Chapter 7
Gentle reader, you have arrived at the intermission of the book. Let me say, it has been a pleasure to bring these characters to life for you, to add the color and depth of experience to their existence, to create the many interactions and dialogues between them that help present the larger message of the text. This new literary breakthrough which I have named Author Explanato or E.A. will no doubt be seen in literary works to come, for every reader at one time or another wonders what the writer meant or how the writer felt during the creative process.
Notice that we have several entities all intertwined together by the Mississippi Spiny Fish. The Adventure Team, Claremont Miller, Fragn Melon, and the leader of the group, Ron Log, search for the fish to get the gem to sell on the open market. Matheson Avenue, the lemonade king, owner of the fish who only now as the story unfolds has any idea of the existence of the gem or the legend surrounding its supposed magical powers.
Harry Blackball, the magician and pyrotechnics expert, quite mad with Bob McGillicuty for the damage inflicted to his eye by a badly tossed morning paper, harboring anguish and pain of such depth and magnitude, it has rendered him vengefully insane enough to use magic and explosives to take the life of his nemesis.
Then, there is Little Betty, present during the death of a cat and a bird. Also the prophetic apocalyptic priest turned maniac, clearly the metaphor for the Yin/Yang oneness of duality inherent in the order of the universe. And what of Balinda, the forlorn lover of Bob and waitress at the Good Good Balloon Saloon, the Saloon where every drink has a funny name, and finally Fred, his untimely death and the seemingly non sequitur nature of his appearance in the book has a profound impact in the big picture as the implications of his wilderness training culminates in the invention of the Fred Survival Pack which will ultimately save the lives of thousands of individuals.
My own offering to your interpretation of the words you read as you plow through this complicated yet simple text, is that everything is a story, and no one is free from the ravages of time. To place into the picture of words what are in effect the dynamics of time, and to hold these thoughts to the printed page and then to have the words picked up by the reader who in turn may write his own book, and to have that book read by another reader who in turn may write his own book, on and on, and to all the fish in the ocean or headless spider monkeys we shall encounter in our twisted wretched lives, it is my profound hope that the reader will be left with all the hope there is to give to our fellow human beings and all the love and hope and hope we can share with the boundless manifestations of the universe, from the lowly worm, to the sort of mid-range sting-ray and right up to the creature of all creatures, the Mississippi Spiny Fish, beautiful to look at but you don't want to touch one, and the technique designed to draw the reader in to the richness and texture of the novel through the use of the run-on Sentence or the R.O.S., one letter short of rose… I give you part two of, The Adventure Team!