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    Akrasia
    Akrasia
    Akrasia
    Ebook112 pages1 hour

    Akrasia

    By Don A Lashomb

    ()

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    About this ebook

    A robot endlessly navigating a snowy wilderness in search of people who aren't there. Two lovers trying to feel good about not having children. A girl and her siblings listening to their grandmother's old stories during a storm. An artist responding to questions about his comeback after a coma. A futuristic train circumnavigating the globe, hiding from the sun. AKRASIA is a longform poetic work somewhat reminiscent of T.S. Eliot's "Waste Land". Various narratives loop together like interlinked Moebius strips, obeying a logic not unlike that of a David Lynch movie or a David Bowie concept album.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDon A Lashomb
    Release dateMay 26, 2014
    ISBN9781311298461
    Akrasia
    Author

    Don A Lashomb

    donalashomb[at]gmail[dot]com

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      Book preview

      Akrasia - Don A Lashomb

      Akrasia

      By Don A Lashomb

      Smashwords Edition

      Copyright 2014 Don A Lashomb

      License Notes

      Thank you for downloading this ebook. Although this book has been provided for free, it remains the copyrighted property of the author and should not be reproduced, copied, or distributed for commercial or non-commercial purposes. If you enjoyed it, please encourage others to download their own copy via official channels so that the total number of copies and readers can be more accurately gauged.

      Quoted materials (including interpolations and deliberate misquotes) remain copyright of their original authors or current legal holders. These phrases are used and reproduced here under the fair use doctrine for commentary and criticism.

      Cover artwork shows filtered photograph of baby turtle on shore of Cranberry Lake, NY, overlaid with image from the Life computer game created by John Horton Conway.

      Table of Contents

      Introduction: ‘How to view this text…’

      Akrasia

      I. Land of the Laughing Death

      II. All That Jizz (And No Kids)

      III. Cozy Storm

      IV. ComaDoze

      V. The Train of Fools

      VI. Eleventy Billion Customers Sold

      A New Homophobia

      i. Snow Zone

      ii. ‘Impossibly Innocent Princess’

      iii. Journal Entrées

      iv.

      v. Reverse Gengineering

      vi. Confidential Retort!

      Acknowledgements

      About the Author

      •

      Introduction:

      ‘How to view this text…’

      About half of the sections that follow are written in a poetic style based on full-length line rhyming. They can be read as blank verse, or they can be rapped—it is the prerogative of the reader.

      In order to display things properly on your device, text size may need to be adjusted. I composed everything (in Microsoft Word) based on the screen width of my Kindle version 3.4. I’ve noticed that my Word-to-Kindle conversions shortened the length of italicized and capitalized words, and my composition made use of this, because my tendency is to cram as much into every line as possible. Whether or not all this means that other readers on other devices will find many sentences with stray words hanging alone on separate lines, I don’t know. Again, if at all possible, text size should be adjusted so as to eliminate that kind of unsightly stuff.

      You also might try flipping your eReader horizontally.

      The sections that do not employ full-line rhyming can obviously stand to have the text size increased.

      Or maybe none of this is important to you and broken lines at larger font sizes would not hinder your reading experience. That would be great.

      Regardless, the intended goal is for the poetic sections to have verses that span the entire width of the page. The opening of the first section is meant to look something like this:

      If your first page looks something like that, then the rest of the text, with all its later eccentricities, should appear as I intended.

      Thanks very much for reading.

      Please note that if you are downloading an early copy of this book (late May 2014), then be sure to check back in a few weeks to download a new one. I have no way of testing certain formatting stuff before uploading to Smashwords and running it through their processor. So in the coming weeks I will be adjusting certain aspects once I see how they actually come out on the other end, across various platforms.

      •

      Akrasia

      A robot endlessly navigating

      a snowy wilderness in search

      of people who aren’t there. Two

      lovers trying to feel good about

      not having children. A girl and

      her siblings listening to their

      grandmother’s old stories during

      a storm. An artist responding to

      questions about his comeback

      after a coma. A futuristic train

      circumnavigating the globe,

      hiding from the sun.

      I. Land of the Laughing Death

      That’s what the place was named by its old natives.

      The adventurers, soldiers of fortune and ‘creatives’

      then came to visit, invest, and help—but ended up

      ‘addicting primitives to progress & modern getup.’

      Your folks knew the story; every human heard it.

      The movie adaptations: hateful, self-hating, turgid.

      Could they imagine how irrelevant such chronicles

      have become centuries later, after a once-tropical

      island of hyenas, scorpions, & masters of the jungle

      has been terraformed into a deciduous ice tundra?

      Sent to seek survivors, equipped with solar battery,

      my robot life has no comparison. It is satisfactory.

      When a tree falls here, it doesn’t make a sound:

      snow always muffles it before it hits the ground.

      The air is colder than the snow. Not that I’d know;

      my thermometer broke at one hundred five below.

      Creator, if you get this, know I’m broken. I failed.

      I have found no live targets. My circuit’s derailed.

      When compelled to pause, I feel a false freedom.

      DEACTIVATE me. I cannot abide what I’ve become.

      My feedback is beautiful nothingness. For instance,

      the horizon gives impressions of infinite distance.

      It is whiteness all around, ground melting into sky.

      When there are no reference points, I want to die

      or else live. Retrieve me. Make me a real person.

      Built to seek and find, I

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