The Banjo Players Must Die

The Banjo Players Must Die
Josef Assad
Copyright 2007 Josef Assad

Copyright 2007 Josef Assad This book is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported license. The full license may be viewed at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/legalcode.
For a brief summary of what this means, skip to the License section at the end of this work.
This is released version 1.0. Errata (hah! ) will be found on http://sancairodicopenhagen.com/tbpmd.html. The author may be contacted at [email protected].

IMPORTANT NOTE

This is the plain text edition of this novel. The style relies very heavily on footnotes. You are strongly recommended to read the pdf or doc version of this novel. In this edition, footnotes (of which there are almost 250!) are represented inline (i.e. in the place in the text where they would have been referenced) and are enclosed in square brackets[This would represent a footnote, for example].
You can find better formatted versions of this novel here: http://www.SanCairoDiCopenhagen.com/tbpmd.html

For Chiara, despite the fact that she will never read or like this book, being a Roman Catholic,
For the unwilling,
For the easily amused,
And for anyone who thinks incense and hard work makes the monsters go away.
Chapter 1
: Them, their Banjos, Him, and Those
Of science and logic he chatters As fine and as fast as he can; Though I am no judge of such matters, I'm sure he's a talented man.
Winthrop Mackworth Praed - The Talented Man
No one knew where they came from; their origin was clouded. Oh, there were theories of course, but there was no evidence. All attempts to scour the records of antiquity for clues were fruitless. No matter how far back in history you went, there they were. Running. Screaming. Pleading for mercy and receiving none. Their appearance did not appear to have changed much in the course of several eons; it suited Darwin's proponents well to ignore them, for they did not evolve. They were the universal constant; always there, always persecuted, always the fugitives from the oppressive forces of divine moral rectitude, and always - always - defiantly playing away on their banjos.
* * *
This is the story of several things, all of them individually very consequential but collectively all rather banal and uninspiring. This book brings you the true story of the End of the World, for varying and often very sparse degrees of true, end, and world; this should not dampen your enthusiasm for this historical account, as history shows us time and time again that historical accounts are often worth very little other than the tablet it is chiseled on[With any luck, we can replicate this success at obscuring counterintuitive assertions in unnecessarily long and circuitous sentences many times in this account.].
This story is told from the privileged perspective of one with access to all the insiders. As anyone who reads tabloids will know, that means that this is also an account of whom had sex with whom, when, how, at what expense, and whether they got a discount or not. More intriguingly however, we shall reveal also whom didn't have sex, and we shall also discuss all the different forms of sex for which this holds true. After all, angels are major characters in the story of how the world ends, and angels represent purity[For now.] .
Everything in this account has been fact checked for authenticity[By a crack squad of baboon fetuses.] . For reasons which wouldn't piss off unless you read the entire account through to its end, we cannot determine at which point in human history this account will be read. We have therefore provided historical context and will describe the way the world changed into the disturbing place it was around the time when Doomsday was planned.
* * *
Right up until the beginning of the twenty-first century, the world as we know it had clung - like a determined but very odd cheetah to a clothesline - to a rudimentary semblance of rationality. When the last fast food restaurant closed down in 2044, Western civilization lost its cultural foothold in the world and the Egyptians began their ascendancy. In the words of Dr. Harvey Stromgard[Dr. Stromgard was professor of Miffed Garden Furniture at the Arizona Institute of Everything for which Public Research Funds Are Available.] :
"...in every sense of the word. What was unusual, however, was not the lack thereof, rather the abundance of diminished quantities of such qualities. This failed to have much effect in general, however, though it must be said that the general situation did nudge slightly right and perhaps a little towards the periphery too. All in all, not something one would want to really claim adherence to."
Which is all well until one considers the catastrophic implications which have historically risen as consequence of rigidly determined modalities, especially those considering catastrophic implications.
Concise Account of History, Abridged - Stromgard
The decline of the Western cultural paradigm left behind it a