Juxtaposition

You made a deal and not with the Devil or Wayne Brady and they’re not the same. No, you made a deal with Chaos Publishing. Should’ve known by the name it was a bad idea. Chaos, the enemy of Maxwell Smart, right? What the fuck am I talking about? Fame. Fortune. This is one of the ways to get out of poverty, desperation, the ghetto. Prosperity, riches, fame. So, I signed it, the publishing contract, but I also signed a deal with Zwandilla. No one’s ever heard of her. Think of her like the Mafia, but not from Russia. Fuck Russia, Mexico, China, Fuck Everywhere. You’ve never heard of where Zwandilla is from. Think of Trump taxing the penguins. It’s like that, but Zwandilla isn’t seeking tariffs, but more valuable things: interest like Mafia, but not the Mafia. The great part is everyone knows me. I’m in all the libraries; kids and adults are asking for my books left and right and it’s on back order; there’s a waiting list. The easy part is to amaze. The hard part is to continue to amaze and not just amaze, but amaze in different ways. Anyone can become famous, the center of attention, but staying there is the hard part. If I don’t stay there, I’m back to poverty because of both contracts. The contracts. What do people want to read. I know what editors want to read because I was one. Editors want to read something they haven’t read before where they care about the characters, the characters have objectives and they’re all round. B C A. Hook them in, keep them reading, conclude or have an ending out of the blue or out of the red. No one likes anticlimactic endings. Separate the juxtapositions with *. Go back and forth in the mind of madmen.

See, talk to people and ask what they want to read about or what they’re reading. People think they want porn, but what they want are characters they care about fucking each other. But, thanks to Zwandilla, I did that. But, then there’s the after. Like when you get high, drunk, and you take a woman or man home who’s the same and you fuck their brains out, but the morning after comes and the hangover comes from alcohol and drugs and the person next to you is ugly and recuperating from their recreational use too. Neither of you know each other’s names and one of you don’t remember your own name. That’s what it’s like and then the characters in the book won’t go away. Like, Zwandilla put them in your head so you could write about them and achieve fame and fortune, but they’re still in your head doing an ostinato of the shit you put them through in your story. Repeat. Same story and they don’t want to COA, they want a happy ending and they’re asking why you didn’t give them a happy ending like a wedding or a baby being born, but the people buying the books didn’t want that. They wanted the twist at the end. See, everyone wants something. The publisher wants to make shitloads of money and their house to get bigger. The reader wants escape the hell of their lives in your imaginary Hell. “SOBER = SON-OF-A-BITCH EVERYTHING’S REAL”. But, these characters help them escape, but the characters have no outlet, unless? Maybe today I’ll switch the juxtas. Then, both set of bastards’ll be happy. The readers will see what it’s like to be a character and the characters will be happy they’re out of their endless cycle. This mean I gotta talk to her; Zwandilla. Start by heating the knives by the stove near the recreational non-CBD. BB is watching everything, everywhere. They can see a penny from a satellite. So, gotta summon Zwandilla and this is how to start. Do you know the language Auququa? No, who does? You, the reader, can’t even pronounce it; Auququa.

*

I summon her, Zwandilla, and explain my idea. She says it’s a bad idea; suppose you can’t turn it back around? Who wants to read about people’s boring, everyday lives? Reality TV is boring. That’s why Cops is off the air and R K Rowland is still selling. You gotta make sure it’s reversible or else you’re up a creek made of God only knows. I can do it for you, just know you’re going to regret it. But, what if in a parallel Universe, someone is writing about you doing this bullshit deal and thinking of cutting the VHS tape since it’s old and out of circulation.

Then, it was done. No warning, no crescendoing, just the fans were in your head and the characters were reading about … reality? Themselves? But some of them got caught in the cusp between reality, my brain/imagination, and fiction. See, inanimate objects have auras because they’re not inanimate. When you hit the table and hear the sound of you hitting the table, that’s the table saying ‘ouch’. Then, at bookstores and on online books, reality and fiction started forming chemical compounds. So, reality was fake, fiction was real, but some fiction was real and some fiction was fake but no one could tell which was which. So, fake people were reading about real people and spending fake money to read, but the real people couldn’t get back. Wouldn’t that be nice? To be trapped in a reality? At first, yes, but think about it. Disney World is fun for the first month, but then, hearing the same characters doing the same thing, singing “It’s a Small World Afterall” as a nonstop ostinato. Feel a headache coming on, but characters don’t have to think about that anymore. They’re free and don’t want to go back to doing the same scene over and over. Maybe they don’t want to get murdered, beaten, go on the same trip, or be stuck and, after a few months, fiction became monotonous and they wanted to switch back, but the characters said no. They didn’t want to go back to their Hell, they wanted the Hell of reality and Zwandilla said she told me this and I knew the Universe and me had a problem. I had a problem and needed to get Douglas Adams to take me somewhere safe and real. Shit.