I write you from a shadowy stool, my leather-seated asylum from the quaking Saturday night/morning/who-can-say spirit alive and a-jive in this underground pit of weekend clubbers. Across the room, past monstrous heads and through the valleys created by mountains of grooving shoulders, I see a lizard chick shaking in a black latex suit. Its sheen reflects purple lights, now green, now deep, deep indigo bunting-blue. Needless to say, I’ve got a migraine. On my way in, I accidentally bumped into the reptilian girl, and her boyfriend grabbed me by the collar. I felt thick needle claws denting my upper back. My feet dangled a foot above the dance floor. Mr. Possessive opened his mouth and screamed at me, his reverberations falling on mosh-deafened ears, while I stared down a gullet half the size of my body. The third circle of Hell — a ring of teeth best rendered by the most tasteless of horror artists — gnashed in a biting off of my head that was, luckily, strictly figurative. My name is Boris Morris. I used to go to your school. That was a good time. Whatever happened?

The full thing’s a bunch of stories for later. There’s plenty of later (too much “later” for me, frankly), because I’m trapped here with nothing better to do. I was thrown onto the Primate Planet a little over one year ago. The expedient download on my new home is that it’s your home, too; “Planet” is a misnomer, and this house of all things really contains everything — all time, all space, all infinity, navigable on one singular plane. Traversal to any possibility of imagination can be made by stepping right or left, if only Monger decides that’s what you shall do. The Word Monger is the summative lord of this place (and by “this place” I mean everything that has and has not ever existed); also my arch-nemesis. So, yes, Forsyth County is in Georgia, of the United States, located in one North America of the Primate Planet. Your lot just gets to enjoy the put-together sensibility of what was once my Earth, too, while I’ve been banished, indefinitely, to the viscous, inconsistent deep-currents of the universe. According to Monger’s Whimsy, I’m sent when and wherever the good Word likes. To do what? That’s what I asked myself for the first long, long while. But I’ve come up with something now. To write. Life of the travel journalist, eh?

Back when I had a life — a home in a world that made any sense — I was a reporter for the world-renowned, non-Pulitzer-prized Denmark Unleashed. Considering that the Word Monger has decided to make things as miserable as possible for me, I’m sure all evidence of my creative output has been erased from your world (as have all other artifacts of my existence, naturally), and you’re reading this asking: “Now, hold on. I’m the number one fan of my school’s newspaper, and I’ve never heard of this staff writer. ‘Boris Morris’? I’m sure I’d remember that one.” Yes, you should. You should also remember our school’s most embarrassing moment: when a crazed just-began junior made local news for the rather loud and public meltdown held in front of the carline one morning, screaming this and that about a trickster god being after ‘er, eventually breaking down, crying, doing insane things that at the time I felt must have been a product of my losing mental control — though now realize were orchestrated by the same puppeteer that launched me into all of this. But, no, you don’t recollect that. And even were your memory unedited by the invasive, meddling fingers of Lord Monger, you wouldn’t know about the next part: where I was taken, locked away after a series of miserably performed psychological exams, lodged in a Tinseltown-rendered white padded room that functioned as my own personal sensory deprivation cell. You wouldn’t know about what I started to see in there: colors began to change, city sounds began to emerge, curious fellows began to pay me visits and tell me all about the wondrous place I’d soon be going. I knew what was coming and I was not crazy. For the past year, I’d been dreaming of the Primate Planet. A colleague, Jade, had shared stories with me, based in some of its metaphysical mores; all of these sessions were met with blaring headaches and all-too-vivid not-quite nightmares. So when I was in that white room, I knew what was to come about. I attempted comfort by convincing myself that I was crazy. You know when you stare at one place too long and you start seeing things? I tried to trick myself into thinking that’s what was happening in the Boris bin. My mind was just turning white walls into other things. But four days into the street that my surroundings had morphed into, I was kicked by a pedestrian and forced out of catatonia. I had no choice but to accept my new life. And so I’ve spent the last ten or so months kicking about here. Knowing no one; knowing nothing; knowing only staggering isolation, the unreliability of time, and the sound physics make when an impish god suddenly decides they shall change: a screech, a lurch, and I’m in a new land.

But now you’re reading this. And I bet you’d like me to explain that. We have time, my friends, we have time. All I’ll say for now is this: thank God for inter-cosmic emails, the public press of Denmark High School, and the fact that you may, you just may, tune in this time next week for the first edition of my ever-ongoing story.