Conspiracy? What Conspiracy?

Individuals who stumble upon inconvenient truths are swiftly neutralized. That’s why every truth I stumble upon is being released as fiction

Death takes no holidays … especially on 9/11 “anniversaries.” Which is why I played it safe on the gala 20th “remembrance” of that fateful day by ignoring all the parading and jingoistic homilies spewing out of the crooked mouths of politicians in NYC, DC and the fields of Pennsylvania.

Instead I attended a nice wine festival in Rhinebeck, NY, bought some wine and a falafel, and capped the day off watching a dystopian musical performed by a bunch of earnest, energetic teenagers. Oh, and the night before, also technically on 9/11, I went to an art opening across the river in Kingston, where my friends Dead Unicorn were blasting songs about death, disease, destruction and the end of the world.

Somewhere in there I read a great column Hunter S. Thompson wrote the day after 9/11. It was, as usual, incisive as fuck, and remarkably prescient as to how things have turned out, with the U.S. circling the drain and all, after blowing its wad in Afghanistan and Iraq and turning from a run-of-the-mill quasi-democratic kleptocracy into a proto-fascist authoritarian police state crawling with eye-in-the-sky drone cameras and information-gathering robot vacuum cleaners. Hunter was a little too incisive for his own good, of course, realizing that there would be no place in the Brave New American World for a stubbornly iconoclastic malcontent like himself. He would have been cancelled or otherwise marginalized within two minutes by today’s totalitarian media matrix, so he allegedly opted instead to check out, turning one of his many guns on himself before the shit got too deep. Or, as some have alleged, he was conveniently “suicided.” Whatever the case, RIP, Hunter. We miss you.

Anyway, having successfully avoided achieving the sort of fame and “reach” that can attract a black helicopter, I remain, hanging onto the listing mothership like a dumb barnacle, trying to sell books and 50-year-old songs. The novel reviewed in the links provided below grew in part out of watching those twin monstrosities crumble into the street, from my bicycle seat that morning 20-odd years ago on my way to work at a shitty magazine job in lower Manhattan. I’d just given three weeks notice two weeks earlier, on my 49th birthday, after deciding to once more give up the life of a lone degenerate, marry a nice woman and make a couple more children to help feed and house me in my looming dotage. Rather than go home and shoot myself, I skulked around downtown for a few days, risking being shot as a looter, avoiding National Guard patrols and checking out the dust-covered damage firsthand. Research, I thought, ignoring the stench. Then I packed up, left NYC and moved upstate into my fiancee’s basement in Rhinecliff and shat out the first draft of Wasted: A Story of Love Gone Toxic, which is about what a corrupt, mobbed-up shit show New York is. The book starts with 9/11, and goes downhill from there.

About 70% of what happens in the book is true. The reason I changed all the fucking names is so I wouldn’t be chopped up into little pieces, like what happened to Jamal Khashoggi. This novel is fiction, but it contains more truth about what is really happening and who is really in charge than any news story. The reason you feel like mobsters are running the world ... is because they are.

Anyway, here are the review links threatened above:

Dactyl Review: Wasted by Biff Thuringer

Living the Nightmare Like a Dream

Powerful Debut Novel

Didn’t Expect to Lose This Much Sleep