DJ Swykert is a former 911 operator.
His work has appeared in The Tampa Review, Detroit News, Monarch
Review, Lunch Ticket, Zodiac Review, Barbaric Yawp and Bull. His
books include Children of the Enemy, Alpha Wolves, Maggie Elizabeth
Harrington and The Death of Anyone. You can find him at:
www.magicmasterminds.com/djswykert .He is a wolf expert.
"Like my character, Jack, I have always
been attracted to the great mysteries of life. While Quantum
Mechanics continues to search for a Theory of Everything, so have I.
And I can write with authority about addiction, rehabilitation and
jail. If you add the desire for a real and loving relationship into
the equation you come up with the story of The Pool Boy’s
Beatitude. Though it is fiction, it’s perhaps the most cathartic
piece of writing I have ever produced. Not only does Jack discover
anomalies to the large physical world we exist in, but also poignant
truths about his own personal little universe.
"In his search for the God particle Jack
Joseph has lost control of the most important particle of existence,
himself. Jack’s intellect may have expanded at the speed of light,
but his emotional development is mired in the darkness of addiction.
Without change Jack is accelerating towards a personal collision that
would render his interest in the cosmic one irrelevant.
"Jack is a drop-out physicist cleaning
swimming pools to support a lifestyle of addiction and detachment. He
has a wife divorcing him, a wealthy woman seducing him and the
justice system convicting him. Jack’s personal cosmos is spiraling
out of control. When he met Sarah his universe further expanded. The
Gravitational Constant he studied at university lacked the velocity
with which their galaxies rushed toward one another. It was a life
changing Big Bang. A new and brighter Jack was created and he found
his supreme happiness. But there was a lot of space junk in the form
of addiction and legal consequences standing in the way of his pool
boy quest toward bliss."
This is a brief excerpt from the book:
I believe God thinks in numbers. Most of what I know best can be
described with an equation, numbers predicting an outcome, relating
the position, velocity, acceleration and various forces acting on a
body of mass, and state this relationship as a function of time. And
isn’t that what we are, what everything is: accelerated particles
in space time.
And this velocity of motion is what creates gravity and holds
everything together. But what creates the motion? I think about this
shit all the time. Until I feel like I only know one thing: nothing.
 |
I sat out on the grass and opened a bottle of Mad Dog 20-20. Drank it
to the bottom, sucked it in like a black hole swallowing light.
Alcohol goes through the brain in stages, first the cerebral cortex,
the thinking brain. A friendlier, more daring person emerges, and
becomes ever more creative, imaginative, as the drug continues deeper
into the brain. Last to go is the limbic brain. That’s when you go
numb.
I got ultimate this night, left the past, present, and flew into my
future. It was brilliant, until in the morning, when I stared into
the eyes of a cop. I realized I had evolved, I was homeless. Passed
out on the lawn I had merged my present into my future and lost the
past. I had become what I refused to change. There are no corners in
a round expanding infinite universe. But I had turned one.
The Pool Boy’s Beatitude can be
ordered at bookstores or purchased direct at:
You can read more about this author and his work at
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