novel 83 - 11. reset

by nick nelson

part eleven of ?

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t all began on an overcast afternoon on victor widespan’s yacht. it had been warm and muggy all day, with no sign of a hurricane or a revolution or anything very exciting. koji lightyear asked if anybody wanted to play shuffleboard and nobody as interested. gena harris proposed playing charades and nobody said anu=ything. excuse me. yes? who are these people, exactly, and why am i supposed to be interested in them? well, before they were characters in this novel you - you. with assistance from a i., are writing, they were lonely people just like you. they do not sound like lonely people, they sound like a bunch of jerks. just because people are jerks, or belong to a bunch of jerks, does not mean they might be lonely . if you say so. by the way, does this mean that i, as a lonely person, might end up in somebody else’s novel? maybe. .but only if you sign a waiver allowing us to. but i do not have to sign the waiver? no, of course not. shall i - we continue? what were these people like before they were a bunch of entitled jerks drinking dom perignon on victor widespans’s yacht.? would you like to start over? please. most people like stories about people on yachts, but if you want something a bit more proletarian, we are happy to oblige. i am more of a power to the people person, so let’s do it. whom shall we start with? i don’t care. start in alphabetical order. i am an alphabetical order person. like a lot of lonely people. if you say so. * albert brown wanted two things - to be a great writer and to get a girl. he did not have any luck in either endeavor, and as the years went by his chances grew dimmer. besides his own rapid aging, the world changed in ways that even further reduced his chances . fiction and poetry continued to be published, but not the type of fiction and poetry albert had known as a dreaming adolescent and young man. there were no more stendhals or hemingways or t s eliots or audens, and there was no audience or expectation for new stendhals or hemingways or t s eliots or audens. there were only, it seemed to albert, identiity politics, identity politics, identity politicss and romance novels. as for getting a girl, the picture was even bleaker. at the time our story commences, according to wikipedia, there were only about 20,000 “heteronormative” human females on the planet seeking live human males as mates.. and these rare creatures would not glance at any man worth less than a billion dollars - preferably 10 or 20 billion. sometime albeer felt so sad he could sit down and cry. at other times he felt curious surges of confidence, and felt that everything would turn out right in the end. to be continuedt