The Printed Threat, A Novel

This is a postmodern allegory set in New York City after the near total institutionalization of Orwellian information control. After The Theory and Practice to E.S.P. was published and people began to recognize lies, the book was banned and all information, news, fiction, poetry and so on became strictly regulated.

This is the story of a marijuana dealer turned literature dealer in postmodern New York City.

The Printed Threat
Introduction

“Man, $#!!.”
I said out loud, in slow motion, as I paused mid-step from the startle of seeing them, and concurrently seeing their eyes light up on seeing me. There was a moment of stillness for us all as I turned the corner and we saw each other, if only a millisecond.
I just had turned around the corner of 215th Street, by Inwood Park, when I saw them walking downhill toward me. At that point in time I was looking out for them because I heard they were looking for me, but I wasn’t peering around corners or anything. In that millisecond I wished I did. They were looking for me, but I never expected them to be there, on my block, at that point in time.
I made them angry for multiple reasons. It built up. I took action on behalf of someone they messed around with, I took one of their girls, and I was selling mad weed, to the point they made the assumption I was taking their money from their business.
There were four of them; Joe, JoeJoe, Joey and another Joseph of some form or another, who simply went by Yo, believe it or not, because it was too confusing any other way. Yo might have been more accurately called Brick, because he was about as smart, about as exciting, and built like one.
The exclamation slipped slowly from out my mouth, and I stopped walking in the midst of a fight or flight decision. And in that millisecond the synapses in my emergency response system started crackling, adrenalin began coursing through my blood, juices were evacuated from my gonads, and my sinews began elasticizing. And in that instant when the four of them sort of smiled, and started at me like some hungry hunters who just saw their favorite flesh, I couldn’t help but think about what was at that point in time, my favorite story, Joe King Townham’s novel The Predicament.
It’s amazing how many thoughts we can have in a split second, especially when the adrenalin kicks in. I was also thinking what to do and how I had to do something immediately, and for that matter how I had to stop thinking about my favorite story more immediately in order to do so, but it was at the forefront of my thinking. I had heard a few people describe The Predicament as like Watership Down crossed with Lord of The Flies, only with chickens. I could see that, but I never compared it to anything except life itself and my life in particular. Up until that point I had never read anything that I empathized with as much as King Townham’s The Predicament and never empathized with a character like a did Roughagelio. My story, and Joe King Townham’s story too were just like Roughagelio’s story, we were all stuck in a cage, or coop.
In that moment, I felt like Roughagelio more than ever before. It was like I was Roughagelio, and it was an allegory about me, that Joe King Townham wrote about already as a psychic author, and I was only then living it out. I knew it was ridiculous to think, and even more so to think it at a time when every moment mattered, but I was Roughagelio being chased by his nemesis and his foes. The specific scene that crossed my mind was when Roughagelio faced off Bugsy and his goons, which was written about me I came to believe, as much as it is hard to believe. It played out as intricately and as detailed as if I was reading it right then, but zapped start to finish in about as long as it takes for the adrenal glands to open up and release when you see your hungry enemies.
If you’ve never read The Predicament it basically compares mankind to chickenhood in a coop. It’s set on a chicken farm in Maine, a farm where there were three poultry sheds, and the family’s own chicken coop. For all extents and purposes Joe King Townham basically proposed we are all chickens in a coop clucking along trying to fly, pretending like we can fly, and trying to act like we get worms to eat, but really we’re just stuck in the coop, and worse we’re dependent on the farmer entity for entirety.

~ Bugsy was standing on the outskirts of the main circle of chickens, as he usually did, flinching his neck, and kicking up dirt to show off. Bugsy would cluck, peck and scratch at the ground pretending there was a fresh batch of uncovered ants to consume in the arid dirt to get attention. This inclined his clucking brood to bop over to him.
“Do you have some ants over here, again?”
“Just ate them. Listen, it’s time, you wingless clucks. It’s time we make our final move on Roughagelio. He is weak and we’re going to prove to him what color the Sun is once and for all!”
Bugsy meant to kill Roughagelio ever since their argument over the color of the Sun began. Because of the injuries Roughagelio recently had sustained during a confrontation with Fizzy the cat, Bugsy knew it was his best opportunity to take him out.
“Have you seen the way he cucks along? And have you heard the way he clucks when he should caw? And caws when he should cluck? And I know you’ve seen where his spots are and how his feathers fluff? And I know, I’ve never seen a chicken his color tone. Is he spotted? Or is he not? Not good, not good at all. I know you clucks know, we’ve got to kill him, now.”
“I always wanted to peck him to death, you know that Bugsy. I always wanted to kill him.”
“I always wanted to kill him, Bugsy, ever since he said the Sun is the wrong color.”
“Whatever, to him. Let’s make him ant food!”
Gonzo, Android and Tick would have done whatever Bugsy wanted and would have convinced themselves of any number of false realities to support him and his hollow perspective. Bugsy had insisted that he was always in charge of their food, and that the farmer answered to his beckon call because he was the best ant hunter in the realm and they believed him, with all their gullets.
“You know what he said to me before? He said, I will see the Sun is violet white eventually and that he’s right! Like my eyes are not perfect now! I’m going to kill him right now! Come with me! Let’s cluck him to death! Come on, you long feathered flyers!”
Chickens have much more sensitive vision than humans, and of course are much more sensitive about the colors and the arrangements of feathers of their peers than man is concerning the color of his counterparts. Bugsy always despised and wanted to kill Roughagelio simply because of his arrangement of tail feathers, but the day Roughagelio claimed to see better than Bugsy made him a mortal enemy.
The brood clucked themselves into frenzy. The tremendous clucking alerted the rest of the coop. Every other chicken stopped their scratching in the dust and the stretching their wings, most even stopped bobbing their necks, and just stared. They all knew these were fighting clucks and highly aggressive wing flaps. Bugsy led the way toward poor old Roughagelio who sat on top of the well, as was his habit. He was resting and the loud clucks of the charge left him unmoved. It appeared he did not even notice.
Bugsy’s flaunting run turned into a determined charge as he gained the speed needed to jump and fly up to the top of the well where the bucket was hung and where his prey, Roughagelio, lay unmoving. At a couple of feet from the well, he was at just the right angle to leap and flap up a foot or two onto Roughagelio. His cohorts flapped just behind him. As Bugsy flapped up at him just about at the right angle to meanly pounce, bash and peck him in one motion, Roughagelio moved. Roughagelio slid off the top off the well in a relaxed way, hanging on with his feet and then flung himself back up as Bugsy smashed into the well and ultimately, after scrambling and clawing to save himself, fell down into it.
“Get him!” Was his final caw, as he fell down and disappeared.
Roughagelio then wrestled and tossed each of the brood down the well one after the other. And as the commotion ended Roughagelio went back to resting, and the remaining chickens in the coop went back to their own fluffing and wing flapping, as if nothing happened at all, some even actually forgot anything happened at all. Most were only happy about the best ant hunter being gone. It meant more for them.
~Excerpt from Joe King Townham’s, The Predicament

In that instant when the story finished unfolding in my mind’s eye, I heard Joe scream at me, “I’m going to kill you, you chicken shit! Get him!” as he thumped downhill toward me with the other Joes behind him. I must have looked sort of frozen with fear, only I was simply compelled with the eerie similarity of what was unfolding to The Predicament, my favorite book.
And then I knew exactly what I needed to do.
As I turned around to bolt down the street, behind the corner where they could no longer see me, I put it all together in my head. I saw what I had to do, and slowed my run to a strut when I was no longer visible to them. I walked over to the parking sign that was just around the corner, and tucked myself behind a parked car aside the sign. I tried to calculate the time it would take for them to turn the corner from where they were, and I listened. And as I heard them coming around the corner at full speed, and saw them from my hiding, at just the right moment, I leaped up and flung myself out into them, knees and elbow first. I grabbed and held the pole to fling and pivot myself in a way to smash into them with my knees and my forearm, as they ran so fast they were just about out of control, just like Roughagelio would.
I whirled myself into them. In front, was my main nemesis, the inspirer for the pursuit. And I checked him with my forearm in the jaw. I heard later it cost him a few months with a wired shut jaw, and probably took off a couple years off his life. Two others caught knees and legs and I kind of only scuffed their boy, Yo, with a kick. In the process of their ensuing tumble, cracking and crunching, I was swung back, still holding onto the pole and I was flung onto the parked car with what was, all in all, a gentle slide and rebound.
I was honestly as surprised as they were, though admittedly more pleasantly so. I was not grazed or scraped at all. I hopped up while Yo was still in the middle of the other three who were jumbled onto the concrete, each well enough to begin crying. Before I could even think about it I cracked him with a palm strike to the head and a kick to the lower back. They were then, all four of them, in a crumpled pile. I contemplated beating them more, but figured it was enough. It was brutal, but it was me or them.
I looked around to see if anyone saw what happened. There was one person on the block, who was standing right across the street, who was staring right at me, who saw the whole thing. He was dressed clean, for a homeless person. I recognized him as a guy who lived in the park. I didn’t know him at the time, but I befriended him later. I gave him a nod, and he said something like ‘that was the baddest ass kicking I ever seen!’ He gave me a bunch of glory from then on, but at that point I kind of just want to slide out of there. This was back in the day when there were no police drones, so I didn’t even worry about that, but I didn’t want to get in trouble anyway, so I just took off back where I was headed.
I told them to remember that I didn’t kick their heads in and some such threatening hero prevailing nonsense, while the homeless guy exalted my ass kicking skills, and then, I was out. I was on my way downtown, on a mission, figuring my beef with them was over. They wouldn’t want anything to do with me ever again I figured, I hoped.
I was hustling some marijuana that day, and of course, after I did what I had to do, I found a box of books on the street with a copy of The Predicament right on top! I grabbed the whole box of books without even thinking about it, like it was nothing, like I normally did, and went back to the block. And by the time I got back, everybody was talking about how I dropped four fools, including Yo. I never really had to fight much again after that, not that people were generally looking to get me. No one tried to mess my game up after that, no matter what I was doing.

Chapter One

I ended up highlighting the following section of The Theory and Practice to E.S.P. I remember I was scanning through it when I first bought it, brand new too, the following was the first page I opened to, then and basically every time. I swear, every book has what I call the primal page. It’s that part of the book you think you just fumble to when you open it randomly, but it’s not random. Usually the primal page is in the first half, but you never know. It is a strange phenomenon, but I have experienced it with thousands of books. The following begins on the primal page of The Theory and Practice to E.S.P.

“Your consciousness is trapped in a matrix of cellular cages, held biologically on the microscopic level and categorically in the system around your skeleton. Your consciousness is further trapped in a matrix of politicalized and social cages, held behaviorally on the collective level.
Our biological states and our political states of being are equally complex systems, that because of our immersion in them, biologically caged in a being of cells, and politically caged as an individual in groupthink, we have no idea the matrix exists, and we succumb to it like a drop in an ocean. We are trapped inside and outside, politically and biologically, but there is an exit.
The mechanized mind bending advertisers of corporations influence our thinking via marketing propaganda, and influence the thinking of those in the government via lobbyists and so forth and so on. And this has been occurring for generations. The corporations and government seek to influence our thinking, in fact they are all about influencing and controlling our thinking. The word govern-ment means control the mind, after all. The matrix cages really require no more than a little knowledge of current events and etymology to discern. Further discernment of our own thinking can allow us to slip through the cages. We are only capable of thinking so many thoughts in a day. If, with discernment, we can maintain the right thinking we can surpass the suppression of potential by the negative thinking imposed on us.
The government and corporate infiltration of our minds is the greatest influence on us all, and perhaps the greatest crime ever. Through all sorts of subtle scams including the initiation of ‘scientific studies’, they make us believe whatever they want. The recent idea, that the benefits of meditation can only be obtained with a machine, is particularly disturbing. And the somewhat ancient idea that eating bovine parts will somehow sustain vitality is another great trick to deaden consciousness. You are what you eat is true in so many ways. In order for consciousness to bloom, simply do not stifle it with deadened thinking, and deadened food, such simply consumes your energy.
Religious institutions too have taken over spiritual nutrition, and loaded it with salty dogmatic transfat taking what was whole(y) lessons concerning and make the meaning indigestible in attempts to not so covertly control your mind. Corporations, governments and religious institutions all are unions and formations that seek to control the mental via a metaphysical cage. If institutions inhabit your thinking they can inhibit your being. So whether with advert jingles or monothematic interpretations of allegory if they have your thinking they have your being.