preface

Ridiculous that you should trust me. It's mad for me to suggest that there is something wrong with books. This must be a joke. The health warning: fiction can seriously damage your reality. More bluntly: READING KILLS.
Me too. I'm not just warning you against other books. That would be a writer's trick. "Read my books, no-one else's." And while pretending to hand down the truth, the writer piles up possessions. It's main aim being to give itself the leisure to read and write more books.
Let's forget about that mythic beast. I am an autochthon. I want to prod you into life. (I is dead. Who will tell the story?)
Ersatz anyplace. Travellers more concerned with their page-by-page journey through a book than their centimetre by centimetre progress through space. It feels safer to give up the thought process to a block of text. To complete the secure feeling, add headphones and turn the volume up.
A teenage boy sits on the tube. His legs are hooked protectively over a capacious schoolbag. One part of his mind refines his familiarity with The Velvet Underground's "White Light White Heat". His eyes feed him with a stream of symbols known as Bleak House by Charles Dickens. If he looks up, he does so without moving his head so as to avoid giving any fellow-traveller an excuse to lock eyes with him. Some days when he looks up he has gone past his stop.
Familiar picture, if we allow some liberty with the casting, and the choice of volume.
Somewhere else she is driving a car. Sunlight pouring off the car-in-front's wing-mirror creates a golden beam and a golden spot on tarmac. These cars moving relative to this road. This road moving relative to this star. Suddenly the conditions that made this happen cease.
A walker stops. I went to the hills to lose the plot, to break free from stories. But the chattering grouse told me the Strid had claimed many lives. (Let's get lost). On a coffee jag coax lichen onto your flesh, moss-eye. The snow goes down and rots our bones where they erode the land. Coffee jaguar we are out of your reach. Olfactory oil factory poo solution pollution the bottomless pit the no-ass hikers. In Doxy Pool ... no stories please, even the cycle of seasons is too plotty. Eyes grey as sky, blue as frozen stone - erase the hillside. Coffee cats take lives, skulls lie around. Lookout. True grit stone. Attack the land and rock. Perish here, the caffeine felines will prosper. I shall water this patch of ice and leave a scraping of skin. Cracked, I cracked cackles ice. Yearning for the less than human. The lichen living on rock and air is freer than I, translating myself into soil.
I would like to make myself unreadable. That would be one way of achieving my ends. Instead I will make myself into an anti-narrator. The kind of person who cannot tell a joke well. Someone from whom you instinctively turn away when he begins to relate an anecdote. Someone at once too serious and too flippant. All the stories have been told. Your addiction to them is killing you. I am merely the detox program.