Editor's Note: Over the next few months, we will be publishing excerpts from Kane X. Faucher's masterwork-in-progress, 'Tales Pinned on a Complete Ass: A Double-Fisted Travelogue of London, Canada and Romania at Large'. This is the first installment, the Introduction.

Goddamn it, you ridiculous and brute bastard! Where are you? I've been bashing these keys like some coke-fueled monkey in an experiment gone awry for so long with nary an acknowledging tip of the hat by means of email or courier pigeon. Sleep is for the weak, the cretinous, and people named Ed to whose snoring you can set a watch to. For sure, and certain. I've forsaken the zone of the blanket and the pillow to follow this very strange piper-rhythm known by you theory wiseacres as "writing". That's right: I'm doing needlepoint narrative, something you can hang over your fireplace mantel with all its frou-frou bamboo shoots and junior's consolation trophies. I'm hunched over this terrible machine, whipping mercilessly away at this text like I was some demented octopus, perhaps unfurling the Great Manifesto Parchment that streams and screams.Dammit, I'm too fast to write! I'm typing and voice-recording at the same time, making sign language with my feet to a scared assistant who is just waiting for her opportunity to club me in the head and run. She's already edging away as we speak.reaching for the crowbar.The hate and nasty energy in this room has reached an unbearable vibe, an intensity that borders on the kind of pure madness from which there is no return.

CLASS IS NOW IN SESSION-PLEASE TAKE YOUR SEATS OR TAKE THIS JOB AND CASH IT.

Coming of age stories ought to be sent to the incinerator, accompanied on that last mile by some drunken hooded axesmith who smells of grog and rancid sausage. Only psalm-squirting Gideons with their droopy wolf-eyes and coiffed manners ought to read and write the pulpular drivel that is advertised in the bookseller's Fear Matrix as "coming of age". I have tried to make an antonymy of it, a kind of hellbroth, steam-fisted tale that works in reverse gear, that deadly making of the hypotenuse with a vehicle when one sees off in the distance a roadblock of police officers with the itchy desire to press your flesh with their new batons.

And that is the future, folks. If you go racing into the age with your head full of dreams, I have a bettor's instinct that puts the odds 100-1 against that it will be mashed out of you as your head is squashed like an over-ripe cantaloupe. Stories that come of age are written primarily by blinded rats in a panic, never knowing the dimensions of the cage where the walls close in at about an agonizing inch and hour. Such things are the mark of a scrambling neurotic, climbing over everything in a frenzied and confused way.

But enough of all that. Travel is broadening, they say. With the price of airfare these days, you better learn something because it won't get any cheaper to travel once we're forced to use ethanol and cow flop to fuel our planes as gasoline jumps the mark to three hundred USD a barrel. I made my way to Romania , which is an odd place to break the hymen on a passport, a two-headed eagle stamp where the claws seem to hold vicious barbs, and where the flag is the colour of shredded clown ice cream.

I hate planes. Turbulence gives me the croaking fear. I once flew a routine commuter flight from Toronto to Ottawa on a discount airliner (that is now defunct; reportedly for having the subpar safety mandate of regions in Darfur where life is measured by the Cheap and the Short). The plane engine "died" at 30 000 feet, and I could hear the old thing kicking over and sputtering. I knew then that this was it . My life just wasn't worth the extra twenty bucks I could have plunked down on one of the Established Airlines. Luckily, the engine was resurrected, but then we hit serious turbulence. And when you see the stewardesses strapping themselves down and their salesmanship grins collapse like tents in a carnival takedown, how could one not think that this is perhaps The End? Strange and crazy thoughts roamed along the dim alleyways of my brain.I began thinking on pure survival mixed with a devil-may-care attitude of having the last cigarette.Perhaps if I could round up all the pillows from the compartments and make myself a fort in the back bathroom, I could stand a chance when we went down like a screaming discount comet into some back-rural field where acres of illegal marijuana plants were tied down and disguised from routine flyovers by RCMP helicopters. My seatmate was some sort of giddy wannabe cartoonist who was far too generous with showing his work, and expecting the same generousity of my giving it praise. Fortunately, the captive social debacle was abruptly interrupted by the engine failing. We were united by fear in that moment, and I think that seat still bears the deep grooves of my nails having dug themselves a firm hold on the armrests for the duration of that flight.

And now I was flying some Hungarian airline. I've had only a few dealings with Hungarians in general. One was my thesis supervisor who claimed to be the reincarnation of Friedrich Nietzsche. Another was a mother-daughter combo in a gaudy gypsy-style quasi-Budapest restaurant who, after I finished my goulash, leaned heavy on me and my professor to run away with them both to Morocco . Again, fiscal prudence was determining my flight pattern and plans. But I would be prepared this time: as soon as we were airborne and people could unbuckle, I would press the stewardess for three double-shots of whiskey, with which I would chase sleeping pills so that I would have no recollection of crossing any ocean called the Atlantic for the near nine hours I would be stuck on a plane that was jabbering in a Slavic language I would never even begin to understand.

I had staked out the temporal borders of my journey abroad. I knew my departure and arrival on a non-refundable economy ticket. I would be in Romania from the beginning of May to the end of June, but I had no idea of where I would be staying within that eight-week bracket. It was all on a whim, supported by my maniac Romanian supervisor. And if I ended up penniless and rolled to near death by local Romi before the end of June return, too bad. I would be trapped for two months in a walnut-tree country once run by a crooked dictatorial shoemaker who looked like Gepetto's retarded cousin.

I usually land on my feet, so I wasn't worried too much.Even if what my feet landed on was slimy or shaky. Never mind that my grasp of the language was infantile or that I had no maps to lead my way. Bars and clubs are universal features in every land, and I was sure to find likeminded or near-minded people who would take pity on my nomadic plight, perhaps giving me lodging in one of their closets for a night. Language barriers are dissolved by the border-busting virtues of alcohol. I did not fear the prospect of culture shock, unless it was that the country of Romania itself that would doubtless have to deal with the shock of having a crazed, gibbering maniac like me vibrating like a crooked tuning fork in their space-but I was sure that they had centuries of experience and preparation in dealing with my type . I may come from a land where the bars shut up tight at 2 or 3 in the morning, but my fundamental Being never bought into it. I am in no way very Canadian, but I doubt there are a people on earth that could-or would want to-lay claim to my kind of prototypical person. But the cruel, savage tales of my being landlocked in a country that resembled a puffer fish appear in this volume, and I need not repeat the juicy bits here.

Anyhow, what you hold is a compendium of sorts, a blended varia of small tales and scattered musings in quasi-essay style as they so came to be arranged like some textual bouquet of stinkflowers and nightshade. This is indeed my opus infama .And what you thought was a chocolate éclair you stuffed in your craw was something else entirely, given that unmistakable look of horror and disbelief in your eyes. It is a double travelogue-covering the ever-illustrious London Ontario and Romania . Come visit London , Ontario , home of the Labatt beer brewery, the University of Lavender , and Jesus scheming on every corner as downtown empties out like rats on a sinking ship toward the golden kingdom of scum-trodden suburbs. But this is where I am stationed right now, folks, right in the middle of some degree.

Well, the horse is around the bend now, in a dead heat on the last stretch toward the Great Ribbon of Winning. The jockey is an ill-reputed cokehead with myriad social problems, but the money is more on the horse than the little elf who rides it. Perhaps all of this will one day make sense when the Great Craps Dealer of the universe settles the Score. Until then, I denature the age, and sink the coming thereof into a resolute kind of going of age that lets panic seize the luggage of escape down the runway to the quickest plane leaving now.

There have been several abortive attempts to draw this thing up, and several computers between me and Glory. Well, I'm of the technological type that believes one can give a vicious thwack to dislodge the mal from the function on any machine, especially when they start upchucking their "illegal operation, performing unexplained gibberish-induced shutdown".Many a time I have found myself roaring at the very top level of my lungs, GODDAMN YOU REAGAN-ERA HUNK OF INCOMPETENT CRAP!! before making a small tribal notch on my intimidating shamanic staff to denote another victim of the information era. The last fiendish and foul lemon was an 11 year-old desktop. Perhaps it was a hundred years ago when a piece of tech of 11 years was still relevant , as though it would be considered as new as if it had plopped out of the industrial womb with its birth sheen.but those were the days when progress was much slower, I suppose, a potato sack race at a picnic-now the race is with an amphetamine-charged centipede that keeps on tripping on its own feet in expensive shoes. I have said things to my computer(s) that, if said to another living being, would have me locked up for multiple life sentences. I have twisted myself purple blowing up at these instruments of frustration, and I am not known for having a short fuse whatsoever. As we speak, faceless reader, I've had to restart this bloody machine six times in response to critical errors and illegal operations, the latter of which infuriate my sense of (non)understanding. This mechanical failure and the incompetence of the whole industry has led me down that pricey path where I am now on another computer, the old one having succumbed to necessary "adjustments"-at least on the order of my storming out of the house in big black boots to form a hypotenuse between my house and the nearest bar while the monitor lay on its side with a claw hammer in its face, the tower in the sink, and the keyboard sticking out of the toilet. I may have did some necessary stomping upon the devices, but let's not get crude and brutal.Let us just say that nothing satisfying comes of berating machines that do not do one's bidding unless one acts on the threats now and again.

As I bullwhip the final elements of this long-bore introduction, I have just received an urgent email notification. The subject line read as follows: "Regain control over your financial destiny the Christian Way ! Get the credit you deserve." Blathering debt-policing credit-control Jesus on a spec-effects cross with searchlights aimed at the sky! I thought the crazy mouthy bastard already died for all my sins, debts included, and that my financial destiny was a Settled Matter. Apparently not, and new emendations are popping up everywhere. In this Age of Aggressive Ignorance and the Fashionably Stupid, there is no corkscrew shitspike of Justice that will serve up truth serum on the rocks-only dignified life up against the ropes and Hope pinned to the mat. Wisdom like that comes straight from the windowless rooms of the Hopelessly Dumb. What is there left to do now but pull down the blinds and go to sleep? Well, if only sleep came that easy to those of us in the perpetual throes of panic and action.I'm lucky to draw an hour or two of snooze from Mr. Sandman, and that on bad credit. Indeed, the credit I deserve, with Jesus as my co-signer. And here I am, at minutes before 4 am , with a rattling throat infection, an empty fridge, and my guts feeling like they are being pulled through St. Peter's needle. I may be falling into a kind of strange, hell-rip quart-mania since I puffed my brave chest forward with an empty wallet and said No to another Saturday at the bar. It really claws something terrible at my prospects at being able to horizontalize with some finer flesh, but I doubt that even my satyr's mania could outpace this wretched sickness I am beguiled by as the sun threatens to pop up and Ruin Everything like some big blinking button of vengeance. Even the prospects of sleep, which are already a dim and farfetched bet anyhow. Okay, you nimble-hipped noddle-thatchers: let's drop these intro shenanigans and go right for the bones.

Note: in the whirlygigging exercise of double-travelogizing, the chapters will alternate viciously between Canada and Romania. Hold fast to your drink.

Para bellum , kiddies,

KXF, Timisoara , Romania .