Cheshire Cat Moon On The High Frontier: A Petitioner's Yearlong Saga, In Three Acts Hardcover – November 30, 2025

A contemporary anti-hero reminiscent of Bukowski’s Henry Chinaski passes into a wildly comic-grotesque job market that would make Flannery O’Connor go pale, parrying along the way the loss of the perfect job, overtures from the owner of an adult bookstore; a narcissistic, big-baby boss with violent tendencies; a child-abusing therapist with a hidden agenda; his own personal shortcomings; and intractable fits of impoverished joblessness – only to find himself on the final day of the calendar year working as a counselor at a remote far West Texas treatment center for adolescent felons with emotional disturbances, ensnared in a leaden dichotomy of misplaced priorities and competing sentiments; a gray carnival of reversed roles where the notions of insanity and reason, submission and authority, liberty and detention, home and homelessness grapple for meaning in uncertain perpetuity…“…and then [the door] suddenly burst all the way open to reveal a skinny, red-headed, elephant-eared youth wearing unbelted, loose-fitting Dickies, white tube socks and a plain white t-shirt, vaulting out of the inner shadows and already sprinting for the highway in a blind panic while struggling to keep his pants on – with his astonished counselor in red-hot pursuit bellowing at the top of his lungs, ‘He’s runnin’! Get him! Get him!, unwittingly herding the unnerved youth straight into the conversing pair where they stood innocently blockading his path. discerning more than seeing, Toney screeched intuitively like a terrified toddler, turned his back on the threat, and braced for certain impact while tumbling to the ground as Kurt dug in, crouched in expectation like a pouncing cat, and detonated on the spot. It was if the poor, misguided runaway youth had hurtled himself into a snowplow, with Kurt standing him up immediately upon contact and hoisting him bodily off the ground, then flipping him deftly onto his backside, before, grinding his body into the dirt underneath him in a malicious, medieval kind of way that would have made an all-American linebacker feel pleased and honored just to sniff his jockstrap. Now they’re all down in the dirt…. Kurt is seated squarely on the runner’s chest, pinning him to the ground by his shoulders as the boy tosses his head from side to side and kicks his legs meaninglessly as if he were struggling to ride an invisible bicycle, their eyes just inches apart, suddenly looking as if they were each preparing in their own unmistakable way for a quick, nonconsensual session of missionary-styled coitus. Toney lay blubbering on the ground, cowering there in a fetal position with his hands covering his ears, the absurd headgear still fastened into place by the even more preposterous stampede string he’d fastidiously cinched under his chin to keep it from sailing away in the steadfast but faltering breeze….” Read more