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Copyright 2025 James LaFond
A Crackpot Book
Lynn Lockhart Publisher
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Dust Cover
In the waning days of January 2025, a worn out tramp writer was set to spend the night on a Los Angeles sidewalk, the recent fires having filled up the available dive habitations with refugees from USG pyro-estate management. Then a reader, a young man working in Yucca Valley, called the writer with the phone number gotten from a Myth of the 20th Century podcast, and offered to put up the old crumb for a night. Minutes after emerging from the enormous LAX Union Station on crutches, the writer was picked up in a powerful four-wheel drive machine by a pulp-fiction couple: a brawny, long-haired, smiling meathead armed with 20 inch arms and a brain, and a beautiful Indian bride. Over the next 16 hours the writer discovered that his Conanesque host was an economic nomad from Texas, home of the creator of that famous pulp fiction barbarian.
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Extended Dust Cover
In what is hoped to be the fruit of numerous visits to this young fellow, it is the tramp’s intent to learn something about life under USG in the time of his decline, through the art of migratory friendship. John, who despite being related to the famous Comanche Chief Quana Parker, has the appearance of “a snow ape’ by his own admission, has had many life experiences alien to the late-modern writer, but common to the postmodern reader:
-Numerous step fathers
-Parents involved in illegal drug activity
-Incarceration for non violent offenses
-Alienation by a school system in which he is easily able to make the grades
-Brutalization in an institutional setting
-Economic migration from his homeland
-Constant dealings with the walking gawds of the Postmodern American conscience…
Yet, this young fellow, who hails from a state with counties the size of the writer’s home state, also shares many facets of his education with men of the Late Modern Age and those traditional fellows reared in the High West:
-Developed his body as an avid do it yourself weightlifter
-Learned how to fight by fighting and by clubbing up with friends for freestyle boxing
-Lived side by side with compulsively violent scions of the Dark Continent, and holds zero particular dread for this boogieman of the sissy suburban bedstead
-Worked in the trades, to include masonry, landscaping and concrete
-Came back to the place of his youth to take the woman away who had so caught his eye as a girl
-Worked in agriculture and food production
-And, yet to reach 30 years, Young John already runs work crews of men older than he is, just as the writer had in a younger time.
These latter aspects, which the wizened old tramp, who looked like a gnome doll next to John in a picture taken by Frazzetta Girl, his woman, will be employed as an empathetic lens from a worldview so different from that lived by the subject of this ode.
Snow Ape is the memoir of a thoughtful young man who as a boy dreamed of being a faithful member of a dolphin pod, fighting off a school of sharks, a dream that weirdly prefigured his precocious life.
Dedication
For Frazzetta Girl, for accepting an old tramp into her house and trusting him to shampoo his yetish beard with her Man’s Primate Wash rather than her body and bounce salon preparation…
Inspirational Quote
“Enjoy this tome on our nomadic ancestors and use it for your material.’
-John, the Vanilla Gorilla, an Inscription within The Scythian Empire by Beckworth, gifted to the writer by young John, 1/31/25
Composition
John and I share the fate of being driven back to our nomadic origins under the Gaslight Heel of USG. Hence, I shall use my travel writing done while visiting him, as a contextual sidebar. For I currently, in my 60s, journey with an old man’s eye through the lands where he has traveled and worked in his 20s, and is set to make his way into majority.
The Vanilla Gorilla Frame is So:
Snow Ape #1
Introduction
Impressions of the Vanilla Gorilla and notes from memory about events he mentioned as we had eggs for breakfast in his kitchen. This is intended to serve as a cue for our future interviews.
Snow Ape #2
Silverback Diaries: A thru Z
Travel impressions had while visiting John.
Snow Ape #3
Snow Ape Domestication: #3 thru Howevermany
John’s Memoir, recorded in the order by which he recalls the events of his life; this in honor of his fellow, and antiquitous, Texan, Robert E. Howard, who wrote episodic yarns, rather than chronological cycles, in abidance to the correct notion that a man of action, when recalling his adventures, does so at seeming random, cued by his inner drive in search of his own past, portions of which often abide in gloom.
I hope to complete Vanilla Gorilla sometime in 2026.
-Honored, James LaFond, Laguna Range, Ranch 201, New Mexico, 2/4/25
