Your Mind What Madness Fills

(a twenty-something young man (our narrator) is forced to deal with the suicide death of his father which draws forth ghosts in the shape of memories, weight, and prior sins - the narrator is forced to attempt to reconcile his father's past with his own present and future - in doing so, he realizes he is living a post-modern ghost story of sorts, the weight, the memories, the sin, he realizes is (and has been) following him - the difficulty of following a genetic map laid out before him is overwhelming)

When we were seventeen we were revolutionaries, poets, prophets, and scholars. We published poetry in underground newspapers. We thumbed our noses at authority. We wrote research papers that were scored F’s, but that we were proud of. “Stoker uses Dracula as a symbol of Eastern Europe. He has, for years, served his purpose of keeping the Asian hordes at bay and allowed Western Europe to develop some level of civility and culture, but only on his back. And, ultimately, The Count wants payment and redemption for the sacrifices he has to make.

I must confess that I did not grow up in a household of cocktail parties where well-heeled intellectuals bickered over the finer points of imperial ambitions in the Middle East. My father read science fiction, worked on the fossils of computers, smoked Benson & Hedges, watched football, and wrote suicide notes. My mother, happy to have traded the farms of East Texas for the mundanity of a metropolis, named my older sister after a soap opera character, not a civil rights leader.

The Great Mouse Quarrel of the late twentieth century might have been avoided, if only for a bit more creative and insistent diplomatic efforts. The day I toured the property, a tiny forlorn nest teetering on the edge of an urban tree, the well-tuned ear could just make out the tiny scampering of feet as they mobilized towards the Western Front.

This is a working thesis. This is where a note of introduction might rest itself.