Excerpt on Main Street
~New Author Spotlight~
Pajamas on a Sun Stained Beach
(A story somewhat supposedly based upon a true tale…)
Manuscript synopsis
Paul Jones Palin is a deeply depressed, severely stressed, self-medicating dysphoric agoraphobic on the verge of suicide. He’s made and lost fortunes, married and divorced three times and is terminally ill. Alone in a post 9-11 New York City P.J. struggles through the not-so-great recession with neither health insurance nor hope. Just when things couldn’t get any worse…
But it’s not just his disease that’s killing him – it’s the irony!
“Pajamas On A Sun Stained Beach” is a work of fiction that chronicles the dying thoughts of a drowning man and not only explores biological death but also the death of our dreams. Within 112 pages the manuscript covers 50+ years of the character’s life (1954-2010) and uses the death of the American dream as a basic subtext. This book is intended to not only work in published form but is also adaptable to film as well as a blueprint for video/computer gaming.
Chapter IV/Excerpt #3 of 3: Weedville Gaming, Inc (WVG, Inc.)
An interesting detail, already mentioned, about the Weedville™ game was its perpetuity. If your character got killed off you could come back as another character. If you were robbed, raided or your Grow House™ was burned down, as long as you had friends, you could go to your friends for help and start all over again. In fact, the only thing that could end the game was if marijuana was ever legalized. Now, if you’re a student of history, how likely do you think that is?
Consider this, The United States of America, which has the highest rates of drug use in the world, has the dubious distinction of housing the largest prison population on Earth. One-quarter of the people who are incarcerated in the U.S. are behind bars because of drug related offences.
When you factor in that America’s war on drugs goes on in a country where many prisons are privatized, it’s not hard to realize that the battle is really an industry. An industry, which by the way, takes a behemoth-like bite out of our tax dollars every single year since the drug war’s been fought. This, of course, obscures the discussion about dealing with drugs as a public health issue (providing care and treatment for drug users for example) as opposed to a criminal issue (locking up drug users). While this certainly sucks, (suck what?), it also means it’s extremely doubtful we’ll ever see the end of the war on drugs, much less than, World of Weedville™.
An interesting fact is that the country of Portugal has the most liberal drug policy in the entire world. They didn’t legalize, but they decriminalized, all illegal drugs. Since it was implemented in 2000, it cut the number of heroin users in half and HIV infections from drug use have gone down by as much as ninety percent.
This certainly is a policy that not only the U.S., but the rest of the world, should adopt instead of continuing to wage a losing battle with failed drug wars. Oh, but we forgot about the profit margin. We’ve got to keep those privatized prisons at maximum occupancy if we’re going to keep their corporate stockholders happy. As any drug dealer will tell you, it’s all about keeping the investors satisfied.
Once P.J. Palin and his game designers completed their first working demo model of World of Weedville™, Paul contacted the owners of www.MyFaceBucket.com on Monday, April 10th, 2000. He set up a meeting to discuss how MyFaceBucket and Weedville Gaming, Inc. could make Beaucoup Bat Bucks™ off the war on drugs. The two parties signed a contract dated Friday, April 21st, 2000. Shortly thereafter a huge flow of cash streamed into both their bank accounts.
In conclusion, it always comes back to the irony. Paul Jones Palin, who was a deeply depressed, severely stressed, dysphoric, agoraphobic suffering from a multitude of psychological disorders, and who made a fortune from the social networking revolution, never had a personal MyFaceBucket page. Although, he did have a subscription for his business, which said account, he had his crew of interns maintain under the name of www.MyFaceBucket.com/WeedvilleGaming). For that matter, he never even had any personal web pages on other high traffic social networking sites either.
Why? He just wasn’t into it. P.J. Palin was the original anti-social networking pioneer. And that remained so up till the day he died. Rest in peace, Peege, rest in peace. Suicide is just another way of de-friending yourself from a wicked-wicked world. After all, we all eventually poke death and at some point death pokes us back. In time; our profile page is deleted.
One day all of our accounts will eventually be closed no matter how closely we follow the Terms of Service (a.k.a.: TOS). And so it goes, seemingly, without end. Amen. NEXT!
By Stevie B © 2011
To be continued on February 14, 2011.
