Ziggy Zigfield: In the Time of Maximum Black, 1987   "And the clock waits so patiently on your song. Well, you walk past the café but you can't eat when you've lived too long. You're a rock-n-roll suicide."   Man steps back a few to look at his world, the one in which he lives, the one that gives to him and takes from him, and briefly ponders deeps continuously forever, what is the meaning? what is the purpose? is there a purpose? am I an idiot to assume that there would be purpose?   There is a greater reality. There is greater truth. Ever slowly intellectual man creeps towards it, expanding his mind for greater understanding of and tolerance for the limitless faces of existence, as daily man creeps away from it.   There are many realities beyond our own. While modern man is tending towards the new realism, where ultimate reality is what we do everyday: the shopping; the fighting; the loving; the compromise to stay alive, oh the deadly compromise where one learns to live and prosper in this mortal world as is, today -- with no vision of tomorrow. (No sight of what lies in the future, what has lived and died in the past, nor what stalks just next door in the present.)   Old men have seen, a few of them do, they are tired and weak and bored with the perils of futile man, and so the struggle is left up to a few children who are ignored, who are too young to know they are right. And there are some, the other ones, and the children of the fawn, with vision so bright it burns out their eyes, and eats slowly at their hearts. And they could not stand ignoring the destruction, the devastation, the pain, simply to allow their miserable lives to continue ....

*Note on intro from Zig: The original formatting perhaps makes it more obvious that it's supposed to be read as poetry or lyrics, and when I read it slowly I can recall the lyrical sense of each independent phrase. Regardless, it's painfully obvious that even as a poetic intro it's still vague and merely pretentious. Granted, the rest of the novella is written in a different form, but I fear both it and my current work (20 years later) suffer from too great a playful naïveté. The solution is perhaps relatively simple, create a clear context in which we might see a concrete protagonist (Zig) intentionally fabricate this poetic pose and pretense for his own personal satisfaction. All the absurdly grand poetic statements will have be dropped, with a handful woven back in with greater context or "proof", that is, with a greater sense of evidence that the statement has meaning and a demonstration of how the statement arises out of the protagonist, his wants, his experiences, and his actions.