The Lexical Funk!

I sit down to write the review of this book. The slightest bit of blackness on the cover slides off and turns into a black pill…hmmmm….

I avoid eating it, but the book slowly grows legs—does its best Bill Cosby impression before turning into a city politician and attempting to steal my shoes. I didn’t know the book would try to do that. I would look at the warning label on the book, but the book is now off to other pursuits.

The book is now my deadbeat roommate—city politics is light on samba, and besides, he shrugs and explains lamely.

It’s the future now, and owe what a future is shall be—or maybe it’s not. It’s hard to tell if waking up after 3 pm constitutes “the future.”

The book looks less like trippy surrealist art and more like accounting...

In offices somewhere boring people talk about sphinxes rolling around in space helmets and riding across rivers on the tips of penises as if they were compact cars with low gas mileage (riding around on giant penises is actually the “greenest” method of travel in the future—at least according to my new accounting book).

Writing books like A Greater Monster is an utterly practical pursuit in this past 3 pm future. I try to formulate eclectic word bombast, but instead end up writing an editorial to Christian Science Monitor that argues for greater oatmeal consumption. My mom shakes her head in worry—“If you can’t write eclectic, electrifying prose, how will you eat? No accounting firm will want you.”

I do what all rebels do in the future…go to business school. Book called Greater Monster, having long given up his quest to be my roommate and/ or be a city politician, follows me to business school. It won’t be like Rodney Dangerfield in Back to School, he explains. Mostly, you just wear a suit and spend the day trying to avoid getting stuff on your tie.

And that’s how you become a rebel in the future.

But I digress…

The gummy black pill, eEye, Sasha—these things—these very potentially real things: constant surveillance, lost love, addiction…they matter the way business school matters, I try to explain to the book.

It’s at this point that he points out I have mustard on my tie…at this rate I’ll fail out very soon.

The bottom line: it’s like modern art, I yell, like a lazy teenager with turrets.

Try again, the book says, I think you mean it’s like contemporary post-modern art.

Modern, contemporary, post-modern, whichever happens in the far off future of past 3 pm.

I try again. Bottom line: It’s like Logan’s Run meets Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

Catchy, the book says, and definitely something I can sell to a movie executive. He goes to the closet and shows me a tied up Michael York. Just in case, he explains.

Book named Greater Monster is in a very practical mood today.

I say so—Book named Greater Monster, you’re in a highly practical mood today.

He responds by pointing to my tie and I find that I have chocolate on it now (in addition to the mustard).

At this rate, I’ll never graduate from business school.

Wrap it up, he suggests.

I smile, clean off my tie, untie Michael York, get on the podium and proclaim: This is an age old story—man works at cybertech security company, man takes strange tar-like drug, man becomes lizard in space suit in surrealistic world; book with lizardman in it makes me go to business school, Michael York still in perfect health despite being tied up in closet for a while, the far off future of after 3pm not so bad.

I smile, book named Greater Monster smiles, book review comes to happy conclusion.

Thank you, Michael York.

Five stars! And no, I’m not in business school…yet.