The Printed Threat
Introduction
“Man, shit.”
I said out loud, in slow motion, as I paused mid-step from the startle of seeing them, and concurrently seeing their eyes light up on seeing me. There was a moment of stillness for us all as I turned the corner and we saw each other, if only a millisecond.
I just had turned around the corner of 215th Street, by Inwood Park, when I saw them walking downhill toward me. At that point in time I was looking out for them because I heard they were looking for me, but I wasn’t peering around corners or anything. In that millisecond I wished I did. They were looking for me, but I never expected them to be there, on my block, at that point in time.
I made them angry for multiple reasons. It built up. I took action on behalf of someone they messed around with, I took one of their girls, and I was selling mad weed, to the point they made the assumption I was taking their money from their business.
There were four of them; Joe, JoeJoe, Joey and another Joseph of some form or another, who simply went by Yo, believe it or not, because it was too confusing any other way. Yo might have been more accurately called Brick, because he was about as smart, about as exciting, and built like one.
The exclamation slipped slowly from out my mouth, and I stopped walking in the midst of a fight or flight decision. And in that millisecond the synapses in my emergency response system started crackling, adrenalin began coursing through my blood, juices were evacuated from my gonads, and my sinews began elasticizing. And in that instant when the four of them sort of smiled, and started at me like some hungry hunters who just saw their favorite flesh, I couldn’t help but think about what was at that point in time, my favorite story, Joe King Townham’s novel The Predicament.
It’s amazing how many thoughts we can have in a split second, especially when the adrenalin kicks in. I was also thinking what to do and how I had to do something immediately, and for that matter how I had to stop thinking about my favorite story more immediately in order to do so, but it was at the forefront of my thinking. I had heard a few people describe The Predicament as like Watership Down crossed with Lord of The Flies, only with chickens. I could see that, but I never compared it to anything except life itself and my life in particular. Up until that point I had never read anything that I empathized with as much as King Townham’s The Predicament and never empathized with a character like a did Roughagelio. My story, and Joe King Townham’s story too were just like Roughagelio’s story, we were all stuck in a cage, or coop.
In that moment, I felt like Roughagelio more than ever before. It was like I was Roughagelio, and it was an allegory about me, that Joe King Townham wrote about already as a psychic author, and I was only then living it out. I knew it was ridiculous to think, and even more so to think it at a time when every moment mattered, but I was Roughagelio being chased by his nemesis and his foes. The specific scene that crossed my mind was when Roughagelio faced off Bugsy and his goons, which was written about me I came to believe, as much as it is hard to believe. It played out as intricately and as detailed as if I was reading it right then, but zapped start to finish in about as long as it takes for the adrenal glands to open up and release when you see your hungry enemies.
If you’ve never read The Predicament it basically compares mankind to chickenhood in a coop. It’s set on a chicken farm in Maine, a farm where there were three poultry sheds, and the family’s own chicken coop. For all extents and purposes Joe King Townham basically proposed we are all chickens in a coop clucking along trying to fly, pretending like we can fly, and trying to act like we get worms to eat, but really we’re just stuck in the coop, and worse we’re dependent on the farmer entity for entirety.
~ Bugsy was standing on the outskirts of the main circle of chickens, as he usually did, flinching his neck, and kicking up dirt to show off. Bugsy would cluck, peck and scratch at the ground pretending there was a fresh batch of uncovered ants to consume in the arid dirt to get attention. This inclined his clucking brood to bop over to him.
“Do you have some ants over here, again?”
“Just ate them. Listen, it’s time, you wingless clucks. It’s time we make our final move on Roughagelio. He is weak and we’re going to prove to him what color the Sun is once and for all!”
Bugsy meant to kill Roughagelio ever since their argument over what color the Sun was began. Because of the injuries Roughagelio recently had sustained during a confrontation with Fizzy the cat, Bugsy knew it was his best opportunity to take him out.
“Have you seen the way he cucks along? And have you heard the way he clucks when he should caw? And caws when he should cluck? And I know you’ve seen where his spots are and how his feathers fluff? And I know, I’ve never seen a chicken his color tone. Is he spotted? Or is he not? Not good, not good at all. I know you clucks know, we’ve got to kill him, now.”
“I always wanted to peck him to death, you know that Bugsy. I always wanted to kill him.”
“I always wanted to kill him, Bugsy, ever since he said the Sun is the wrong color.”
“Whatever, to him. Let’s make him ant food!”
Gonzo, Android and Tick would have done whatever Bugsy wanted and would have convinced themselves of any number of false realities to support him and his hollow perspective. Bugsy had insisted that he was always in charge of their food, and that the farmer answered to his beckon call because he was the best ant hunter in the realm and they believed him, with all their gullets.
“You know what he said to me before? He said, I will see the Sun is violet white eventually and that he’s right! Like my eyes are not perfect now! I’m going to kill him right now! Come with me! Let’s cluck him to death! Come on, you long feathered flyers!”
Chickens have much more sensitive vision than humans, and of course are much more sensitive about the colors and the arrangements of feathers of their peers than man is concerning the color of his counterparts. Bugsy always despised and wanted to kill Roughagelio simply because of his arrangement of tail feathers, but the day Roughagelio claimed to see better than Bugsy made him a mortal enemy.
The brood clucked themselves into frenzy. The tremendous clucking alerted the rest of the coop. Every other chicken stopped their scratching in the dust and the stretching their wings, most even stopped bobbing their necks, and just stared. They all knew these were fighting clucks and highly aggressive wing flaps. Bugsy led the way toward poor old Roughagelio who sat on top of the well, as was his habit. He was resting and the loud clucks of the charge left him unmoved. It appeared he did not even notice.
Bugsy’s flaunting run turned into a determined charge as he gained the speed needed to jump and fly up to the top of the well where the bucket was hung and where his prey, Roughagelio, lay unmoving. At a couple of feet from the well, he was at just the right angle to leap and flap up a foot or two onto Roughagelio. His cohorts flapped just behind him. As Bugsy flapped up at him just about at the right angle to meanly pounce, bash and peck him in one motion, Roughagelio moved. Roughagelio slid off the top off the well in a relaxed way, hanging on with his feet and then flung himself back up as Bugsy smashed into the well and ultimately, after scrambling and clawing to save himself, fell down into it.
“Get him!” Was his final caw, as he fell down and disappeared.
Roughagelio then wrestled and tossed each of the brood down the well one after the other. And as the commotion ended Roughagelio went back to resting, and the remaining chickens in the coop went back to their own fluffing and wing flapping, as if nothing happened at all, some even actually forgot anything happened at all. Most were only happy about the best ant hunter being gone. It meant more for them.
~Excerpt from Joe King Townham’s, The Predicament
In that instant when the story finished unfolding in my mind’s eye, I heard Joe scream at me, “I’m going to kill you, you chicken shit! Get him!” as he thumped downhill toward me with the other Joes behind him. I must have looked sort of frozen with fear, only I was simply compelled with the eerie similarity of what was unfolding to The Predicament, my favorite book.
And then I knew exactly what I needed to do.
As I turned around to bolt down the street, behind the corner where they could no longer see me, I put it all together in my head. I saw what I had to do, and slowed my run to a strut when I was no longer visible to them. I walked over to the parking sign that was just around the corner, and tucked myself behind a parked car aside the sign. I tried to calculate the time it would take for them to turn the corner from where they were, and I listened. And as I heard them coming around the corner at full speed, and saw them from my hiding, at just the right moment, I leaped up and flung myself out into them, knees and elbow first. I grabbed and held the pole to fling and pivot myself in a way to smash into them with my knees and my forearm, as they ran so fast they were just about out of control, just like Roughagelio would.
I whirled myself into them. In front, was my main nemesis, the inspirer for the pursuit. And I checked him with my forearm in the jaw. I heard later it cost him a few months with a wired shut jaw, and probably took off a couple years off his life. Two others caught knees and legs and I kind of only scuffed their boy, Yo, with a kick. In the process of their ensuing tumble, cracking and crunching, I was swung back, still holding onto the pole and I was flung onto the parked car with what was, all in all, a gentle slide and rebound.
I was honestly as surprised as they were, though admittedly more pleasantly so. I was not grazed or scraped at all. I hopped up while Yo was still in the middle of the other three who were jumbled onto the concrete, each well enough to begin crying. Before I could even think about it I cracked him with a palm strike to the head and a kick to the lower back. They were then, all four of them, in a crumpled pile. I contemplated beating them more, but figured it was enough. It was brutal, but it was me or them.
I looked around to see if anyone saw what happened. There was one person on the block, who was standing right across the street, who was staring right at me, who saw the whole thing. He was dressed clean, for a homeless person. I recognized him as a guy who lived in the park. I didn’t know him at the time, but I befriended him later. I gave him a nod, and he said something like ‘that was the baddest ass kicking I ever seen!’ He gave me a bunch of glory from then on, but at that point I kind of just want to slide out of there. This was back in the day when there were no police drones, so I didn’t even worry about that, but I didn’t want to get in trouble anyway, so I just took off back where I was headed.
I told them to remember that I didn’t kick their heads in and some such threatening hero prevailing nonsense, while the homeless guy exalted my ass kicking skills, and then, I was out. I was on my way downtown, on a mission, figuring my beef with them was over. They wouldn’t want anything to do with me ever again I figured, I hoped.
I was hustling some marijuana that day, and of course, after I did what I had to do, I found a box of books on the street with a copy of The Predicament right on top! I grabbed the whole box of books without even thinking about it, like it was nothing, like I normally did, and went back to the block. And by the time I got back, everybody was talking about how I dropped four fools, including Yo. I never really had to fight much again after that, not that people were generally looking to get me. No one tried to mess my game up after that, no matter what I was doing.
Chapter One
I ended up highlighting the following section of The Theory and Practice to E.S.P. I remember I was scanning through it when I first bought it, brand new too, the following was the first page I opened to, then and basically every time. I swear, every book has what I call the primal page. It’s that part of the book you think you just fumble to when you open it randomly, but it’s not random. Usually the primal page is in the first half, but you never know. It is a strange phenomenon, but I have experienced it with thousands of books. The following begins on the primal page of The Theory and Practice to E.S.P.
“Your consciousness is trapped in a matrix of cellular cages, held biologically on the microscopic level and categorically in the system around your skeleton. Your consciousness is further trapped in a matrix of politicalized and social cages, held behaviorally on the collective level.
Our biological states and our political states of being are equally complex systems, that because of our immersion in them, biologically caged in a being of cells, and politically caged as an individual in groupthink, we have no idea the matrix exists, and we succumb to it like a drop in an ocean. We are trapped inside and outside, politically and biologically, but there is an exit.
The mechanized mind bending advertisers of corporations influence our thinking via marketing propaganda, and influence the thinking of those in the government via lobbyists and so forth and so on. And this has been occurring for generations. The corporations and government seek to influence our thinking, in fact they are all about influencing and controlling our thinking. The word govern-ment means control the mind, after all. The matrix cages really require no more than a little knowledge of current events and etymology to discern. Further discernment of our own thinking can allow us to slip through the cages. We are only capable of thinking so many thoughts in a day. If, with discernment, we can maintain the right thinking we can surpass the suppression of potential by the negative thinking imposed on us.
The government and corporate infiltration of our minds is the greatest influence on us all, and perhaps the greatest crime ever. Through all sorts of subtle scams including the initiation of ‘scientific studies’, they make us believe whatever they want. The recent idea, that the benefits of meditation can only be obtained with a machine, is particularly disturbing. And the somewhat ancient idea that eating bovine parts will somehow sustain vitality is another great trick to deaden consciousness. You are what you eat is true in so many ways. In order for consciousness to bloom, simply do not stifle it with deadened thinking, and deadened food, such simply consumes your energy.
Religious institutions too have taken over spiritual nutrition, and loaded it with salty dogmatic transfat taking what was whole(y) lessons concerning and make the meaning indigestible in attempts to not so covertly control your mind. Corporations, governments and religious institutions all are unions and formations that seek to control the mental via a metaphysical cage. If institutions inhabit your thinking they can inhibit your being. So whether with advert jingles or monothematic interpretations of allegory if they have your thinking they have your being.
Being arises before thinking, but being directs later thinking. Chemical and biological reactions and ignitions can be related to certain feelings. You are what you are because of the endowment of your birth, and your thoughts later transform too. However, there are thoughts that are your own, the traumatic thoughts of others around you and the traumas of your ancestors. If individuals were only more in tune, or rather less in shock from such traumas of others and their own, they might be able to go much farther than the simple intuition notions within. Today we were all born into the fire of postmodern toxicity and today likely you, and certainly, practically everyone around you, is dominated by advertisers, law writers, dogma dealers and those seeking to govern your mind, either directly or indirectly, to con-vince others to seek solutions outwardly, with them, and be a slave to their game, their way, instead of seeking the answer within, so as to understand and surpass traumas for instance.
We wait in line to commute, wait in line to eat bovine flesh with scat, wait our turn to discuss horrible and worldly subjects with equally locked out slaves, equally far from their home within, all in the bosses’ buildings and offices, doing their bidding, in a hurry up and wait game on their behalf. We daily go away from ourselves and rarely, if ever, go in-ward to our own ward, or mansion within, to the point we have little direction, and no sense of self. We’ll disbelieve and refuse in-tuition or in-sight, because we’ve never been ‘in’ and because we are steered by tools of mediation, outer control as opposed to steering ourselves with meditation. We are held by the status quo, by our social training, and moreover our very essences or lack thereof, by the hormones and endorphins we emit and detect with the olfactory despite our lacking conscious knowledge we do detect and react to them.
Without meditation, we will remain trapped in an endless matrix of unconscious reaction, as if we are paper in a burning house of prejudice and delusion, unknowingly, uncontrollably, susceptible to catching fire and spreading the delusional flame. This old, ill trap is illustrated most vividly and clearly in the cyclical torment of Samsara described in Buddhism where a cock, snake and pig chase each other’s tails. It’s like that, and worse where there’s a million other entities trying to get in there and get a tail before you, maybe your own. The matrix of tail chasing keeps us as paper apes of base thinking, performing predictable animalistic routines based on our biological inheritance and karma amid bear traps afire in a burning house. The difficult thing about the fire of course, is the fact that we’re made of paper, that is to say, the most difficult thing is to get past is ourselves. What fear has a diamond in a fire? Transforming your inner house in such a way, concentrating a paper mind that sways in the social winds into diamond density that cannot be burned simply requires dedication, dedication to practicing meditation.
As paper, you misjudge, make assumptions, misunderstand, think you see what happened when you did not at all, miscount, misplace and all in all flub what could surpassed. Simple social breezes easily mislead us in the wrong direction off cliffs and into pitfalls by corporate malfeasance. But in the beginning we are all primarily swayable through our very bodies, our masculine or feminine natures.
If you are not a meditator, your cortex of bioelectric flesh controls you, and it’s rigged to base root instincts and uncontrollable reactions akin to that of a paper ape afire in a bear trap, in a burning house. If you meditate occasionally you may be in control of yourself occasionally, but you will not be aware of your true nature. If you meditate twice a day and then once a night when you roll over and wake up during sleep, you can become in control of how worldly weather affects you and you can begin to grasp your true nature, and even understand what your higher self is telling you, probably initially something like every Buddha says, ‘Be happy, time is short, seize the day and meditate to return to your true nature.’ Going inward is the supreme exploration because the microcosm within our mansion, our consciousness, accesses the macrocosm of the Akashic field, the universal stream of consciousness.
In order to go inward you have to be open and clear, and be geared towards being aware. Then you have to learn how to interpret the symbolism and brief messages your stillness and awareness initially yields, but somethings that were hidden immediately become obvious. In the psychic, energetic, spiritual Akashic that which has remained hidden the longest, the truths which have been covered up with the most lies become the most blatant and bright subjects. The more energy went into covering up truth with lies in the physical, the more energetically the subject glows in the spiritual.
Men and women interpret symbols differently, as we are subject to our born being, to raw femininity or masculinity, as much as we are subject to the need to eat, only it’s even more constant, and thus being more constant perhaps less realized. Our culture practices the inhibition of understanding of self as a means to sell some smokes or cell phones or some snake oil to consumers lacking understanding of their true nature. But this physical entrapment leads to a downward spiral effect, downgrading our being further because our chromosomes seek to keep us locked down in the physical as well, to interrupt our metaphysical connections, so we remain focused on and ruled by the physical, which tends to be self-absorbed, sexual and aggressive, so that everything we do is in order to get laid on finer sheets, in a bigger room with more stuff and more flesh to eat. The physical is encouraged to maintain its established rule of behavior, and always attempts to hold the reins, no matter if negative. In the same way the eyes try to infer the seer of their dominant role in visions or insights, but they are not responsible. The physical always tries to dominate the spiritual, the metaphysical, but be sure everything begins in, and adheres to the rules of, spirit. And what we note physically arose before in the psychic, spiritual Akashic.
Dealing with the physical nature of our raw femininity or raw masculinity is a constant, and because it is constant it is mostly unnoticed, as are most happenings and circumstances when you’re out of your mansion working all day in some institutionalized literal or figurative off(orof)ice. We are trapped by our psychosexual selves, men much more so then women, usually by women. Interestingly cultures in Asia and Europe classified the feminine as the weaker of the sexes, the lesser in a physically dominating manner and therefore, it was inferred, all across the board weaker. Cultures in the Americas however yielded to women as the spiritually superior of the two sexes, and often made women leaders and equals as such. The Indigenous Americans were more spiritually open to the feminine and thus more in touch with metaphysical Akashic. No matter what people tell you, no matter how one views life on this gross, physical plane of Samsara, the feminine is exponentially more powerful spiritually and metaphysically more powerful. Masculinity taking physical power in the world among various cultures is just like the eyes claiming responsibility for insight and intuition.
For women to find their true nature, simply meditate in the manner described, twice a day and once a night in order to be open to the truth of your higher self, surpassing the guttural cellular cages the political have played upon and set afire. Women always maintain a bit of the receptive spiritual essence, that metaphysical water that quenches and clears karma if you will, a combination of purity or innocence, clarity and dedication, and for all extents and purposes easy access to the spiritual metaphysical field. While men practically always have their waters dried up. Without purity, clarity and dedication one cannot clear burdensome karma and will be stuck viewing this plane of existence for its tangible grossness only, for its tail chasing and no more.
Sometimes things that seem magical might just be the result of a mechanical process, like what is termed ‘women’s intuition.’ No matter what a women’s thinking is and even if she never meditates three times a day, if a woman practices purity, clarity and dedication she will develop her inborn intuition, to some extent or another. The problem for women is that being such high end metaphysical receivers they are more receptive to and influenced by social, political, corporate mind bending which otherwise inhabits and inhibits. Women have better access to the light, but are made to carry the corporate blight more. For women to crack open the shell of the psychosexual self, in order to communicate with higher self, simply address it’s there and meditate as described, twice daily, once at night.
The following is for men only. Ladies, I respectfully ask you do not read this section as it would only undermine your thinking with the clutter of the masculine predicament, though I know many will decline. Instead of reading further meditate now and skip ahead to the beginning of the following chapter. If there is any gender discrepancy at all, go with whatever sex you were born as, and not whichever sex you have most affinity for being, for all of us were born physically a certain way, but spiritually possess contents of both.
Dear Sir,
You have been trained since day one, not directly but through immersion in a subtle manner that goes mostly unnoticed. You have probably not been yourself since you were a toddler, since before you really grew to be yourself any way. You were brought up to be a brute and to dominate those around you as a dirty, lying, tricking, conniving coyote in a pack of a billion strong scheming coyotes. You have been lied to your whole life by most all who you have met and most likely have been steered away from any form of sensitivity, and totally desensitized from reality, and for most, this condition may remain preferable to facing it and moving forward.
You have been convinced to think that obtaining things and dominating other coyotes who are lower on the canine social ladder than yourself is the key to good fortune. You have been made to see the most evil as the most typical and trained to jump right in so you are soaked by it. Your only validated ideas are evil, and ‘get’ is your most often used word. You are not being yourself, you have been steered to be blind, deaf, and mostly silent brute.
Centuries ago men accomplished farm work, and sought to enhance their consciousness, not to grasp and seize tangible crap and to march around constantly chatting on phones and about how much they get. We indeed operate in a form where lost is logic today. The Sufis were predominantly a farming and meditating community, clearly representative of our lost heritage, despite their current leniency to the monotheistic and secular thinkers. The Sufis were among the first people to enjoy coffee and found the stimulant enjoyable and useful. Only the Sufis did not drink coffee before work, as a cog in some hurry up and wait corporate machine, instead the Sufis drank coffee to stay up late and meditate, to explore their inner house and their true nature, what you might understand as the corporation within. Now we spend our whole life persuaded to work outwardly, not to perform the most important work of all, inward getting. Time is short and Sufis used coffee to stay up late and meditate, not get up and go somewhere they didn’t want to be. Change your pattern. Instead of focusing on get, focus on let. Let the absorption of meditative energies take place. Stay up late and meditate, instead of just performing the goals of the corporation.
You have been trained to think drinking cow milk is normal when in reality cow milk is for babies, baby cows. Milk is for babies, coffee, teas, wine, beer, juice, are suitable drinks for adults. Children crave fruit and vegetables to grow, but are tricked by advertising gimmicks to substitute their natural wants for cereals and sweets. Stay away from grains, sugars, all bovine products, and unnatural energy drinks.
You have been trained to think going to war is a heroic and that being violent is legitimate. Across all spectrums this reptilian notion is pushed. Our ancestors came and went, tricked into killing and dying in wars for nothing. And we’ve been tricked to be proud of that and if someone calls attention to the fact that memorialization of stupid violence is not the best for progression of consciousness they are chastised. Many believe that because of some religious idea from some thousand year old doctrines based on homogenization for the rule of some king at the time, that revenge quest is worth pursuing, but it’s not. Religion is based on spirit and the religious just don’t know and can’t know what can’t be described, your true nature. War with religious institutions involvement or approval is worldly and stupid, simply. It is not spiritual. The suggestion of its legitimacy comes from the institutionally mutated need of adventure and comradery and the basic behaviors instilled in society so that kings today can maintain their end. Institutions steer you and manipulate you into thinking the way you do, in order to make money and dominate. And you take pride in it.
You have been trained think in terms of getting, of seizing and holding people, places and things because you are afraid to go inwardly wrestle consciousness. You are so afraid to go inward that even when exercising, when you are potentially most in tune with yourself, you call it a work-out, key word: out. You have been trained to be outside yourself even when ‘exercising’ and attention is steered outside via dealing with the deadness of metal weight, instead of body weight and mechanics of movement.
You have been steered to think drinking alcohol daily is fashionable, when in actuality it kills you, when in actuality any so called tough ‘manly’ drinking culture like the Vikings you might think you emulate, would only drink occasionally and then they would get rip roaring drink and could handle it as most of the didn’t live long enough to endure hangovers of any significance. They would have never soured their blood for days on end.
You have been trained to think about hurting others, been trained to think about acting stupid and trained to evoke shallow toughness in a hateful manner. Why? Because you are spiritually inept, and you compensate for it physically and tangibly, even if it means knuckling up for no reason. You are the most unlucky of beasts, capable of ascension, but tending toward declination, because of a fire you did not start.
Women can turn on their ascension reception with very little concentration, whereas men tend to require so much reconditioning, meditation on removal of vile preconceptions to turn on their reception, that most become disbelievers of intuition. It can take years to recover from the denial of truth and portrayal of lies. We are indeed so filled up with our sense of things, our perspective, most of which is distorted at best, that we are basicall a mix of nonsense and therefore have to be rid of it to begin to make sense. We have to return to being in no sense, to our innocence, as within no sense, no preconception.
We are all cocooned in our physicality first and foremost and meditations are all about simply becoming and rising beyond the cocoon of conditioning and peering inward toward our true nature. We are also layered with webs and masks, put on us directly and indirectly, so many in fact that we just don’t know ourselves anymore, or anyone let alone ourselves, resulting in the sense of our nationhood instead of our universal brotherhood. Once true nature is found, intuition is undeniable brotherhood is undeniable. Because men have mostly accepted physicality as dominant over spirituality, because we’ve adopted rigidity we think is strength, because we are not natural receivers in tune inwardly, like the feminine, it can take years to verify intuition. In fact, biologically speaking on the spiritual plane white males are the most limited. They are male of course which is a hindrance, and secondly they lack any sufficient quantities of melanin which is a receptor of sunlight, and light of course is intuition’s medium. Where there is light, intuition can bloom Your average white male has about as much potential in a year to gain about the same amount of intuition as your average white female does in about a week. White males are spiritually the weakest, dullest and most rigid and therefore the most likely to be physically insistent, that is for all extents and purposes, deniers of spirt and/or atheists. If you fall into this category, double your efforts. If you’re blessed with melanin and are male, meditate on enhancing your already natural feminine-like receptive qualities physically of melanin with sunlight.
No matter your physical cocoons and the experiential traumas and fragmentation that one might have experienced we can always mentally and further, spiritually, overcome our cocooning and conditioning through learning and practicing meditations and through learning and understanding universal symbolism, only then can we truly understand the potential of our own intuitive conceptualization.
The more one understand who one is biologically, the better one can get past it and understand one’s true nature which is of course beyond female and male. he more you understand your biological and political being, the more likely you are to understand your true nature, just as the more symbolism you understand, the more you will be able to understand the intuitive flickers.”
~From the chapter Individuation, The Theory and Practice to E.S.P., by Joe King Townham
Joe King Townham had to write The Theory and Practice to E.S.P. And I had to write this. His book changed the world. I can only hope this changes anything for me or the world. E.S.P., as Joe put it, stands for Earthling Spiritual Properties. This following is about Joe, the individual and what happened after the publication of the book, to the world, and to me.
I have done extensive academic and empiric research into the book’s subject matter and spoke with the author several times, randomly, before the book’s publication. And I basically found myself in the right place, at the right time, and fell into my own story, that ultimately was a part of his. I realized I had to tell my story, about how Joe King Townham and his book effected my life. I was in a unique situation, by way of what I first thought was random luck, and later momentarily considered it to be possibly destiny, and now as hard as it is to believe, and at the risk of losing credibility, it is entirely I was steered by psychic phenomenon beyond my comprehension.
I began my personal research into The Book as an open minded skeptical reader, and also a fan of Joe King Townham. I was so profoundly changed by the book, so positively, that I could only approach it with appreciation or even reverence after reading it. Probably everything you’ve ever heard about Joe King Townham and his book is all lies. It is not satanic, but saintly, and it is not brainwashing, but brain cleansing. It was obvious to me that Joe King Townham does not hate women, or any racial group as has been portrayed by the media. Joe King Townham had only the best intentions in publishing the book the way he did, and though surely he knew there would be wild waves, he did it to counter evil and repression, not to instigate it, as so many otherwise believe, and no matter how things might have worked out.
Joe was not a traitor, molester, or Satanist, he simply wanted people to know they were being lied to, he wanted you to know who the traitors are. He certainly knew that doing so would result in the cascade of events that followed, he must have, but he knew what would happen if he didn’t too, and the alternative must have been worse. The Book’s detractors commonly refer to those who read it, as under the influence of literary narcotics, but I swear, for what it’s worth, those who have not read it are much more under the influence of a narcotic, or a spell rather, than any who read it. I swear, despite what you’ve been told, reading Joe King Townham’s, The Theory and Practice to E.S.P, and reading at all, particularly contraband books, will free your mind. Of course, this is just my opinion.
I read the book and learned several, simple new ways of thinking, new meditations and found the motivation to meditate. And soon after began to have several surprising and spontaneous intuitive insights. The insights were strange and I could see how some people would have a difficult time dealing with such, but if these thoughts were maddening to certain people, they were just borderline already, living with unaddressed madness.
Reading The Theory and Practice to E.S.P. will not cause psychotic episodes or behavioral changes, unless one is on psychotropic medication, or one has a psychological disorder in which has long been on a bearing treading the precipice anyway. Reading the book did not result in a desire to commit heinous acts of violence or sexual deviance, and I had no impulse to perform dangerous stunts as the detractors commonly claim. However after reading it there is no doubt in my mind that the detractors are 100% percent correct, the book is indeed a threat to society.
The book is a threat to society for it revealed to me society’s foundation on devastating lies engineered to kill people, to create problems which kill just to get certain people paid. By enabling realization of lies society is built on, society is certainly threatened.
The gift and the threat the book offers is lie detection. The ability to detect lies directly threatens infrastructural segments of society dependent on lies, therefore becoming a threat to the rest of society dependent on and connected to. We are living in a house of cards that lies built, and it’s afire. Depending on the lies in one’s immediate proximity, one’s mental condition and one’s intake of disastrous prescription narcotics, one could snap. It’s very possible one might find out their spouse is cheating or their company is willfully poisoning people, or any number of upsetting realizations. Joe King Townham’s book is a danger to society, but assuredly, it is dangerous because it leads to the discovery of foundational lies, lies much more dangerous to society than even a city of millions on psychotropic meds, all reading the book, could ever be. The lessons of the book enable people to expose lies and ulterior motives hidden in underhanded coordination. Therefore the book is dangerous to liars, therefore the liars in control made it contraband material.
If you are unprepared for revelations of lies, lies by friends and family, lies both simple and complicated, then one should not read Joe King Townham’s book, for they are highly likely. If one is unprepared for revelations of lies delivered by familiar institutions, lies both laughable and diabolical, then one should not read Joe King Townham’s book, for they are certain. After reading The Theory and Practice to E.S.P., I found both. Most everyone lies and the book teaches people to see lies, and prevents lying from taking root, or would.
I have never spontaneously learned any secret or read anyone’s mind. Mischievous and diabolical lies were all I became intuitively privy to. I have never spontaneously learned of secrets, whether they were embarrassing or private, or otherwise, but I constantly become aware of lies, mainly pertaining to institutional abuses, of me and the rest of us. Interestingly Joe King Townham’s methods, despite the accusations otherwise, can detect lies and reveal insights pertinent to the individual, but few if anyone can learn to read minds in order to obtain bank numbers, or peer into your personal life from reading The Theory and Practice to E.S.P. Lies and obfuscations glow in the intuitive realm more than any other idea.
If one is not ready for lies to come to light, then do not read Joe King Townham’s book. And if you are not ready for lies to come to light then read this no further, for more excerpts of his book are within. If there is an inner dilemma between the part of you that wants to know the truth and the part of you who is afraid of the truth, then read and the debate will end. Just know that the excerpts themselves have potential to instigate spontaneous insight into lying individuals and institutions around you.
Most worldlings prefer stability over truth, even if it means their enslavement, their death and even inevitable extinction. Joe King Townham said, “societal training leads us away from our true nature and higher self, and sometimes redirection or cutting a societal leash is all that is required to regain connection and begin attaining psychic insights.”
I have come to believe that indeed Joe King Townham did play a prank on us all, as he was so famous for doing. He constantly used the phrase ‘psychic insight’ in the book, but could have just as easily used different language, like intuitive lie recognition or something more accurate and less alarming. It’s my guess that practicing lie recognition could expand or help one develop psychic insights, but the phrase left the door open for the detractors to proceed with banning the book and all Joe King Townham books, and eventually all the other suggestive books. And I believe Joe knew exactly what he was doing.
I warn anyone who fears truth or depends on lies not to read Joe King Townham’s book. If fear truth or do depend on lies stop reading now. Clandestinely leave this book in a location where it might be found by someone who is prepared to read it. Or if one is opposed to books wherein there is truth hand this copy over to your local librarian official for book burn. However I must warn you that those who do so risk being charged on site with possession, put on a watch list cross referenced with the other lists you’re on, and/or just straight shipped out west to cleanup New Mexico or California, never to be heard from again.
This book is my story of Joe King Townham, in combination with the story of what happened after he published the book, the societal and political aftermath. The information presented and quotes gathered, were retrieved from various news sources, written works and interviews I compiled. It is a real history of Joe King Townham, the book and the results.
My story is an equally factual record, but of my personal experiences with the book and resulting from the book. Perhaps my story is more factual that the story of Joe King Townham, who was not only a brilliant poet and psychic, but a notorious joker, who was known to pay people to lie about him, just as a joke. Perhaps my story, though hard to believe is less conflated with superfluous subterfuge than is his story. My story is real, and 100% factual, only some names have been changed to prevent incrimination of those involved. And my story of course will likely remain unverifiable.
Joe King Townham’s The Theory and Practice to E.S.P. revealed the world to me. It also completely turned my life upside down. Before Joe King Townham’s book came out I was just trying to keep my head above water, and find the yin to my yang, and occasionally I tried to write this one idea, a fictional story in hopes I could be a writer, like Joe King Townham. After Joe’s book came out, my life changed, everyone’s lives changed of course. My own changed in a way that made it apparent to me, that despite the barriers, I had to write this.
Chapter Two
Joe King Townham’s The Theory and Practice to E.S.P. was released in late September of 2020 with little fanfare or any press release announcing its release. Bookstores received boxes of the books without ordering them and a note from Inlighten Publishing Company essentially explaining the subdued release as something the author wanted to do. Joe King Townham penned it and released it without author attribution. Some stores refused to put the book up without knowing the identity of the author, but some stores put the authorless book with the plain white cover on the shelves and soon people began talking about it, and it quickly became an underground success by word of mouth and by the end of the year was a controversial bestseller.
Inlighten Publishing Company was at first more than pleased with the controversy surrounding their new release. The attention equated to sales, of course. As the story goes they fought bitterly against releasing it without his name and notoriety, but eventually they caved. They would have never come up the approach as a keen marketing idea, they simply followed Joe’s demands. They were elated that complying created an international bestseller, but when the letter ordering them to cease and desist publishing was received they must have realized that somehow they, or rather Joe, had gone too far. The controversy increased sales, but soon lawsuits were flying and corporate accounts were closing entirely and no one would sell any Inlighten material at all. Inlighten closed its doors one year and one day after the release of Joe King Townham’s The Theory and Practice to E.S.P. and so did a lot of publishing houses. Joe King Townham changed the world.
Joe King Townham was born during a snowstorm in his parent’s modest home in Pittston, Maine. Jill and Duffy were poor folks and the tires on the truck were too slick and worn out to make it to the Hospital in nearby Augusta, Maine the night Jill gave birth to Joe. When she went into labor, they tried to drive there, but got stuck so his father confidently carried his laboring mother a mile or so back home in the storm, and King Townham was born in a shack apartment, above a shack garage, that had been converted from an old barn, on a farm in Pittston.
Duffy was an inventor. Jill supported his creative endeavors by making soap, growing vegetables and working random jobs, including cleaning hotel rooms in Augusta. Duffy ultimately patented a variety of inventions and sold them transforming their lifestyle from poverty into luxury. He made his fortune inventing tools for tools, innovations which bettered existing inventions. But for years, most of Joe’s youth, Duffy followed his heart and pursued more impractical ideas.
For many years Duffy tried unsuccessfully to make a name for himself in the joke business. He came up with gag trinkets that shocked and buzzed, prank kits that made for hours of fun for all ages, but he didn’t make any money. An example was the spray band, a head band that sprayed water or shot dust onto whoever was standing around the wearer at the push of a button.
While seeking to create the newest joke that could retail for under $5.99 Duffy made money as a tinkerer. His practical joke company; Poke’s Jokes was his pipe dream. Duffy earned most of his limited income fixing neighbors farm equipment, lawnmowers and cars.
Eventually Duffy learned that the joke market was locked down and monopolized by one main corporation and that they had a mafia like control scheme that had taken over every mom and pop shop magic store and joke shop, and corporate account in the country. Duffy eventually concluded that Poke’s Jokes was a failed endeavor and changed his focus to concentrate on more practical inventions instead of practical jokes.
For ten years Joe lived in the one room shack above the tinkerers garage, with his mom and dad in Pittstown, Maine. They were potato poor, and simply went without until Duffy’s inventions paid off. The apartment above the garage that served as Duffy’s workshop was owned by a farmer who provided cheap accommodations in exchange for Duffy being his fix-it man. There was a fireplace in the center of the room which somewhat countered the cold. There was electricity and plumbing, but there was no toilet. A shitter utilizing scrap wood and a bucket was near the door behind curtains. Joe King Townham shit in a bucket until he was ten.
Joe once was quoted as saying, “The place was so drafty, cracks in the walls served as windows to watch the birds fly and snow fall.”
After giving up the joke business, Duffy sold a few patents for his ideas and took his family from the pine barn to a nearby homestead. His main invention was a valve system that ended up being perfect for a component purchased by an oil company to use in a drilling system which he sold for an unknown sum, another was a vacuum design which was purchased by Glide Rite Vacuum Corporation.
Both of the patents sold at around the same time and the money came in all at once. Their lives completely changed. Joe got new clothes, toys and whatever he wanted from then on, not that he ever wanted much, apparently.
Joe was an exceptional student with high marks. However despite his good grades, he was expelled from two area high schools. All his teachers recounted how much of a troublemaker and class clown he was. He, like his dad, relished jokes.
His first expulsion was for placing rotten eggs under the benches in the gym prior to a school assembly. He and a friend placed the eggs in crevasses barely big enough for them be and when people sat down the eggs were crushed, splattering their stink into the air, onto the benches and practically everybody’s pants. After a video investigation it was determined that Joe was the culprit, he was seen in the hallway with a full bag and later with the same empty bag. They made him clean the entire gymnasium before expelling him, nonetheless the smell lingered for weeks, he never told on his friend and accomplice. His mother was naturally disappointed and upset, but his father thought it was a great idea that would long be remembered. His father, who named him Joe King because he wanted him to be the joking joke king of Poke’s Jokes couldn’t help but be proud of the prank.
Joe was quickly enrolled in another nearby school, and was just as quickly expelled. Monday was his first day and during his first history class Joe fell asleep or acted like he did. The history teacher was infuriated and woke him up by slamming a stack of books onto Joe’s desk.
Wham!
“Would you like to join us, Joe?” Instead of being shocked by the aggressive noise Joe calmly lifted his head up.
“Yes. Thanks for waking me up, but you put me to sleep in the first place with this crap. Would you like to really teach us?” Or some such equivalent was said.
The class exploded into hysterical laughter and Joe was sent to the principal’s office. From then onwards Joe requested he stand in class so as not to fall asleep, not only in history class, but in all of them. He accused the subject matter of being elementary, and accused the teachers of inadequacy later remarking, “If something legitimate was taught, it was taught out of order, so we just didn’t get the significance of it.”
The other teachers settled with Joe and allowed him to stand in the back of the class, but not the history teacher. He refused to let Joe stand, and Joe refused to sit down.
“You’re putting me to sleep. You’re ignorant and incoherent. ” Joe said, and was sent to the office, again.
On Wednesday, the teacher asked if Joe would sit down, Joe refused and was again sent to the office. This went on until the Friday of Joe’s first week at his second high school. On that Friday Joe was sent to the office, again by his history teacher. It just so happened that there was a school assembly that day, and soon Joe found himself in the principal’s office all by himself.
He would later write, “It was the faculty’s fault for daring me with the opportunity to take control of the school office. Even back then I believed in destiny, with a stipulation that I should open the door to her when she knocks. They left me there with destiny, what was I supposed to do? I locked and barricaded the office door shut, so that it was just Destiny and I in the office.”
Joe locked himself in the office and then secured the door with desks. Whoever was going to get into the office was going to have to break in. After a few moments of giddy preparation and allowing time for everyone to settle in the auditorium Joe turned on the intercom and began singing his own rendition of God Bless America, stopping half way through it, bursting into a hammering cursing of the history teacher through his own telling of Maine history.
Stories of his tirade vary, but all agreed he used every bit of profanity in the English language and insult in the Mainer dialect. One of his classmates later recalled Joe called the history teacher a ‘white devil pervert as sick as chicken pox who gladly taught us lies and half-truths as good as lies.’ He insulted the teacher, the entire teaching staff, the principal and the state’s teaching material, several students, and everyone he could in the ten minutes or so he was on the microphone. The faculty and the special guests, local law enforcement officials, discussed what to do in the auditorium and ended up smashing the office door down and pummeled their way in to barge the desks out of the way. Instead of just being scolded and expelled he was wrestled and arrested for causing a nuisance and for being so bold. As Joe was taken away to jail he bid farewell to the students milling about, most of whom didn’t know him.
It was decided that a student who visited the office five times in his first week and then pulled such a stunt was not worth having as a student, and further was worth pressing charges against. If Joe had any other track record, other than the week of disruption, the school might have considered only suspending or expelling him. Instead they banned him from school property and pressed charges. It was only a couple of weeks later that the history teacher was accused of systematically sexually abusing several of his students over the years. Everyone knew that Joe broke the spell the history teacher had on the kids by doing what he did, accidentally or not. In a way, Joe’s fame began in high school as a prankster of the highest order. He remained legend at both the local high schools in Lincoln County long after leaving them and would still be spoken of to this day even if he didn’t become a well-known author, even if he didn’t gain alternative infamy.
After the History teacher was charged, the school dropped the charges on Joe. His parents shortly sent Joe off to the nearby Fryeburg Preparatory Academy a couple of hours from home where he stayed in the dorm. His parents convinced him to calm down, that this school was basically his last chance to play the game of life with a high school diploma, which he managed to obtain. Former classmates at the prep school stated that he was like two people, one minute a quiet intellectual and the next the wildest class clown in school. Words underneath a yearbook picture of Joe writing in the library read, “Joe King, fly on the wall, and off-the-wall joker.”
Joe didn’t get into any noteworthy trouble at the preparatory school. He applied and was accepted to many colleges and universities partially because ‘that’s how the academy was structured.’ He decided to attend Princeton. His parents recall that he was very excited about going there and spent part of his summer learning about the history of the school. He intended to major in philosophy.
After one week at Princeton he dropped out and took off on his own. When asked why later in life, he said, “Let’s just say, being around despicable people can be awfully despicable and make you despicable by osmosis, and that, I did not want to be.”
Joe just left. He took the books he bought with him, a bag of clothes and walked to New York City from Princeton. He read while walking and slept on the side of the road. It was then he decided once and for all, he wanted to be a writer. He also further decided that “writers should be educated, but should not be educated at an Ivy League university for more than a week.” He went to Soho and became another “lost poet in the hood.” The sights and sounds of the city were the complete opposite contrast to the quiet Maine woods he was accustomed to.
Joe made his first headlines when he disappeared from college. He was reported as missing and since he left no note, and told no one of his plan or his subsequent whereabouts, including his parents, they worried about him for weeks. Duffy used his connections and influence to call attention to his missing son through the media. And after a couple of weeks of downtown introspection, a stranger approached him in New York and told him he was on the news. Only then did Joe called his parents to report his whereabouts.
Duffy and Jill were furious, but relieved. Jill demanded he come home right then, but Joe had other plans. Jill would later recall, in one of the few interviews she granted, “I told him to come home. He said he had other plans. Other plans? Now what? I remember thinking. I thought he was going to stay in New York City or something horrible like that. Then he said he had to find something and was going to India or Nepal or some such. ‘India? Jesus Christ go to school to find yourself!’ I said! I told him I had heard something like that from a thousand different young men before, including his father a thousand times before, about finding something and something being themselves, but Joe was the only one who picked up and went to India to do it. He said I had him misunderstood that he had to find something, not himself. Only Joe would get up and go to India to seek higher knowledge at monastery in India over Princeton. Where he gets these ideas I can only blame it on his father, of course. Well, I knew college was out of the question when he said that. He was stuck in the sky, his head in the clouds, just like his dad, instead of looking around where he stood. I told him that all he would find out in the world, be it India or Russia or Greece, is that people are crazy. They’re crazy the same here and there, India’s just the same crazy as in Boston. The whole world is crazy. I told him all he would find out is why people call Maine Vacationland, because it is just a little less crazy here. Maine is vacationland from most of the crazy that’s in most of the world.”
Joe had been saving money his whole life, since his father’s inventions paid off anyway, and amassed some thousands of dollars he used to take off. He left to India without any concrete plan, just the fanciful notion to seek out a Buddhist monastery that would allow him to stay and study with monks who might need something that his money could buy. He eventually returned penniless, seemingly wise and happy.
Joe never directly wrote of this time period and barely talked about it publicly. He never said much about it privately either, merely stating that he learned a lot, wandered a lot and spent an unspecified amount of time at an unnamed monastery.
Jill was extremely disappointed with his decision to go to India and dropout of school and for all extents and purposes, society. His tinkerer father on the other hand was more than supportive. He thought Joe was further staking his claim in the world in a unique and funny way. In the time Joe was gone, he sent his family a few postcards which they did not release, but were rumored to limitedly describe some of his experiences.
After almost two years he returned and after some time back in Maine, Joe moved to N.Y.C. to pursue his writing career, of which he said that “writing is a decent way to learn, but frequently a horrible way to earn.” Jill insisted that Joe live by his own means if he was not going to attend school, but Duffy occasionally sent Joe money without her knowledge.
Joe referred to this time period in his life as “days of dissonant poetry.” He spent his days writing what he called “illegible literary explorations” and his nights “exploring the urban human condition.” Eventually Joe published a poem in The New Yorker. The poem entitled, Love Tree, became his figurative foot in the door. Afterwards he began writing articles, essays and other poetry and began being “paid for the penance of the pen.”
Though he spent a lot of time downtown, this is the time period when he also started spending time uptown in Inwood. He would hang out in the park and hold impromptu yoga classes and discussions with people in the neighborhood. He would stay in the caves in the park and battle crackheads for sleeping arrangements and would bathe using the spring water for weeks on end.
He was twenty three when he published his first novel; The Rise and Fall of George. He wrote the first draft of it while staying in a cave in Inwood Hill Park. The book did fairly well in the Tri-State Area, but remained mostly obscure until Joe published his second book almost a year later, it quickly became a national bestseller; The Postmodern Poetry of Brenton Mcgee. From then on Joe correspondingly gained success, lost obscurity and began to grow increasingly reclusive.
Opinions of Joe’s character swing far and wide. People were just as likely to call him an eccentric playboy or an enlightened old soul, an admirable philanthropist or despicable drunk bum with an audience. The fairest assessment of his personality is that he was unpredictable. You never knew which Joe you would get on any given day. The only steadiness to his being is that he loved to surprise people. He could be compassionate or mean as hell, serious or foolish, reasonable or ridiculous, but mostly he was just trying to joke with people. There was no way to predict his behavior, except to guess that if the situation called for quiet and calm he would go irate, if the predictable response was a fight he would give out hugs or hand out money. Whatever behavior a situation normally instigated, whatever was the normal response, Joe would do the opposite.
He lived by an axiom he heard in Asia, which he paraphrased literally almost every time he spoke publicly, obviously as some form of ironic joke, or moronic based on in its repetitiveness: cease an old habit, and start a new hobby, every day.
Because he was erratic and intelligent, and because there was the internalized jokester in him and so forth, very few people could relate to him, and he to few. Joe was viewed as odd compared to most everyone and as at odds with most everyone well before The Theory and Practice to E.S.P. Joe and his fiction created friction in reality. Many people loved him, but even more loved to hate him. He was compared to various Saints as well as Hitler, constantly.
Nathan Stone was a close friend of Joe, one of the few whom Joe kept from his childhood into adulthood. He was from Pittston, Maine and was Joe’s partner in his high school egg prank that soiled a gymnasium of hundreds. Nathan was a fourth generation farmer in Maine and as the years went by and Joe grew more reclusive and distrusting, Nathan became the first Stone in four generations to have a job, acting as Joe’s manager and spokesman.
Nathan was once stated, “The thing about Joe, that people never understood, that I don’t think Joe really can get through his head, or completely accepted, was that he lived for practical jokes. He wanted to better people, and he wanted to get people to think. And I think, he found jokes were the best way to get people to think and better them at the same time. So no matter how much he learned, no matter how many complicated, esoteric understandings he had, no matter what kind of wild psychic comprehension he experienced, he lived for jokes, he couldn’t help it. But the thing is, here’s the thing, his jokes grew to be severely, I’m talking severely, complicated, abstract and intellectual to the point that no one was getting it, even if they were the subject of it. See? You know? He was a joker, but he had another side to him, another side to him maybe no one will get really. His intellect, you know. He could understand the mechanical and the metaphorical and spiritual and put it all together. And he was really good a reading people, like he could read people’s minds, I think pretty easy too.
He told me once that the worse people were the more he knew about them. He said reading people was like being in stinky gym, and the more people that were around the more likely he would eventually be nauseous, but some people just really were stinkers. He needed to joke maybe and needed to learn too. He fed off knowledge I swear, had to learn something every day, like most people have to eat. As a kid, honestly, I learned more from Joe King Townham than I did in school, be sure. But he didn’t take anything serious you know? People who were real rigid and serious, they hated him, they worked and toiled to process what he just got, instantly. They really hated him. I think too that once Joe saw that intelligent people disliked his intelligence he wanted to shut them down every chance he could. He loved making intellectuals feel stupid most of all and I think that was part of why his jokes grew more elaborate. As kids it was the teachers, and later for a while it was, as he said, ‘anyone in the literary field who isn’t a writer.’ And then it was, maybe everybody….He blamed publishers and editors for the dumbing down of the United States and the world, just like he used to blame the teachers for the dumbing down of the students. He made no differentiation among pedigreed intellectuals and considered them all compromised by having been documented and institutionalized. I mean, by the time we were twelve we must have put buckets of pond water on top of a thousand doors, broke and planted a thousand stink bombs at various gatherings and public places, including school, church, parades, police stations and court. And we did stuff I still don’t want to admit! I liked the simple more juvenile jokes I guess, not Joe. That is, he grew out of them. I grew out of it, I guess, and Joe grew into it, you know? As a kid he liked jokes that people would laugh at right then, the simple jokes. But he grew to like the type of jokes that would get people angry or shocked or dumbfounded immediately and that they would laugh at later, years later maybe. He just never stopped joking, maybe he was just living up to his name, the Joke King. Sometimes he would use insider jokes when the circle of friends who would get it, weren’t around, or insider jokes in which he was the only one who was in on it. It got to the point, where basically no one would get his jokes a lot of the time, except for him. Sometimes I knew he was laughing on the inside, but holding a straight face so most just never knew what he was thinking, unless you knew him really well, unless he let you in on it and then only maybe. Everyone knows he was the class clown as a kid, but I remember one time we were talking about what we wanted to do when we grew up right, typical kid stuff. And the class clown, Joe King Townham, said he wanted to teach clown class. And you know what? He really did too.”
In the same interview Nathan Stone went on to say “I’m pretty sure the statute of limitations is up as far as the incident is concerned, so I don’t mind admitting, in fact I’m proud to admit, I helped Joe put eggs under the benches in the auditorium of our high school. He let me in through a back door that didn’t have cameras, so they only saw him going in, but I did it with him. He got kicked out of school and he took all the blame and he never told anyone. Joe is the realest, best friend I ever had.”
Everyone who knew Joe had strong feelings towards him, no matter how divergent their opinion of him, his own family was no exception. His mom and dad loved him and were no longer on speaking terms with those of the family who had less than desirable opinions of Joe and who stated as much in the interviews they were paid to give. Several of his aunts and uncles, on both sides of his family, called Joe “a well-known vagrant”, “a pervert”, “a well of uselessness”, “a sick puppy” and “untrustworthy devilish book worm.” Many of his other family and friends on the other hand described Joe as a “misunderstood joker” and suggested many, or some, of the people who spoke badly of Joe were paid to do so, by Joe.
After gaining notoriety and wealth Joe retreated back to Vacationland when he was twenty-eight. He bought an estate sized property not too far from the shack above the garage where he was born and lived well into his childhood, but a world away in comfort and design. He rebuilt an old farmhouse on the property and erected an iron fence around three acres of his twenty acre property outside Rangeley, Maine. He decided on Rangeley in part because of the seclusion and because one of the few people he looked up to in modern times used to live there, Wilhelm Riech.
It is my opinion that Joe King Townham had at one point in his life learned a thing or two about Wilhelm, likely as a youth through some underground channels of which you had to be a related to a lobsterman to catch wind of, and variously learned other understandings about Wilhelm’s ideas and perhaps about Rangeley itself. Wilhelm’s banned books and controversial healing practices were verifiably one of Joe’s early interests and Wilhelm remained someone Joe was inspired by and emulated.
No one could see Joe without his explicit consent and practically everyone had to go through Nathan Stone to make such a request. For months at a time Joe wouldn’t accept visitors, except for his parents, Nathan, and one or two girlfriends he might have had at the time.
Though Joe would hide out in his house and assumedly write for weeks at a time talking with no one, he also was known to make spontaneous road trips to New York City and occasionally leave on trips abroad just as abruptly. He preferred solitude and yet sometimes needed to immerse himself into society, maybe to remember why he preferred solitude.
As time went on and his writing became wildly popular, Joe travelled less as he was more likely to be recognized. “Fame arises at the cost of anonymity which is one of those precious intangibles you don’t realize the value of until it’s gone,” he would later say.
He would also just as randomly go from recluse to host of random but legendary parties where all were welcome. He never held a celebration on a holiday or any notable date whatsoever and he never announced the parties more than a couple days in advance, but they were always the place to be. Because of the nature of his fame and fortune, and because he welcomed all comers to the random events, they were the cause of tremendous excitement and anticipation in Maine, and beyond. He made sure people from Manhattan to Augusta knew about the occasion and many dropped everything to go to Rangeley, which is in the middle of nowhere even by Maine standards, and rub elbows with Joe King Townham himself. The abrupt parties were on usually on random Sundays when nothing was happening but church service. He would contact of all his family -even those who overtly disliked him, who happily attended- his friends, neighbors and so on would go driving around Maine and invite one and all in the vicinity to come, and bring friends. Joe would have Nathan make abrupt announcements to writer and editor colleagues and all the random people who sought to speak with him for various reasons that Joe deemed likable enough to invite, but not worth contacting if they were looking for him. The editors, publishers, artists and all who sought to speak with Joe while he was indisposed all received sudden invitations via a phone call or email from Nathan. The parties increasingly became the only opportunity for many to see and speak with Joe at all.
Joe’s parties would cause noticeable local traffic jams going to the otherwise quiet town of Rangeley. Once word was out people would crawl out of the maniac woodwork from far and wide as would the clichéd literary urbanites. Conservatives from Kennebunkport, rowdy river rats, lawyers and lobsterman, young and old alike all came to Joe’s parties to rub elbows with artists, writers and actors of notoriety as well as the not so famous editors came to meet Joe Townham. There were likely scammers, thieves and users too just looking for free lobster rolls and a good time.
At one summer party, during a stretch of drenching Northeastern heat and humidity, Joe further revealed he potentially had psychic capabilities years before writing his controversial book, the book that uplifted so many, and the book that caused his downfall. A group of youngsters from Rangeley, who recently found some pubescent bravado, and consequently lost all respect for sentient beings and tangible things, had planned a joke on the joker, and all his posh friends, that they thought would make them famous.
The first stage of the plan was to take all the toilet paper, tissues, paper towels, and napkins and hide them in places other than the bathrooms. The second stage was to spike the food with a laxative. They imagined the lineup at the bathrooms and frustration inside them, and outside all around on would lead to a couple hundred turds on Joe’s land wherever there were leaves. They imagined the grotesque desperation would become infamous, hilarity of legend of which could supersede Joe’s fame even, they figured, making it so when people thought of Joe they would think of the crap attack. They planned on eating the food and the laxative as well to obnoxiously join in the calamity and to perhaps implicate Joe himself, a slightly nefarious twist. They all wore old tee-shirts as tools for their foreseen relief too. When they finalized the plan they wondered if Joe himself might end up respecting them for it, and adopting them as his protégés after seeing the mastery of their work.