| To the extent anyone this much larger than life can
play a minor role in anything,
Character comes to life As it stands, Leary is a biologically dead centenarian Boomer living in a generated reality in the year 2055. He’s channeling between my website and the future. Leary was already something of a mystery when he first appeared to me. I was writing Bangkok Knights, my first book, and a minor character started to come alive. In part a composite of people from my underground mining days in Canada combined with an American oil platform worker I’d once met on a fishing boat in the Andaman Sea, Leary quickly took on real flesh. In Knights, Leary was in his early 40s, and his main Bangkok hangout was Boon Doc’s bar. He turned 50 some years later, in my novel Yawn. At this point in his life, he was partners with Big Toy and Dinky Toy, Boon Doc’s alumni now working in a Pattaya bar call Hot Licks. Leary also ran the next-door Down Down Scuba Center and was writing a book called Half Full, the story of his first half century. Throughout, he’s a fount of pungent aphorisms and near-aphorisms. If you read my book MOM, you’ll meet the 108-year-old Leary, who, at the beginning of the story, lives in the ESSEA Mall, roughly where Bangkok and the Gulf of Thailand’s Eastern Seaboard used to be. With help from mid-21st-century nanomedicine, he’s still firing on most cylinders. He isn’t the main character, by any means, but he does play an important supporting role. Since the events described in MOM, however, his pronouncements on existence have become rather more Olympian. He’s now an ascended ebee -- a “scendent” -- biologically dead yet still living in the year ad 2055 in a generated reality known as Aeolia. He’s making notes towards a second book, this one called Full of It, and he has chosen this website to channel his thoughts from the middle of the Third Millennium, a unique perspective looking back on the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Don’t ask me how all this happened; I haven’t the faintest idea. |
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