Part of the Introduction

The world is a bountiful oyster, the only problem is my lack of stomach for anything mollusk. But at least now, through my ageless perception, I have come to understand the origins of that cosmological sucking sound. It is my fellow man, slurping with fury, hoarding the shells, leaving not a scrap for the modern urchins and gamins, the artists and thinkers. These robotic philistines run full speed toward the line, their mouths agape and drooling, their bovine eyes drying in the wind, their sclerotic brains knocking around their skulls like an almond in a guitar...

The novel is being replaced. I am a blacksmith in the modern era, hammering out archaic tools and holding them to the light of this century like a fool waving a rotten piece of meat before his starving family, or the dehydrated idiot drinking from the sea. In a world this profound and lovely, America has no place for me.