eXistEntiAlasM

© 2022 John Cady

ISBN: 978-1-66-784005-5

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

~ Dedicated to Scott William F. Cady

the ne plus ultra of this

Acknowledgement

I wish to acknowledge the excellent friendship and advice provided by Craig Cady, Seth Tucker, and Dave Jamison both in enduring my ongoing sense of self and critiquing both it and a never-ending litany of opinion. However, and most importantly here, for responding to these stories and this collection. I cannot begin to thank my parents enough for bringing me into the playdough and giving me all this opportunity and support. I have been variously called hedonist, epicure, madman, and bon vivant and accept the epithets gladly. I hope this collection inspires you to feel similarly.

I also wish to mention some of the inspiration that drove this need to share. They are not presented in any particular order, but have motivated so much in my life (and yes, some are fictional characters, go figure): Don Quixote, The Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, A.A. Milne, Inspector Clouseau (Peter Sellers), Antal Szerb, Len Rix, Dave Eggers, Han Shan, Omar Khayyam, Rumi, William Shakespeare, William Carlos Williams, Jan Brueghel, John Irving, Mark Leyner, Hunter S. Thompson, Salman Rushdie, Donovan, Scott McLemee, Ken Wilber, Terry Gilliam, Ignatius J. Reilly, and so many, many more.

Hence my… "pitifullest infinitesimal fraction of a product".

"If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry."

~Ernest Hemmingway

It is a happy talent, to know how to play.

~Ralph Waldo Emerson

"To live is to play at the meaning of life."

~Earnest Becker

"And maddest of all, to see life as it is, and not as it should be."

~Don Miguel de Cervantes

Table of Contents

Acknowledgement

Foreward by Dr. Seth Tucker

Prologue

GAMBLING POETRY

BREEZE

SLEEP LIST

OZPERLOO

NEO-FRIVOLISM

RETROCAST

THE SYSTEM IS BROKEN

BECKY & TODD

THE REVIEW

WHY TEENS LOVE VAMPIRES

MY WAR

SUFFERING

CONVERSATIONAL COMMERCE OF LOST SOULS

DATING

BLARG

THE SYSTEM IS BROKEN

HAND-CRANKED

NEO-BUDDHISM

START

WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOU?

WHO ME?

A HIDEOUS WORK OF PRETERNATURAL SUBJECTIVITY

WIKIMAUNDER

THE SYSTEM IS BROKEN

CIRCUMLOCUTION

Epilogue

Afterword by Dr. Dave Jamison

About the Author

Notes

Foreward by Dr. Seth Tucker

(A Warning)

This text asks us to dive deep, to wrestle with the old gods of sanity and reason and wealth before Trump was even a glimmer in the mad-eye of white rage, to erupt in a rigor mortis of existential poetical climax or encase our feet in cement and let the darkness or the light of the quixotic take us. Or die trying, which is what John Cady asserts. These essays and poems and inquiries and rants and screeds anticipate the moribund gestalt of our recent awakening to ‘the enemy among us’ here in the US where we see the divisions even when there aren’t any, where the stupid few get to dictate our reality and realities, and where our willingness to believe the old lies of capitalism are whispered or shouted at us as we sleep. Inside this cover, find the animated wisdoms that Cervantes would have cheered wildly for from his perch in a turning windmill.

It’s the playdough, stupid.

Seth Brady Tucker is executive director of the Longleaf Writers’ Conference (which you should endow with riches and plan to attend, every year in the second week of May) and he teaches creative writing at the Lighthouse Writers’ Workshop and at the Colorado School of Mines near Denver. He is senior prose editor for the Tupelo Quarterly Review, is originally from Wyoming, and once served as an Army Paratrooper with the 82nd Airborne in Iraq. He is a multi-genre writer and his work recently appeared in the Los Angeles Review, Driftwood, Copper Nickel, Birmingham Poetry Review, and others. He thinks John Cady has totally lost it, and cannot think of any better way to rage against that dying of the light.

https://sethbradytucker.ink/index.html

Prologue

I don’t know if it’s true or not, but my ‘thoughts’ or ‘life’ seem pointless if I cannot find one permanent thing. Maybe that one thing is the eternal nature of transience? Truth is a loaded word. One of my favorite sentences in existence is the KDworld.net tagline: "It’s like the truth, only real."

Does it make any sense to strip my thought of conceit? My soul of guise? Am I just fooling myself anyway by writing… by questing? Am I nothing but a poor, timid attempt at Don Quixote, protected by the faux-shield of a computer? Would I do better to throw down this enabling cyber-armor and take up this discourse in the streets?

Being the Neo-Frivolist that I learned I am in writing, I wish to invite anyone to experience this as portal into a somewhat unrelatable consciousness as it looks out onto many things.  This consciousness fears it will never be shared, seen, or remotely understood, but cannot bear the thought of not trying.  This will not be a ‘story’ in the way we have come to think of them, but a glance into the -dare I say soul- of an entity that begs to be exposed.

I promise to say something real or die trying! Of all the ridiculous…

Vini, Vidi, Reliquit!

The following verses punctuating the short stories are all by Omar Khayyam:

XXXIII

Were the choice mine to come, should I have come?

Or to become? What might I have become?

What better fortune could I then have chanced on,

Than not to come, become, or even be?

A HEARTRENDING WORK OF STUPEFYING BRILLIANCE

I might want to write a heartrending work of stupefying brilliance, hmmmm, and maybe even unlimited jouissance, but first I’d have to lose some weight.  I live in LA.  Not Los Angeles, but Ellay, and in this metropolitan celebration of exoterics it is not so much what you do, but how you look doing it.

I admit this to myself, though it hurts.  I plan to use it more as grand stratagem than excuse for procrastination.  My writing routine, therefore, includes an exhaustive exercise regimen. 

Before I chronicle my literary exploits, I must describe the setting that frames this attempt.  I am firmly ensconced in a "heavenly bed – part of a new marketing ploy by the Westin Pasadena in which they make a little cash on the side by branding and selling their painstakingly crafted interior design.  My wife (an actress) is lying next to me, trying to read some material that will expand her interests outside of the business.  To that end, she is reading a biography about Albert Einstein.  She complains that it is frustrating because every time she encounters the word Einstein she thinks Epstein-Wyckoff & Associates" – an agency with which she has always aspired to sign.  She says she won’t be able to make it through page eight if this persists. 

My writing regimen shall be threefold at the very least.  First, I embark on a high-protein, low-carb diet along the lines of Atkins, but one which I will name after a fictional Swedish scientist.  One does not want to hear that one has been laboring under the second best diet, or that one’s diet methodology has fallen into disfavor.  By creating an unassailable fictional diet that is in principle similar to the most popular diet, so much annoyance is avoided.  I can even take some joy in imagining curious fellow Angelinos googling Sverin Renneblad to no avail.  This also allows me to evade all, "Well my diet… conversations, by claiming to be involved with this mystical and secret diet, which prevents me from comparing it to other diets.  All I can tell you is it’s an improvement on Atkins.  Can we talk about something else please?" 

Second, I shall have to purchase a number of the magic-diet formulas that are the touchstone of late-night TV.  I’m thinking DreamAway™ or Cortislim™ or perhaps even the one that is so good because it’s so expensive (it is billed as way too serious for anyone who wants to lose 10-20 vanity pounds).  It is clearly targeted at the significant cross-demographic of individuals suffering from obesity coupled with the crippling belief that expensive equals effective.  This part of my writing regimen (let’s call it the 3-magic-diet-program-cocktail) will certainly lead to some loss of weight and perhaps trans-conscious states whereby I can access unknown talents.

Third, I will employ one of the finest Tai-Bo instructors,