Caveat Emptor

If you wish for writing that takes you on a predictable journey, a familiar road to travel down, then you have had a predictable life, so it follows quite clearly that you will not fit in here. As you have likely noticed, the writing changes from the first to the third person narrative, and it occasionally offends and challenges the topic of your dissertation, or what your pastor suggested in church on a particular Sunday in 1973, without regard for you, the Reader, clearly questioning your fine sense of literary balance and your expensive and meaningful education.

On occasion, you will find yourself reading works of or about dead poets as if you have emerged inebriated in the alley outside of a bar your friends dragged you to. You will be engaged, much against your free will, in conversations about things you have not thought about in a long time, if ever. These conversations, brief as they may be, will upset most of you, but a few of you will be so excited your natural and immediate instinct will be to revolt against any level of institution and/or rule with varying degrees of rage. If the medicine found in these pages takes appropriate affect, in a few months from now you will consider yourself an anarchist, a free thinker, the New Person, a fresh liberal mind in a vast sea of nothingness and mediocrity. You will be liberated. You will read Mark Morford columns while playing the tamborine.

These conversations of ours will be the proverbial flower in your mind, as they will range from philosophy, mathematics, History, literature, Rick Springsteen, and just plain life. Probably like the predictable life you are leading right now. In these conversations, you will be reminded of your imminent death (not on every page, but close). It surely may be no surprise, but the words written here will be difficult for the academics in the crowd to digest, mainly because these random animal parts, this evolving essay knowns as Naked Sunfish, refuses to document its many sources of insight with the industry notations called footnotes. We are not, my friends, a bunch of prostitutes, in the halls of Naked Sunfish.

Since we are not prostitutes, many people will simply discard this mass of words, and will move on to more (or less) established venues of scholarship. I even ask myself whether it is possible to fully comprehend what Lao-Tzu once said: “If you speak, you do not know. If you do not speak, you know.” Despite my interest in an Eastern viewpoint, a refreshing landscape in a linear world, you are hereby left up to your own internal trust detectors, and perhaps a growing suspicion that there really may not be a difference between fiction and non-fiction, that in order to have hot we must have cold, and that footnotes are ridiculous and a waste of time. It is all a gamble you must be willing to take as you read each additional sentence.

Clearly, the crafty and swift changes in narrative style, which also include rapid adjustments in verb tense, are techniques used to control the control freaks in the crowd, those odd people who simply cannot fathom lack of control even when they read. If the above observations about you have any bearing and make you feel self-conscious, then this is either not the place for you, or a very fine wake-up call to remind you that the bus of reason is leaving the station soon and it’s quite possible there are no more seats left.

As you can see, the author thinks way too much of himself. He has too much authority in his writing and purports things that he cannot back-up even with scientific proof. The writing is clearly self-indulgent and leaves a strange after-taste in your otherwise Cognac and musty cigar tasting mouth. The author must be forgotten at once for his scholarship and general writing style is irresponsible and does not even remotely support any level of “rules-based” approaches to writing.

If you are the sort of person who has been shaped beyond any semblance of literary repair, as described right here--that is, incapable of reading anything unless you believe it has a predictable shape to it, a pattern that makes sense, then you should invest your time reading something else. For, as you will soon see, and for which it is important to apologize for being so late about introducing, this piece right here is all about your time.

Caveat Emptor means “beware buyer.” In this essay it is simply a small warning. It’s here only to suggest the manufactured item you’ve just purchased (or borrowed) has a warning that says, “death imminent if product used.”