Jimmy

A Memory of Childhood

A Crackpot Book

Lynn Lockhart Publisher

Copyright 2021 James LaFond

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Dust Cover

What makes a graphomaniac? [0]

From June 1996 through December of 2021, D-student, special-education student, high-school dropout and life-time grocery clerk, who has suffered over 24 concussions as an adult, James LaFond, has inexplicably written 233 books, ranging from 44 to 700 pages, with the median around 300 pages each.

With some 70 novels and short fiction anthologies, and an assortment of books on history and literature, some 97 of the books are urban blight, combat arts and travel memoirs, amounting crookedly to something of an unwieldy and patchy biography. In the summer of 2021 Wrath of Gnon, a twitter dignitary and supporter, requested that LaFond write an autobiography.

The Crackpot groaned. Lacking the stomach to write anymore about his adult and adolescent past, LaFond has agreed to the compromise of recording his childhood memories, hopefully after a fashion that the reader will find pleasing and Master Gnon, who has declared LaFond to be a “singular” writer, will find worthwhile.

Quote

“As I walked through the wilderness of this world I came upon a  certain place with a den and laid down to sleep.”

-John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress

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A Question of Distinction

As I believe myself to have entered into the final portion of my writing life and to have squandered much of that upon knucklehead advice, counter-culture journalism and the mediocre composition of much that shall remain unread, I, as a writer of some aspiration, seek a serious purpose in the writing of this little book. I shall finish but two or three books in this final six weeks of 2021 and do not wish to waste the effort. The novel has been in the works for a humiliating ten years and the memoir of travel in the nadir of life, is a mere obligation.

This book here, could be worthwhile if it had an objective of some gravity. The question is, what about James LaFond, the subject is worthwhile?

This creature does not even have a Wikipedia page.

-He has apparently written more books, and on the widest variety of subjects, than any other person of his era. However, only one book garnered even niche acclaim [The Logic of Steel, Paladin Press, 2001, being alternately out of print, banned, shadow-banned and pirated] and despite used copies of this book selling for hundreds of dollars for over a decade, the author has made a total of some $300 dollars on the original 1,000 copies and his subsequent attempts at POD reprinting.

-The above confirms to a broader trend. Despite having written and published more than any other author alive, the author has achieved the following as a full-time writer:

2017, renting a room in Baltimore City while working as an overnight dairy clerk, and surviving 1 dog attack and 19 mugging attempts, income $1,200

2018, becoming a wandering hobo in July, income $2,400

2019, remained homeless, income $5,700

2020, remained homeless, income $11,050

2021, remained homeless, income falling below $6,000

So, on Thanksgiving week, as the author succumbs to bronchitis in an unheated garage in the Pacific Northwest and even his fans pirate his meager work online against the day establishment platforms ban his writing for good, the questions  of the subject’s childhood seem to distill into:

How did a distinctly middle-American start in 1963, born roughly into the 35% of Americans, by stages, remorselessly consign the subject to life as one of the bottom 1% of his countrymen...and this despite having worked the equivalent of two full time jobs for some 38 years [and up to 6 jobs over 118 hours per week for two years] and this as a member of the Caucasian Baby Boom generation, which is collectively the most prosperous generation in human history.

Note: only two members of my 60-odd extended family have bettered the lot of my parent’s generation, one being my uncle and the other my youngest son. A good half-dozen of my cousins have died of alcohol, drugs and despair in their youth, prime and early middle age.

Furthermore, this author, over the course of his non-fiction writing has consistently predicted near future events with uncanny accuracy.

Additionally, during the course of researching a science-fiction time travel series, LaFond, an entirely uneducated man who could not read until age ten, has become the only inhabitant of Planet Earth to conduct a serious, non-mythic, historical examination into the birth of this world’s most powerful nation, uncovering legions of open source facts ignored and denied by historic academics in a massive series of 13 history books.

Thus the initial search for substance takes two quixotic turns.

As the author of this work trying to make something worthwhile of it, the question begging to be answered seems to be, how does a child who should have become a man owning a modest home in suburban America without ever having done more than obey his employers, abide by the laws of the land and pay his taxes, statistically the victim of one or two violent crimes, come to live a remarkably violent life—surviving over 200 violent crimes—and go on to write more books than the life time output of Steven King, Daniel Steel and James Patterson [1] combined [and this in one decade of his late middle age], while ending his life as a hobo living on the charity of a handful of readers across the country?

In short, the big question about the boy named James, who has never been called anything but the degrading “Jimmy” by his family, is how did this person of average prospects manage to finally earn his birth name among strangers, and to produce more works of literature than any other human of his age, only to fail absolutely in every other measurable degree of social and economic life?

As a man who yet aspires to produce serious literature concerning even trivial matters, I find myself conducting an autopsy of a child destined for comprehensive failure as an adult.

In writing numerous biographies and one autobiography of Violence [2] I do have substantial experience walking a subject through his past according to a chronological scheme of recollection, that I hope will serve well to impart some substance to this work.

-James LaFond, an hour after nightfall, Monday, November 22, 2021, Portland, Oregon

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Notes

-0. Declared a “graphomaniac” by Anne Sterzinger in a Takimag article in 2015

-1. The latter two authors each employ staffs of ghost writers and researchers and merely edit the works assigned with their names.

-2. 40,000 Years from Home, a history of aggression, 2016, I will use my childhood recollections in this book as memory cues for that innocent portion of the past which I have generally striven to forget.

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Dedication

For Wrath of Gnon, it might have been nice to meet under better circumstances as well as in person, but so Life leaves us on this weirdly illuminated lee shore