Puppet Master
The brain is god’s puppet strings–shoot a horse in the head and watch it drop to the ground like a sack of rocks, just like when a puppet master grows bored and lets go of his puppet’s strings. This observation could be looked upon as proof of god’s existence. Or that of puppets. Or both.
But the real mystery lies in the strings. Notice how when you concentrate on the strings, both god and puppets vanish. Which carries the implication that both god and puppets are an illusion.
Nothing exists outside the mind, and the brain is the tabernacle of the mind. But if nothing exists outside the mind, how can this be? The brain, then, must be an illusion. The mind needs to anchor itself in illusion in order to exist. So then why does the horse collapse when you put a bullet in its brain? Is god dead? Are god and mind one and the same? Is god the original puppet? Does this explain why Pinocchio’s nose grew long? The collapse of the World Trade Center? Sodomy and warfare? Language? Is existence a commodity? What are hard facts worth in the world of the Puppet Master? All this makes me want to put a bullet in god’s brain. Desecrate his tabernacle. Live in a world with no strings attached.
He’d done it again! For months now he’d been aping the behavior the new drug was supposed to produce in him, something that mimicked sanity, and all he had to do was clear this one last hurtle and make it thru the interview with the shy, young psychiatrist from Zurich. But he couldn’t keep his eyes off her long tan legs that she kept crossing one over the other or off the deep cleavage of her breasts, off her sea-green eyes, her high cheek bones and her long blond hair. He wanted her, and he knew that the way to her heart was thru her mind, and so he said all that stuff about god and puppets, which opened a panorama of scenarios that he was obliged to explore, being, as he was, the Original Thought that spawned the Universe.
“Ha-ha!” he laughed. “Just kidding.”
She stood up, smoothed her skirt over her thighs, buttoned the top button of her blouse and smiled down on him. She left the room, and the two male orderlies came in.
“Are we going to do this the easy way, Jackson,” one of them said, “or do we have to play rough?”
It was a reasonable question, but it baffled him.
HCOLOM PRESS is the heir to Vagabond Press, which began as a main player in the Mimeo Revolution of the Sixties and continued publishing right into the jaws of the new millennium. HCOLOM PRESS embodies the spirit of Vagabond Press, retooled for the times we live in.
Hcolom is Moloch spelled backwards. Moloch is an Old Testament deity to which children were sacrificed, a practice society still engages in with increased enthusiasm. Consumerism is the new Moloch, manifesting itself like cancer in war, politics, the arts and religion, in every nook and cranny of human endeavor, draining the intrinsic beauty out of life and mutilating the innocence and magic of childhood with its commercial meat hook. HCOLOM PRESS intends to publish books that by their nature repudiate this pernicious force–novels, poetry, children’s books and books that transcend genre.
Our launch book, in June of 2006, was John Bennett’s novel, Tire Grabbers, a fable of sorts, a reality book rooted in the fantasy of our times, the story of the coming of Moloch and the children who rise up in rebellion against it.
Books of kindred spirit will follow close on its heels. Go for it by clicking here… or hit the Hcolom logo above… or just hit any of the following covers…
