john bennett | the rock & the hard place

The Rock & the Hard Place

The rock is an act of nature. “You want rocks?” says nature, and flings pebbles in your face. Then she spins boulders around your head like planets and goes sailing off thru the universe trailing comets and conjuring galaxies. Nature is a bit high strung.

After she’s gone, things grow silent and dark–the danger zone where you become aware of the hard place. The hard place exists in rigid repose and is unaffected by nature.

Nature provides a diversion from the hard place, keeps us toying with the notion of rocks, occasionally staggering our imagination with rocks so huge they’re light years across. But such spectacles, if they happen to slip off into the hard place, vanish. Even black holes vanish in the hard place.

We’ve reduced the hard place to the mundane. “I’m caught between a rock and a hard place,” we say, and chuckle while shaking our heads sadly. We busy ourselves playing games with nature who rains rocks down upon us, and we prefer this.

We dare not stand still. We dare not turn away lest we vanish.

click the Hcolom Press logo to visit the web page...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…

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