A Crackpot Book: Lynn Lockhart Publisher

Dust Cover

The author, a homeless novelist, was shopping in the Dollar Tree on Foster in Portland, Oregon on Monday, March 1, 2021 at 12:34 pm when he saw two women and a man attack and beat a homeless man for the crime of not wearing mask during the only respiratory disease outbreak in human history. As an un-apologetic creep, the author wondered at such violence in the absence of bodies being stacked like cordwood in bedsheets on city sidewalks. But then, after leav-ing the store and taking down his mask, walking in the clear virus-killing sun-shine, he noticed various much younger, much healthier folk glaring at him, stepping into speeding traffic to avoid him, huddling in fear, cringing, even cry-ing with mouths hanging a-yawn under their masks.

The homeless man was not capable of fighting back and had fared poorly. It being obvious that building hysteria would eventually result in him being at-tacked for not masking outside, the author wondered, “How would I fare before the mob?”

Dollar Joe is the transcript of a tactical fantasy written in one man’s mind during a 9-block walk.

“Then Weohostan’s son, stalwart to the end,

had orders given to owners of dwellings,

many people of importance in the land,

to fetch wood from far and wide

for the good man’s pyre.”

-Beowulf, verse 3110

For Dollar Joe, whose fate is unknown to me—thanks for the gift of your miserable plight and may the sickly World of Man suffer the fate that its grand collective has visited upon you.

Prologue

From March of 2020 through this March of 2021, I and numerous friends have experienced and witnesses much Maskland hysteria and some violence, the characters and scenes depicted in the first seven chapters of this volume really happened and are related as experienced by myself and others in six different American states. For this reason, Dollar Joe occurs in a generic U.S. City of the like that can be found in any of its 50 delusional states.

Chapter 7 is the last of the non-fiction chapters and the first of the fiction chapters, in which I take a composite character, that is one part me, one part a fellow writer I know and one part a fighter I have trained for some five years. I have placed Sean's ability, Mescaline Franklin's emotive frame of mind and my suicidal tendencies into one fictional person.

The balance of the story may seem extreme, to you, the reader of 2021, but will occur in parts all around this hysterical nation before 2024.

In case I meet with our Cruel Mistress Fate before then—I told you so.

Welcome to Harm City, U.S.A.

James LaFond, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, March 29 2021