Face of the Screaming Werewolf

About the Book

AUTHOR´S FOREWARD

“The following selection is monophonic. Please adjust your stereo accordingly …”

Here’s a little yoga for the dead before you enter the next cultural traffic jam (on your way to making that fine tortured living in the modern past). Any ordinary levels of awareness make me want to kill that climb toward self-reconfiguration until you and I are declared as equal as any fellow subhuman reduced to the sum of his or her multiple intelligence quotient. Do you stare until the shadows cast light? Are you a fellow conspirator?

Any spaceman-writer worth his anti-radiation suit knows that power floats, that you’ve got to build a fable to outlast the fads and popstars and media clatter, and you’ve got to document social deflations and disintegrations -- it’s got to be sold solid, before the warranty expires. Flesh, steel, concrete, rockets, dollars … posts, girders, laser beams, words. Do you want people to say, “He was an okay scribbler”? “Had his helmet on backwards”?

No, you want to be the Sphinx of scribblers, the one who etched his thoughts into stone and dared people to turn the heavy pages. Throw the helmet to Theseus and start gathering flowers and beechstaves in the folium et volumen. If you settle for less, they’ll chuckle derisively, “He took a stab at writing and killed everything he wrote.” Journey to spaceman nowhere.

Or maybe you are the Sphinx of readers?

Most folks are seeing the world through a brain-tank of bubbling water and institutionally globalized poverty. Real eye-popping, from their phosphenes all the way down into that hippocampus. “Tlcemsaio oiasmsaio.” Dr. Wilder Penfield, an American surgeon, discovered he could induce hallucinations in the brain by applying the probe of a 60 volt D.C. charge. Theremin music penetrates, burp of lithium-6 isotope hits the Bhutanese refugee. Olmec-age negotiations remind us that the erosion of moral character is built on a series of thankless tasks (and grit smaller than one zeptometer). “Oiasmeclt tlcemeclt.” Los diableros hablan. All government is illegitimate. Love is a two-person conspiracy. Don’t want to stumble, stand still. “Tlcemsaio oiasmeclt tlcemeclt oiasmsaio?”

What are the qualities of a good conspiracy? Tight lips. And a backwards wall is just a llaw waiting for demolition. We are privileged to share this planet with persons of all backgrounds and degrees of mental defects and reading habits.

Opposites and dualities and apostates are part of the same scheme. A robot looks down one of life’s pathways and sez, “Looks kinda dirty.”

“Of course it’s dirty -- it’s a dirt trail! You want it swept???”

“Neat concrete or asphalt would make for a nicer st/roll.” (Especially if you’re driving an electric wheelchair instead of a pair of hairy, chimpanzee-like legs.)

Neat versus dirty or clean versus clutter; control versus free spirit; sterility versus life. Same things. Don’t get your foot caught between the extremes while becoming who you are. You will be forever changed even by the end of this paragraph.

People must, of course, create their own meanings and reasons to live. At least most people. As a gladly-suffered screwball, I shouldn’t cast too many aspersions upon the habits of the unreflecting herd; the others, content to follow the make-believe of yet others still, probably mill about semi-consciously, driven by various addictions, phobias and animal impulses. I am a bookwriting animal, however, and these art projects occupy the otherwise empty, meaningless hours of my life, when not pursuing various addictions, phobias and animal impulses.

In print, this is my first book. Its title is stolen from a Jerry Warren film -- a film which he, in kind, stole from Mexican filmmakers. Now the circle is broke

About the Author

Ken Gage writes from the “traditional” school of rebel-rousers, Hell-raisers, Surrealists and other extremists. He claims to belong to the Communist Party of Outer Space, where he “brokered the Neptunian Alliance before the secrets of Dementia-Five were known on planet Gorth.” He particularly enjoys the works of Ray Bradbury, H.R. Giger, William S. Burroughs, Anton Szandor LaVey, J.G. Ballard, Howard Stern, Paolo Soleri, Genesis P-Orridge, Harlan Ellison, Theodore Sturgeon, H.P. Lovecraft, Alex Jordan, the Marquis de Sade, among others.