Why the Disabled Must Destroy the Government.

It's not easy oppressing the disabled. But
somehow they manage. Canadian Film Centre.

Louis Shalako

If you are a disabled person living in Ontario, you have probably asked yourself the following question.

“How am I ever going to destroy the government of this formerly-fine province?”

The question is a pretty rational one. After all, they plan on destroying you. They’ve been chipping away at you since the day they took office, and the fact is the Conservatives were worse.

Much worse.

Right?

And if you have even half a brain, (and I sure know I do,) then you must also have asked yourself what would happen if you, or better yet, we, succeeded in this fine and noble goal.

The problem is a simple one. If the disabled manage to defeat the Liberals, the Progressive Conservatives seem the most likely winners. The NDP would form the opposition and the Liberals would go back to their natural state, i.e. a rump.

There are reasons for this. Not the least of which is that disabled people alone can’t determine the result of the provincial election, which must be held by Oct. 1/2014. There aren’t quite enough of us, although we get plenty of new recruits every day. Our numbers are growing, ladies and gentlemen. The Star is hinting at a spring election, a bit of a no-brainer for a party which has little going for it except empty rhetoric and a long list of broken promises and failed initiatives. Oh, sorry—they do have a few scandals.

When they warn of a minority government, that’s scare tactics—they’re holding the Conservatives over your heads.

In order to do that, the Liberals first had to stand on your throats.

Don’t forget that part.

The facts are simple and undeniable.

We need the help of other Ontario residents to do it. They have their own concerns, but this writer has never doubted that they sympathize.

Let’s hope they’re mad enough to consider some healthy alternatives.

One of the challenges faced by the New Democratic Party is the reputation, a rather unfair one as it turns out, of Mister Robert Rae, former Premier of Ontario during the years 1990-95. Robert and the NDP swept to power, as things generally go. They were young, and brash, (which I have always admired in a man,) and inexperienced. They were riding a wave of popularity and a general optimism all across the vast province that we lived in once but now we merely endure.

The NDP does have a social agenda. It’s a much more positive one than is popular these days. It’s much more optimistic.

Understandably enough, in the early1990s, the provincial NDP government set out to change the world. I have to give them a lot of credit for that, but of course they never foresaw the big recession that hit shortly thereafter. It’s a funny thing about global recessions. The experts, the economists, the irrational monetary theorists of the world, never see them coming. It is only in the hindsight of revelation that we realize they somehow made out like bandits, while all of the rest of us were suffering…struggling to keep a roof over the heads and food in the bellies of our children.

But I digress, ladies and gentlemen.

I say the reputation is a bit unfair because Robert had a sweeping vision for social change. At least at that time. Such things indeed cost money, and the media, some of which is owned by former Conservative Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, (Sun Media, etc.) has taken some time and trouble to smear him over the last twenty-five years as a ‘tax-and-spend’ Premier. It doesn’t cost a Conservative much to slam a former NDP Premier, (he probably enjoys it, both men in fact) and in fact we all know Mr. Rae joined the federal Liberals as a leadership hopeful.

If nothing else, the gentleman has leadership qualities.

I’ll talk later on, about why I think the Federal HST, 13 % on most purchases here in Canada, is inflationary.

The provincial Liberals have taken a provincial budget that was $68 billion or so annually, and bloated it, so that it has now almost doubled over their tenure. It’s a relatively short period of time to wield such magic, but then they are special, aren’t they? They’ve also managed to run up quite the deficit.

The former Premier and two of his top aides, narrowly avoiding criminal charges, at least so far, have been thoroughly discredited. No one wants to forget them more than the surviving Liberals themselves.

I would suggest that you remember their names, they are Dalton ‘Snake’ McGuinty, Dwight ‘The Doughnut’ Duncan and then of course there’s that other Fat Bastard.

There are 700,000 known disabled in the province of Ontario. If you are disabled, or if you know someone who is disabled and eligible to vote, it is incumbent upon you to get registered to vote; or help them to get registered to vote. It is important to be proactive.

Don’t wait for them to come to you. I haven’t been enumerated in years. The buzzer doesn’t work on this building, and I’ve moved five times in the few years. They don’t really care if we show up or not. In fact, they hope that we won’t.

They sure as hell ain’t gonna come lookin’ for me.

That’s because they know we have exactly zero reasons to vote for either the Liberals or the Conservatives.

Who can forget Mike Harris, Ernie Eves, and oh, yes, Mister Jim Flaherty, presently federal Minister of Finance, the man who continually lied about the bank bailout and the true state of this nation’s economy. 

In fact the man is still doing it. Take a look at that face, ladies and gentlemen.

Either a liar or mistaken much of the time.
(Joshua Sherurcij. Wiki.)

This is your enemy.

But he is only one of the enemies of the disabled.

What we need to do, in our inclusive little alliance, is to make damned sure we all vote the same way.

Pick one. But only one.

Let’s vote NDP. I have no idea of what their platform ultimately will be. But then, I don’t much care, either.

I guess you could call it a measure of my desperation—and I still don’t really care.

We might call this attitude one of political nihilism.

What that means is if we can keep the Liberals and the Conservatives out, after that, I don’t much care what happens.

That’s because both the Liberals and the Conservatives have made our lives a lot more miserable than they really had to be.

And I’m real tired of being punished by people who morally aren’t particularly all that well suited to pick up dog turds in the backyards of their own mansions. (Not that aforesaid individuals don’t pay servants to walk aforesaid dogs in public parks. After all, it saves on the landscaping, and lush green lawns say it all, don’t they.)

I say, we, the people of Ontario, have no choice whatsoever, but to pitch the Liberals out, and for all intents and purposes, chuck the damned Conservatives out too. And keep them out.

We know who they are.

For some reason we are not welcome in their little society.

***

Let’s take a chance. The Conservatives are little too vicious for our liking, the Liberals a little too expensive and shifty-eyed.

There’s not much point in voting for the Green Party. Their economic platform looks like Sarah Palin got together with Kim-Dumb-Son and Fox News and put a few speaking points together for an audience of (barely) tame chimpanzees.

There are critics who say the NDP are ‘socialists.’ It’s absolutely true.

Socialism is all of us, working together for the common good.

Democracy is the most benevolent and least invasive form of socialism that has ever been tried.

That’s why they called it ‘democracy.’

Some people see that as a negative point, but I kind of like it, myself.

One of the really great things about the NDP is that they actually have a chance of winning, unlike the Green Party, who won’t poll one percent of the popular vote. The fact they are currently listed at six percent shows just how accurate polling really is.

The NDP can win this one.

But even more importantly, the interest groups, the pressure groups, lobby the NDP much less than the government, and of course the Tories are the biggest lobbyists of all. It’s what they do when they need to moonlight and make a few extra million bucks.

Of course the insurance industry, the chemical industry, the power generation industry, they lobby those who they think will first and foremost win, and those who will be amenable to suggestion, ladies and gentlemen.

They are of course looking for like-minded individuals, whoever is leaving the biggest slime trail, no matter to them, if those individuals are good for nothing and hard on food.

***

Here is an unpalatable truth.

The government can’t raise the ODSP subsistence rates. Do you know why?

Because then Ontario’s disabled would actually have a better lifestyle than someone working forty hours a week, for the $10.25 minimum wage. That’s because wage earners pay taxes. They pay OHIP and WSIB contributions, they get deductions for Canada Pension—did you know Kathleen Wynne wants to bring in a provincial pension plan? She’s got an eleven-buck an hour minimum wage?

Do you think she knows exactly where the poverty line actually is?

Sure she does. She wants to keep them minimum-wage earners hungry—otherwise they’d be tempted to book off and take the kid to the dentist.

The disabled have medical, drug and eyeglasses, the most basic dental care benefits. Imagine making eleven bucks an hour, part-time, and your kid gets a toothache. That’s going to cost you.

What if the kid needs glasses?

You will always be struggling. And most minimum-wage workers don’t even get forty hours a week.

***

Yeah, but what are the odds the Liberals could ever keep their hands off of a provincial pension plan? 

Especially if there was any kind of surplus. What are the odds that if the Conservatives came to power, they would scrap it, and, keep all the money? It’s not like they could ever give it back. They would be claiming to pay down the debt or something and, oh, how fast it would all evaporate, eh? Imagine the tax breaks they could cut their buddies. That would dissipate quick, wouldn’t it? They wouldn’t even have the grace to use smoke and mirrors. With them it’s all justification, nothing more. It’s all ideology with them guys. They’ve never had an actual, original thought, in their entire lives.

Who knows, maybe some Conservative cronies would find themselves in the rather enviable position of being paid a couple of hundred million for a power plant they didn’t actually have to build.

Alas, so far, it’s only been the Liberal cronies doing that. And of course the disabled get to pay for it with their grubby little hides, which come remarkably cheap to this government.

My spin on this is that we need to boot these highly-esteemed, good-for-nothing-individuals out, have done with it, and at last, finally, have a chance to move on with our lives.

I, for one, would like to take my life in a slightly different direction than the good old ODSP’s rather limited vision.

‘Cause we all know how that works out in practice.

The NDP would have a growing economy to look forward to in their early years of power, for surely Mister Flaherty is optimistic about the future.

You remember, he’s a federal Conservative.

The sort of people who make hay out of other folks’ catastrophes.

***

Okay, I know you’re all asking, so Louis?

Why is the 13 % HST inflationary?

When guys like the beetle-browed, semi-economist, the Right Honourable, Jim Flaherty, Minister of Finance, would hotly deny it.

Because if it was removed, what would happen?

Canadians would have thirteen percent more money to spend on food, shelter, clothing, transportation, fuel, rent…mortgage payments...lots of good things, really.

Your dollar would be worth that much more in an instant. That would be, in classic economic terms, ‘deflation.’ And the opposite of deflation, is…wait for it…inflation.

To artificially jack the price of goods for no real reason, surely this is the worst kind of inflation.

I say that because they’ve never really managed to pay down that nasty old deficit, have they?

It only gets bigger. And Mr. Harper is harping on rearmament. I guess we can thank Putin, a slightly more extreme case of conservatism, for that.

It’s only a matter of degree, separating the two men, ideologically, ladies and gentlemen. One is a little more extreme than the other, that’s all.

Putin is the arch-conservative, so much so the Tea Party in the U.S. sort of idolizes him

***

Inflation wipes out corporate debt, destroys the life savings of the middle class—who are now on the hook for paying off all of that corporate debt for them, and of course it makes the lives of the poor intolerable.

That’s why they do it, ladies and gentlemen.

Even Paul Krugman, the noted (Nobel Prize-winning) economist has called for a sustained period of ‘moderate’ inflation. What that does is make all pensions and fixed incomes smaller.

Every year, your disability pension is worth less and less. The government knows that very well.

How much longer do you figure you can stand it?

***

Inflation is when it takes more dollars to buy the same thing.

It goes like this: what once cost $1.00 now costs $1.13.

That is inflation, ladies and gentlemen, and that is also all of our time for today.

Oh, poo, I almost forgot—that is also the sound of the good old Minister of Finance being caught out in another mistake, Mister Flaherty.

‘Cause if it’s not a mistake then it must be a lie.

You read it here first, ladies and gentlemen.

END

Note. I was a bit surprised to see the poverty line pegged at something over $23,000 U.S. in one of the supporting links in this Mother Jones article, where some of the most common myths about poverty are explored and de-bunked. A single person on ODSP here in Ontario is living on about $12,600 a year CDN. 

And there are people out there in the world who can justify that. Kathleen Wynne is just one of them.

Here’s the recent poop on party desertion, the humbling but necessary support of the NDP for this government and its budget to survive, and some other neat stuff. (The Toronto Star.)

Craigslist Horror Show.

Caveat Emptor.

Louis Shalako

Here are ten Craiglist horror stories, compiled by Crime Library and posted on Daily Dot.

***

Tried to sell a table, ended up with an evening of Psycho Horror. (Where Is Jenny?)

***

Recklessly Seeking Sex on Craiglist. Two self-conscious people with low self-esteem have a long talk. (NYT.)

***

Sleeping Around Craigslist. “Dangerously low self-esteem,” issues of sexual abandonment.

“Years before embarking on Craigslist, both of us had experienced sexual abandonment. We were both hungry for intimacy and physical touch after years of wandering in the desert. Our lives were on similar trajectories.”

“Lily Penza, 46, had been overweight since her teens and suffered from dangerously low self-esteem. At age 28, she moved in with the first man who looked her way. It was a virtually sexless union for 10 years before a therapist helped her come to her senses and move on. Lily never married and spent most of her life caring for an ill parent who died recently. So she lost 40 pounds and decided she would make up for lost time.”

(Names have all been changed in original article.)

(Alternet.)

***

My Craigslist Casual Encounter.

“A year ago, I'd never heard of normal women trolling Craigslist looking for no-strings sex. But recently, I became one of them.”

“It had been two years since I'd last had sex (I know, I know). I decided it was time to take matters into my own hands. My friend and I laughed about finding an easy way for me to get laid, bandying about out many ‘40 Year Old Virgin’-esque pickup bar strategies. Then, she laughed and said that I should ‘just put an ad on Craigslist, like everybody else.’"

(Lemondrop.)

***

Beginner’s Guide to Anonymous Craigslist Sex.

“The reason so many str8 men indulge their bi-curiosity (which you will come to learn and learn well throughout this piece) on Craigslist is that they simply get fed up looking for women only to get scammed over and over again. Most posts by men under M4W go ignored or are only answered by the previously mentioned hookers and webcam girls, and sometimes the occasional horribly unfortunate-looking real woman looking for a casual good time. It's like seeing a unicorn, only if unicorns looked a little more like this little guy.” (Ranker.)

***

“People should be Careful Putting Personal Ads on Craigslist.”

“You would think people would be a little more cautious when it comes to answering personal ads on Craigslist, but, apparently, such is not the case with Rep. Christopher Lee — the married New York congressman who abruptly resigned last Wednesday after a shirtless picture of him and allegations of an online affair surfaced on the gossip website Gawker.”

“According to Gawker, last month Lee reportedly responded to an ad placed by a then unidentified woman in the “Women Seeking Men” section of Craigslist.com.” 

“The woman — 34-year-old Yesha Callahan — a single mother and University of Maryland employee — sought a ‘financially [and] emotionally secure’ man who could prove that not ‘all [Craigslist men looked] like toads.’”

“Unfortunately for her, the handsome congressman, although not toad-like in appearance, undeniably shared a few of the less attractive qualities of toads, sliminess being one of them.”

(Daily 49er.)

This writer is unacquainted with the individuals in the above piece, personal remarks are merely reported, and not endorsed, neither are they disputed.

***

Why Craigslist is a bad spot to catch predators.

“Venson Villapando had, in the words of his psychologist, a “normal” heterosexual interest in ‘adolescent and adult females.’  In 2009, he logged into Craigslist’s 'casual encounters' section and responded to an ad with the headline ‘looking to get by in hard time-w4m (hb),’ where w4m stood for 'woman for manl and 'hb' stood for 'Huntington Beach, California.'  The ad was posted by Detective Alan Caouette of the Huntington Beach Police Department, who pretended to be a 13 year old girl, Jessie Browne, offering to have sex for $100.  After many, many electronic conversations over more than 5 months, Villapando eventually showed up at a Carl’s Jr. parking lot in Huntington Beach apparently thinking he would meet Jessie for prostitution.  Instead, he was arrested.  A jury subsequently convicted him of attempting to have sex with an underage girl.”

(Forbes.)

***

Bay Area Cops Use Craiglist to make 57 sexual-offence arrests. (Gawker.)

***

Well. If that doesn’t put you off the Craigslist personal ads, I don’t know what will.

Personal advice: Bring your own condom, let someone know where you are going. If your instincts tell you something is fishy, get out or don’t go in the first place.

It’s a mad, mad world out there.

While everyone needs love, and in the opinion of this writer, adults need sex regularly, the fact is that sometimes it just ain’t worth it.

I won’t comment on law enforcement in my own home town. But when I see ads, for example, ww4m, (two women looking for one man,) or ’18 and looking for older man,’ that just seems a little too good to be true, doesn’t it?

***

My own singles ads might go something like this: Man with no prospects looking for Woman with No Prior History.

Personal note: A date with somebody nice would be one thing. The prospect of intimacy, possibly leading to a real relationship, one that two busy and independent people might enjoy, (rather than just tolerate) would be nice. Sex isn’t necessarily a good thing on a first date.

Other than that, I’m not looking for trouble—and there’s plenty of that out there if you’re not careful.

There comes a time when you take your chances and take your lumps, quite frankly.

Or you can walk away and just keep walking.

Nothing is worse than death, dismemberment, disappearance—or being labeled a sex criminal and doing hard time for a crime you never intended to commit; framed up by an intolerant local police department staffed by Tea Party types and their abusive little hangers-on.

Quite frankly, I think I would be better off alone, and that’s especially true after seeing some of the blue-haired old biddies on Zoosk.

To be fair to Zoosk, they do ask your birth-date and you can filter the results.

Oddly enough, I am no longer a member--so you can forget about looking for me there.

END

                                        

The Union Shuffle.

I've done every kind of shit job.

by Louis Shalako

I’ve worked for unionized employers and I’ve worked for non-union employers.

The differences are not so extreme, but the game is played a little differently.

When I started at Fibreglas Canada, I made it through the ninety-day probationary period and then I was a permanent employee, and the deductions for union dues were there on my paycheque to prove it.

What I didn’t know, was that I was supposed to bid on a packer’s job. That’s how things worked. 

Otherwise I was just temporary. I might have done it once or twice, but somebody with two days more seniority beat me out and got the packer’s job. The next one came up and it was on S-4, the second line in the Wool Plant, and I liked working on S-3 just fine so I didn’t bid on it. Some guy on my crew bid on it and got the job. We were hired the same day. At some point, with guys of equal seniority, they would have gone alphabetically, so who knows, (as I can’t recall his last name.)

That didn’t bother me, as doing the same job, running the same machine, by shop rules I had to be paid the same.

What happens is some guy wants to change shifts. Maybe his buddy lives in the same outlying little town. They could commute together to work and maybe save some gas. They want to be on the same crew as their buddy.

And word gets around.

So some guy with a couple of years seniority bumped me off my shift, and while I had some seniority, a few months at least, I still didn’t have a regular position on any shift.

They didn’t have a damned clue what to do with me! And yet they couldn’t just pay me to show up and hang out all day, either.

What the company did was to put me in something called ‘Fab.’ The little crew in Fab took high-density fibreglass panels and cut them up for special orders. Some of them might have been for the tops of freezers, other sizes might have been for the sides of ovens and home appliances like washing machines and dryers and things like that.

And I still didn’t bid on a job. And why would I, completely clueless as I was. Fab was days only. Our shift rotated through the days of the week, but it was only one shift. In the Wool Plant, they had three eight-hour shifts, on the pipe insulation line and one or two other little divisions, in the acoustic ceiling tile part of the plant for example, they worked two twelve-hour shifts.

Guys will talk and I wasn’t so smart back then, and when some guy came nosing around I probably told him the same story myself, but soon enough I was bumped off of the Fab crew. Yeah, it was the nosy guy who replaced me.

I guess that sucked in some ways, but next I ended up on Aerocor line, which was basically a big roll of soft fibreglass, which we cut at a certain length and bagged up with a big suction machine to make it smaller. It took four guys to run the line, bearing in mind somebody’s always on clean-up or on break or lunch.

I worked a year at Fibreglas, and I ended up with a car, a girlfriend, and an apartment. All that sort of thing.

Eighteen years old, and the job was the last thing in the world I cared about. One day they laid me off and I soon got work at the other little insulation plant in town. The wages were low and the working conditions atrocious. It was non-unionized. Part of the problem was a different product, as white wool was soft and fluffy, and it came apart easily. We hated white wool at Fibreglas, but it was seldom run on the line.

White wool was sticky, it was like cotton batting only looser.

It hung in the air in clouds. I quit after four hours, and yet I stood the itch, the constant prickling of the skin even when you had been away for a few days, well enough over at the other plant.

Fibreglass got in your clothes, your laundry, your bed, it was in your car, it was in the freakin’ sandwiches that you ate.

But the difference between the two plants was that great. A year in one, four hours in the other.

***

In construction, unions divide up the work. They’re pretty jealous, they’re afraid of their rivals across town ‘ripping them off for their work.’

We were in the door business.

I was in the carpenter’s union and my partner was an ironworker. The local agreement stated that when working on an industrial door, you had to have a carpenter and an ironworker.

The carpenter’s union, in the plants, mostly built scaffolding, but that’s another story.

My buddy was senior man, up on a ladder, and he called down for me to get him a big hammer.

I went out to the service truck and when I came back there was some guy there.

He asked me what union I belonged to. I said the carpenters. So then he gave me shit for having a ball-peen hammer in my hands.

He was an iron-worker and he was shop steward of his particular crew, and in his eyes there was great harm in a carpenter holding onto a ball-peen hammer. He went to the construction foreman, and the plant foreman, and he raised a big stink about it. We got called on the carpet and then we had to defend our turf…

In his eyes, I was on his turf and ripping him off, and of course I had only been with the door company for a short time. I hated taking bullshit from people, so I might have said a few things myself.

But that’s what it was like at times.

Now for the non-union story.

I worked for another industrial door company, and it wasn’t unionized. The company founder and father-figure had done some fast talking and gotten some group health insurance, which included dental insurance. 

There were less than twenty employees, one big happy family, right?

At some point the insurance company asked me to go to the dentist to have ‘an assessment.’

They didn’t want to insure someone without knowing anything about him, and while I don’t want to make too much of it, I sort of came from a broken home, and when I got to a certain size no one could make me go to the dentist.

My old man had plagued me to ‘get your teeth all fixed up before you’re eighteen’ and I would no longer be covered. It didn’t mean much to me at the time. Just the old man talking, you know.

Well, my own dentist’s records must have showed I hadn’t been in there in a while.

Some time later, the boss told me that the insurance company didn’t want to cover me. But I had a chipped tooth that might have benefitted from some cosmetic work, and a couple of cavities, and God knows what all the assessment found.

Imagine the position he was in—and I’m not saying he was a bad guy, because in many ways he was a pretty good guy. I always got along well with him, and we never had any problems.

A week or two later I was laid off.

Why? Especially considering that when I went to pick up my last paycheque, he had hired a couple of real bozos, complete dummies to replace me?

But he couldn’t discriminate against me by not providing the exact same benefits that the other employees enjoyed.

What was he supposed to do? What was I supposed to do?

***

Dow Chemical was in town for five or six decades. They had this thing called ‘revamp’ which was a little in-house construction crew. Everybody in town knew the company would hire temporary workers, pay them good money, and then lay them off after 89 days. One day before your probationary period was done.

I got hired, they called me a ‘Carpenter II,’ based on past experience and they paid me something like $14.88 an hour, not bad money for 1984 or ’85. They stuck me with some old guy who kept telling me to slow down! He had one speed, not very fast, and he always had a pocketful of sunflower seeds, which he would chew and then spit out at regular intervals. The way he walked, I called it ‘The Union Shuffle.’

The man had learned how to survive there, but I didn’t. Perhaps that’s for the best. That’s what we’re supposed to think, right?

Yeah, but he was in the union—I just wanted to get in the union, plus the fact that standing around looking busy, or trying to look busy, was never really my thing. I was easily bored and preferred action, even work, to help get through my day.

Sure enough, they laid me off maybe ten or eleven weeks later. Me and another young guy named Pete were off somewhere on our own, and we were literally pretending to work (which should have been our first clue that something was up) when the foreman drove up just after break-time and told us to get in the truck. They had layoff slips all made out for us in the construction office, and then he drove us to the gate and said goodbye.

“No hard feelings, boys. It’s just that work’s a little slow right now.”

One kid I knew got in there full-time. He must have gotten enough weeks for unemployment insurance, and then they must have called him back before the benefits ran out, or he would have been looking elsewhere I’m sure.

He got lucky, as this happened two or three times, and they decided they liked him well enough, and they decided to keep him. And once you’re in, you’re in.

So that’s how it works sometimes, and I can’t quite remember where I drifted after that.

I’ve had all kinds of shit jobs in my life though.

Chalk it all up to experience and move on, that’s all you can do sometimes.

END 

Here are some of my books and stories on iTunes.

My First Hyper-text

The moors. (Veleta, Wiki.)

by Louis Shalako

A hypertext is a story with multiple endings or multiple story lines. It can also be a portal, one that takes the reader off on some long and involved journey. Hopefully it leads them somewhere new.

It seems to have done so for the author.

In its most complex form it can look like a tree, with all sorts of stand-alone spinoffs branching out in all directions.

The multiple ending version, in fiction, involves alternate storylines breaking off at a given point. Readers reach a certain point in the text and then they have a choice as to which alternative story line they wish to follow.

They don’t even have to read the book the same way twice—the next time they read it they might decide to see how another version of the book turned out. If there are three endings, there is three times the fun in reading it. If the book is a good one, with all sorts of subtexts and little curlicues of smoke going off in all directions, in all three versions, each of which is a unique story, if there are lots of thing implied but left unsaid, it might be beastly interesting as an overall art form. Your main characters change over the story—in three fascinating and different ways.

I’ve wanted to experiment with that for some time, ever since I first heard of it and understood what it was.

I’ve even wondered if I should put factual links in a mystery novel. I first thought of that while doing the research for Redemption: an Inspector Gilles Maintenon mystery. If readers could read about Gilles walking across the moors on his summer holiday, and then click on a link that takes them to good pictures and informative articles about the moors, it might help the story to come alive. It would help the reader to visualize the story. The whole thing is just denser in terms of reading material.

It might make the story a richer experience for the reader. Video and music links could be incorporated, and whenever the reader tired of that, they simply return to the story and carry on.

I haven’t brought myself to doing that yet, but writing even the simplest blog post with links out to any supporting material basically covers the whole process in a nutshell.

If you want a text with three endings, you simply write it. The beginning is common, and at the midpoint, there would be bookmarks to another piece of text inserted in the ebook after the ending of version one. 

That process is very simple.

All they have to do is click, and there they go. Next chapter, only it is version two.

There might be two links: all the reader has to do is to keep reading for version one, and there are version two and version three with their alternate endings.

It takes long enough to write a book, so I really haven’t gone after that idea.

However, non-fiction ebooks are a natural for some kind of conscious hyper-writing.

Once I have enough material, of news, views, opinions, commentary, a series of essays or whatever, I will definitely put that plan into operation.

I think that really does qualify as hypertext because it expands the story, non-fiction as it is, and over the course of time our hypothetical story ‘ending’ changes. That’s because an encyclopedic entity like Wikipedia, or any other repository of knowledge, updates and improves its database, so in that sense the story is ever-changing. That’s valid in the context of the modern world, where the pace of progress is so fast that some of what we write is out of date before it is even published.

It is also possible to put a brief note at the end of the book, linked to a website’s contact form, and readers would be able to report a broken link, offer opinions of their own, or interact to some degree with the author.

What’s really interesting is that readers can follow up a link, add their comments to the site or story, and advance the story on their own initiative, outside of the actual book. The book is a link or portal to offshoots beyond the control of the author. If someone has special knowledge or a unique perspective, then the work will go beyond the writer’s original vision and continue evolving over time. If you don’t agree with Wiki, you can sign up to edit the original material, give citations, and just advance the sum of human knowledge in general!

In a hyper-text, the links take the place of footnotes. In a hard copy book, the reader would have to option to search online or go to a physical library or bookstore in order to check out the references and source materials. Assuming the author ever decided to produce a non-fiction hardcover or paperback book, the hyper-links would become footnotes and reference notes in the back of the book.

It seems like a reasonable experiment, and it also involves new skills. Now the author must think in those hyper-textual terms: good links, good writing, good pictures, and from the perspective of the artist, it has to be coherent. It can’t be all ragged in places because you couldn’t find a good link.

It is a matter of the thing being well-conceived from start to finish, and that holds true whether it’s fiction or non-fiction.

Think of what all of this does to a writer’s mind.

It’s not exactly going to hurt my brain, is it, ladies and gentlemen?

Hell, it might even help.

END

Author's Note: Writing a hyper-text requires hyper-thinking, hyper-editing, and a kind of hyper-conception of the whole project from top to bottom. It is layered thinking rather than strictly linear.