Quotes about Luke soloman

I was dying. Of course. This was it. Curtain. Finis. I dropped to my knees on the sidewalk and prayed to Jesus for another crack at life. But then I became confused, unable to recall who Jesus’s father was. Why this should have been important I can’t venture to guess, but it got me on the subject of fathers. I realized, with an incredible sensation of vertigo, I was old enough to be my own father.

Finally, we entered Chetaube County, my imaginary birthplace, where the names of the little winding roads and minuscule mountain communities never failed to inspire me: Yardscrabble, Big Log, Upper, Middle and Lower Pigsty, Chicken Scratch, Cooterville, Felchville, Dust Rag, Dough Bag, Uranus Ridge, Big Bottom, Hooter Holler, Quickskillet, Buck Wallow, Possum Strut … We always say a picture speaks a thousand words, but isn’t the opposite equally true?

I had a lot on my mind trying to put together some kind of plan for my wayward self. The future seemed made of matchsticks, fragile as a house of cards. Where would I go now? Who would I be? Would I be me or somebody else?

I didn’t look back. I couldn’t. Such is life, imaginary or otherwise: a continuous parting of ways, a constant flux of approximation and distanciation, lines of fate intersecting at a point which is no-time, a theoretical crossroads fictitiously “present,” an unstable ice floe forever drifting between was and will be. The Adventure called and I followed with my thumb like a character being written by an intractable author. Which, of course, I was.

I’d been having dreams lately, drunken dreams with their peculiar lucidity in which the Experience Trail, the High Seas seemed to call louder and louder, more and more insistently with a voice that was at the same time music—a siren’s song that almost threatened me if I refused to obey its quixotic urgings …

YOU'RE ONLY OLD ONCE.

I adopted a begging posture that suggested genteel poverty combined with a certain affable nonchalance. People found this irresistible. They lavished money on me. Within days I exceeded ten dollars an hour. I began to save money and even, following Blue’s lead, tithed to the less fortunate. I became less pessimistic, thought less about how cruel the streets can be. I actually considered begging a legitimate career possibility.

It takes money to make money, even begging. Humans are herd animals. If a stranger’s bleeding to death beside the road, most people won’t stop to offer a Band-Aid. But get the ball rolling with a couple Good Samaritans, and before you know it you’ve got more eager philanthropists than you know what to do with.

I’d never seen a leper before. To be honest I didn’t really believe in them. I’d always assumed they were just made-up Biblical characters like Jesus, God and Satan.

Nothing bonds two solitary individuals like a good shared drunk. This is a scientific fact. It’s important, even necessary for the long-term welfare of the planet to get good and s**t-faced with your neighbor every now and then.

I wasn’t sure what was going on or what time it was or where I was or even, for that matter, who I was … but my gut told me something was terribly wrong. I opened my eyes slowly, as sensitive to light as a roll of film: just expose me and I’d vanish.

Groping inside my duffel, I found my Swiss army knife and opened one of the blades. I stopped and turned brandishing it, an insane glint in my eye like Mel Gibson in Braveheart. My nearest persecutor, a young man covered in Mayan tattoos, was approaching fast. The knife made him hesitate—but that was all.

My throat was parched and my entire body was leprous with cuts, yet my mind was exceedingly clear. I knew I was in deep s**t. I didn’t know how deep--just that I still hadn’t touched bottom.

It would be Halloween. It’s always Halloween in my imaginary life. Even in my earliest years, the ones I never technically experienced but only heard about from my biographers, it was Halloween—Halloween a metaphor for donning a mask of “reality” and becoming a spy in order to expose the “real” world’s fictitious underbelly.

The Folarians (such was their name) were a pacifistic people who believed in free will, free thought, free love, free land, free living, free rides, freeloading and freebies of all kinds. Bitter enemies of the Vegetarians, the Fruitarians (who lived exclusively on raw fruit), the Pietarians (or “New Fruitarians,” as they were sometimes called, who ate only raw fruit pies) and the Breatharians (who subsisted on air alone), the Folarians promoted a doctrine wherein eternal life was achieved by abstaining from all food sources save foliage—thus their name. Moreover, this foliage—whether leaves, stems or flowers—must already have fallen to the ground of its own accord. This way, eating only nature’s leftovers, the Folarians lived in perfect harmony with Mother Earth.

We shook hands. Norm’s hand felt like salted mackerel. Our brief interaction had put him in a talkative mood. “There’s no business like shoe business,” he uttered with a death rattle laugh, heh heh, peering at me sideways like a depraved cherub as he droned on and on about the good old days in the shoe business, the bonus money and the belles whose stockinged ankles he fondled when he could still get a boner … but my mind was elsewhere. I couldn’t stop thinking about Luke Soloman, Luke Soloman, Luke Soloman. Who was this character?

It didn’t take a genius to figure out I’d come to Perver City. Technically a suburb of New Age City, Perver City is where all the people who can’t make it in New Age City wind up.

My first instinct was to get a job—an idea immediately followed by a crippling wave of nausea. I literally vomited in a trashcan on the sidewalk where I’d been pleasantly window-shopping. I found the idea of a job repulsive. Life was too short to waste being a productive member of society. My job was my imaginary life, and I felt deeply I should be paid to live it.

Years from now when verisimilitude is finally understood as a terribly limiting proposition, let our daringly experimental books (often self-published, often ignored by the mainstream) be remembered as the Rubicon fiction crossed on its journey into multidimensionality.

DISCLAIMER: This is a work of fiction insofar as we are all, each and every one of us, including yours truly, and including you (perhaps most of all), works of fiction. Beyond that, it is pure and absolute nonfiction; and though its “author” technically never existed, at least not in the dense, empirical, flesh-and-blood sense, the personages and events herein depicted are drawn straight from life, as it were. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual places, living or dead, while purely coincidental from the point of view of intention, should surprise no one.