. So it’s refreshing and troubling at the same time that you don’t care about being popular and don’t give a shit—living on fifteen dollars of food a week. I know when I read Taboo You that shook me up—I was pissed. It made me look inside. You’re indictment of us white men is particularly galling—but you’re right. That point you made that we still outnumber the savages six to one and that if only ten percent of white men would stand up and protect themselves, and their women and children than all this shit would end right now. But we’re all on the gravy train.

“You know Ann did a big write up on you in takimag—an interesting lady and she thinks you’re interesting. She says she devours your blog. I can’t wait for your review on the movies. But I was wondering if there is anymore to your theory about emasculation beginning with agriculture. No one else has brought that up. We all seem to think it just happened in the sixties, and now you’re pointing out that this feminism thing—this evil ideology—is just the end game of a process.

“What is that process?”

“Look, I was just too much of a knucklehead to buy the bullshit. I’ didn’t figure things out, just rejected what I was taught on pure defiance. Of course the fact that I accidentally hit on something has got me intrigued and am looking into it like the nosey little ape I am. My head’s spinning man, I’ve had it up my ass proofreading for days—and it’s only an honorary African American ass, not the real wide deal. I’ll write a piece on it on Wednesday when I’m fresh.”

The next Mescaline Franklin post will be Seven Pillars of Emasculation, or how The Goddess Got Your Balls.