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More Than Ample
Ken Stange
Published by Two Cultures (2009)

“More Than Ample indeed! For the modest price of this meal, one receives a more than ample serving. Oh, it isn’t the size of the portions, but rather the variety of flavours that keep surfacing in rapid succession as one proceeds through the courses. At times sweet, other times sour, occasionally even a bit bitter. And just salty enough to appeal to one’s prurient tastes. You get a good square meal, but one that is never heavy.“
––The Gourmet’s Guide to Literature

“One might call this a philosophical comic novel, but that is probably redundant. What novelists and poets know, but philosophers don’t seem to know, is that the big questions are really just big jokes. Life is just a shaggy dog story.”
––The Philosophist Review

Two Cultures Press (2009)
ISBN: 978-0-9809273-2-0
Softcover (6x9 inches) 156 pages
Personalized signed first edition: $14

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More Than Ample (2009)

Excerpt

...each a bed with an individual history of loving and dying that did not include me—or in the former case only as a footnote. Each with its semen stains and blood stains—mostly someone else's semen, someone else's blood. And each, I knew, with its own residue of human flesh embedded in its core. The dead skin of sleepers!
    I know all about this special mystery: the dead skin of the sleepers. At one point in my pointless life I tried my hand as a vacuum-cleaner salesman. Part of the pitch was showing the customer all the dead skin our Super-Hoover could suck from their mattresses. This was intended to appeal to the horror the middle-class have of their own flesh. It was considered a very big selling point. Every night, it seems, we slough off skin, the dead skin from the outermost layer of the epidermis (the layer called, paradoxically, the “horny” layer), and this dead tissue slides and slithers down through the fabric of the sheets, filtering and weaving on down, on down through the mattress cover,  down,  down, finally

to accumulate in the very core of the mattress. It is no small amount of skin this, for we all constantly throw off dead tissue in great quantities, and remember a third of our lives is spent in bed. God!
    This is a metaphor for my life. I've left my dead skin in so many mattresses over the thirty-three years of my life, mingled my dead flesh with the dead flesh of so many other transients, that it is a wonder some bizarre miracle hasn't come of it; perhaps a hybrid race of zombies spontaneously generated from these myriad flakes of sloughed-off flesh. The intimacy of so much flesh, even dead flesh, must be a sexual event. Surely something somewhere was being procreated. Someday a vandal will slash open an old mattress in some tired room and find encased within a creature without entrails or soul, a thing waiting its moment to emerge from mattress casing like moth from cocoon. And maybe part of it will be me.
    I opened my eyes and looked across the room at the bolt on the door.


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