A rough draft novel prologue and opening chapter

Let me tell you about a time when absurdity reigned supreme. I was a young man then, not yet 22 laps around the sun. A native of a big sprawling coastal city with a temperate climate and beautiful fake women, that had recently moved to a small university town with piss poor weather.

As a whole though my laddish self was content with the situation and station which I inhabited. The university was, at the least, pleasant with engaging professors and beautiful brick buildings that cast scholarly light upon any of those that happened to be on its campus. The surrounding neighborhoods were quaint with a local flare which only lended to the academic odor. People and lunatics fancied the university a market place for the exchange of ideas to the point where supply so far exceeded demand that sellers took tyrannical measures to promote their products. The university however was only a microcosm of the inanery that existed at the punctuation.

My-young-self inhabited a small but pleasant, and wholly livable 3-bedroom house. The place had a stagnant substantive nothingness that made it a loafers’ Eden with progress as poison fruit. There was a dog. He mirrored the house’s energy level. There were 2 roommates with like polarities that continuously butted their electro-magnetic heads. My-innocent-self was the buffer in the interpersonal lightning storm. During the calmer patterns, however, each heart beating in the house was easily and independently affable. This also, is only a grain in the proverbial imbecility bucket.

It wasn’t the social structure, the people or atmosphere of the town as a whole that fostered the absurdity: although it wasn’t completely free of fault. Those facets of being were relatively satisfactory in comparison to the shenanigans and worldwide gallivanting that were constantly taking place. Humanity had lost the characteristic previously unique to the species; that wonderful thing called cogitation. Maybe the pinions and differentials had worn, but in effect minds were rendered useless.
At that time it was hard to tell if my mind was fugitive. If I was different from everybody else. None of those who retained their faculties could but question who were the absurd ones. Did the absurd even think? To this day the answer remains unclear, but it comforted me (and the eventual others I was to find) knowing I gave comprehension a shot.

CHAPTER 1

I don’t recall how I came to realize the deplorable state of our gaseous blue ball. (It couldn’t have been an epiphany, but it sure felt like how I thought an epiphany should feel. When I had eventually come to this conclusion, it was astonishing that I hadn’t reached it earlier; that makes me think it was an epiphany. So tantalizingly clear, was the realization that I was unable to think of anything else for such an extended period of time, that eventually when I was able to subdue my astonishment I had another epiphany regarding my near return to that absurd asinine mindless zombieism.

The year was 2008 A.D., two millennia after the famed Jewish rabbi was fixed brutally to the intersecting two by fours with an assortment of nuts and bolts. I’m not sure whether A.D. actually corresponded to his death but it was a popular attribute to the year counting protocol. The realization was seemingly abrupt, although likely an amalgamation of smaller less profound ones, it came to me around the third or fourth cup of atomically excited coffee while watching what could have been one of those arbitrary television shows that parody the other television shows that the producers think are full of imbeciles, not knowing that they too are cretinous dullards. It had to have been the caffeine which jumpstarted a malnourished brain cell which prompted the aggregation of the smaller epiphanies into an interlocking train of though, gaining momentum from immense gravity and smashing the rust from my ceased cogs. It turned out I wasn’t viewing a pseudo-witty parody on an entertainment news channel but a broadcast from an oligarchical and allegedly legitimate corporate news agency. In the enormous flood of consequential consciousness my eyes and ears were bombarded with the sights and sounds of the notable earthly affairs.

The astonishment was brutalizing. The world was parodying itself. For how long had the once noble pursuits of men been mutated into a picayune knee-slapping jape? Immediately I began audible ferocious blinking, attempting earnestly to rearrange the television transmission’s trade-symbol into that of the ludicrous entertainment channel. Was this bawdy jest the works of a cruelly minded syndicate or a failed comedic exploit of an alien race of Vonnegutian values? It seemed the entirety of humanity was in on the hoax without actually laughing at their time-consuming laborious inside joke. But they were inside! My mind fantasized about the possibility of an international comedy conspiracy with me as the giant catalytic butt of the thing. The pie in the sky vanished and I was tossed languidly back into reality with the weight of an ontological crisis bearing down upon my puny mind. What sort of sanity prompted people to protest supposed human rights violations by climbing huge red bridges with crudely draw posters? They realized the fallacy… In the waning moments of my skeptical awareness, I observed a gaunt dark skinned man exchanging political vulgarities with a wild-eyed middle-aged woman. The ontological assault was overwhelming, I lost consciousness.