by Chris Markel

Created on: July 25, 2008

The plastic rhythmic clatter of the keys softly shuffled through the air with each word that his fingertips formed on the screen. To him, the sound was a mockery to the art of writing prose. He preferred the snapping, metallic, clickity-clack of a typewriter, rather than this noise from the computers keyboard. But he had already grown accustom to the technological ease and speed of the cybor machine, the words flowed freely, almost effortlessly, allowing him to write more effectively.

Playing Softly behind him came the lyrics of Jim Morrison.
Depending on his mood at the time, if he didn't play the Doors, he played something from
Beethoven at a low enough volume that it wouldn't distract him while he worked.
But now Morrison's voice grabbed him:

"I've been down so god damned long that it looks like up to me.
Why don't some of you people come on and set me free...."

Xgin Reid paused. Smiled. And sat motionless drifting into a moment of nostalgia, then went back to his work:

"After Ernest Hemingway shot himself, real heroes were ignored, mocked or belittled.
Then Arlin Spector's Magic Bullet Theory was a joke to a murder and My Li was a murder within a joke. The Watergate Plumbers became the clowns in the center ring of Tricky Dick's I'm Not a Crook Circus. The Great Society's corn pone leaders spun their lies around their icons, masking the farce they had created after killing Martin and Bobby, who symbolized North America's last chance of being truly the hope of the world and humanity."

These were the first words he wrote since the loss of his first manuscript. He had worked five years with the research and rewriting of the opus and was close to finishing it when he lost it because of a bad love affair. Before, many distractions and set-backs kept him from fulfilling his desire to become a full time writer, plunging him into periods of monumental dis pare; But his last foible was a gruesome struggle he almost lost and nearly broke him.
But he was writing again and that was all that counted now.

His given name at birth was Christian Reid. But later in life, as a protest against the hypocrisies of Christianity, he changed the spelling of his name to Xgin. Then used it as a pen name when he attempted to launch his writing career in earnest.

In his early years, he had done many things. He had played college football and boxed semi pro. He served in Vietnam just before the pull-out. Reid was even a police officer for a period of five years. During his college years, he

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