Introduction: Weirdos

People collect all kinds of crap. I knew a guy named Wedge who collected his toe nails and stuck them together with gunk from his ears. Now he’s got this giant sphere of toenails glued with earwax. I knew another guy named Gleet who collected used condoms from the local trash dump. He filled the condoms with crank case oil, mounted them on used chopsticks and stuck them out in his backyard. He was also a chopstick collecter, natch. Now he’s got a small forest of dirty pennants in his backyard, a demented memorial for America's war-dead.

There was this other guy, a roadhouse midget named Shortcake. Rednecks at the roadhouse liked to stick a harness on Shortcake and toss him down a greased ramp. That’s how good old boys entertain themselves out in the boonies. But Shortcake knew how to get back at his tossers. He’d ambush them in the parking lot after they were good and drunk. He’d knock them cold with a lead-filled baseball and slice off their earlobes with a rusted scalpel.

Shortcake was an earlobe collector and an artist. Back in his trailerpark atelier he’d dip those earlobes in colored glue and paste them to a large canvas. The result always put me in mind of Van Gogh. A trailer trash Van Gogh on speed and acid. Shortcake was a psychopath for sure though not a particularly dangerous one. I knew he was a psychopath because I was one too, still am. It takes one to know one as they say.

We got along like a house on fire with a cannibal fuckfest raging inside. I mean me and Shortcake did. I was a psychopath like he was and I was an artist like he was. I'm still an artist of sorts, though I don’t do the kind of art I used to back then. We had a third thing in common. I was a collector like he was except I didn’t collect earlobes. I collected the nutsacks of guys I killed and disintegrated. I collected the scrotums (scrota) of the child-torturers and wife-beaters I slaughtered and shredded for the sake of art and humanity. But I don’t collect scrotums anymore. I collect weirdos is what I do now.

I locate genuinely strange people and get them to tell me their stories. I record their stories and collect them. It’s my life’s work now, something I love to do. It’s spiritually rewarding and I make a decent living off it, can’t ask for much more. I do yearn for the old days sometimes when I was flaying the flesh of evil men and transfiguring their death-torment through art. But I can’t go back to that. I’m old now for one thing, sixty four years old, though I look about forty four. And I made a deal with Uncle Sam. No more killing now Zorn, they said, you start that shit again, we're gonna come after you hard and fast. Okay fellas, I said, no more of that, I promise to be a decent law-abiding citizen.

And that’s what I am. A decent, law-abiding citizen who lives alone in a Dixie log cabin and records weird stories for a living. Some of the stuff I record goes straight to Alien Wreckage, a popular print magazine that features UFO’s, werewolves, vampires, zombies and such. They pay me pretty well for the stuff I send them because it’s always compelling and because the founder/editor of Alien Wreckage knows I’m a former serial killer, the most noble and esthetically refined serial flogger of all time. The man digs and respects me, what can I say.

He also knows I keep the best material for myself. He says we’d make millions if we published that material in book form but I’m not interested. I respect my weirdos too much. They don’t deserve to be sold out for a bag of filthy lucre. The people whose stories I keep in storage aren’t just weirdos. They’re geniuses and prophets. They’re the most extraordinary people in North America and among the most extraordinary on planet earth. I paid them for the stories they told me, paid them well. But they didn’t give a fiddler's fuck about that. They would’ve told me their stories for free, only because they recognized I was one of them. They saw I was a fellow weirdo, a fellow prophet, a fellow genius. That’s the only reason they talked to me and I’m honored that they did.

I was going to have their stories published post mortem, after we were all dead and gone, every one of us. But I’ve changed my mind about that. I’m going to feature their stories here, in this space, for everyone to read. I decided to put them here because of the times we’re living in. We’ve got us a country run by fascist assholes bent on devouring the planet. We’ve got us a planet that’s near dead from being gang-raped by corporate pigs. We’ve got us a legion of media whores drooling lies as they fellate the Man.

The grand inquisitors of consensus reality have failed us. What we need now are voices from the margins. We need prophets speaking to us from beyond the pale. We need purveyors of Chaos Magick and Crazy Wisdom. The stories presented here are visions. Bizarre, phantasmagoric visions rendered in words. They’re testimonials of the sort rhymed by the Ancient Mariner. Readers will be tempted to dismiss them as mere lunatic ravings. That temptation should be resisted. Judgement should be reserved. Some of these stories may be literally true. Others may serve to enlighten, to point us out of the nightmare of the present age. If that's good enough for me it ought to be good enough for you.