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[David]

FOREWARD TO THE AUDIO VERSION

One day, while I was around eleven years old, a bully beat me up and threatened to cut off my penis. I said, "What the fuck do I need a penis for?" It wasn't great wit, but it was some kind of wit. Thus came thrust upon me the desire to share my version of wit, and what better way than to be a writer?

When I was fifteen years old my male parental authority figure asked me how I wished to earn a living. Of course I told him I planned on being a writer. Convinced that I must not have understood him, he repeated the question. I thought that a terrible slander upon my chosen, distant future, profession. Surely some writers still get to eat occasionally, and the cardboard boxes they live in while they toil applying quill to parchment might eventually be paid off in three or four decades. If starvation does not carry them off first.

My first professional magazine sale was when I was nineteen years old. One night I sat at my Olympian Deluxe typewriter and I hammered out an astrology article about roommates and I sent it off, keeping no copy for myself, to the most popular astrology magazine in the USA at the time. The magazine eventually published the article and sent to me $87. I had suddenly become a professional.

The relationship between me and the magazine after that was precarious, as they refused to buy everything that I wrote, damn them. More annoying to me was the fact that the editor disliked the word "bastard" and I am emphatically in love with the word. The editor would change my "bastards" into "beast," "creature," and "person" where and when he deemed appropriate and where I deemed it to be blasphemy to even dare edit me. Most times the editor just excised my bastards, the bastard. Eventually I was using the word "bastard" every three or four sentences, just to see if he might some how miss one and leave it in. Our professional relationship did not last much longer after that. The magazine owner got cancer, sold the magazine, and died, so I had my revenge.

I stopped writing, of course, when I discovered I would rather eat regularly. Added incentive to quit was the notion that if I were a professional writer I would have to actually talk to readers, sign books, and other such tortures. I did not wish to talk to people: I wanted to write *AT* them, slap them around a bit literately, and have my way with their cerebral cortexes. A good book is one that leaves the reader injured.

In the book "Desert Soliloquy: A Perfectly Sane Misanthrope Hides in the Desert" there is one major theme: I reversed modern society. I lived in the desolate wilderness and then told stores about taking brief adventures into the city. Like Tarzan; like George of the Jungle; like Crocodile Dundee. As is obvious in the book, my utter loathing of humanity is only mitigated by the fact that I need humanity to provide cheese enchiladas and guacamole. Now and then I feel like eating, so my hatred for the species is tainted; my revulsion isn't completely pure. The benefits of human society has made of me a hypocrite.

It is very much my hope that the book you are about to read leaves a few tiny scars, and maybe a rash or two here and there--- to remember me and my memoir by. I have tried to insult and offend all of humanity, and I hope I have achieved that goal. Thank you for reading.