I first read this manuscript in a cheap hotel room off the coast of nowhere - salt in my hair, cheap whiskey on the nightstand, a half-eaten sandwich congealing on a plastic tray.
I read it in one fevered sitting, lit by the soft hum of neon outside my window and the sound of waves pretending they cared about my insomnia. By dawn, I knew two things for certain:
One - this is not your father's Odyssey.
Two - the bastard who wrote it has done something both reckless and necessary.
What you hold in your hands is not an academic paper or a polite commentary. It's an excavation: raw, bruised, salt-blooded. It rips the hero myth down to bare ribs and shows you the beating animal beneath. It talks like a drunk saint and curses like a priest with a drinking problem.
I don't know who you are, reader - a tourist, a scholar, a runaway, a sailor of your own shipwrecks - but if you have ever lied your way back to a lover, stared too long at the bottom of a bottle, or woken up certain you'd never come home again, then this book is your confession too.
It won't redeem you. It won't fix you.
But it will remind you, like the old Greek salt-boys did:
the only thing that survives the monsters is the story you dare to tell.
Read it out loud. Keep it dirty.
Go home when you can.
And if you can't?
Tie yourself to the mast,
and sail anyway.
-
A Fellow Nobody, Somewhere Near the Sea 
