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Your Grief Blog

Navigating Philip K. Dickian “sustains” of false realities and a global pandemic involving the “philoviral miasma of a past reconciled” (written nearly a year prior to COVID-19), the blogger-narrator depicts the grief of sinister hobbies—e.g., “inveigling”; e.g., “deceit”—the grief of the non-historical nature of time; the grief of coins accidentally eaten while on Ambien, the coins presumed to be mints; and the grief of Time and Narrative: “Remarkable that it is language usage that provisionally provides the resistance to the thesis of non-being.”

David is a dilettante who philanders and huffs solvents while pantomiming authority over questions of sempiternality and fears of an artificial super intelligence dooming the whole human scheme in the eternal prolongation of an “eye-icycling to come.” Unburdened by anything resembling epistemic humility—who provides this thesis of non-being anyway, the nontologists?—or methodological rigour, David defers to scientific and philosophical papers alongside recent headlines salacious as Obese American passenger forces Taiwanese flight attendant to wipe his butt on plane.

He quotes everyone from Blaze Foley to Baudrillard, from Arthur C. Clarke to Trailer Park Boys creator Mike Clattenburg, all to add dimension to David’s sole preoccupation: the lost lone love of his sister Catherine. In a catalogue novel dense with ideas and allusions, use of the imperative and counterfactual tenses grants an economy of language that makes many sentences “hilarious and wrenchingly poignant,” as Publishers Weekly referred to the author’s previous work.