JANUARY 13, 2006.  In an ideal world, hunger would signify a mild craving between meals.  War, a card game played with two or more full decks.  Terror would be the desired result of your favorite horror story.  Child abuse, the blatant mistreatment of teddy bears.  Cancer no more threatening than a zodiac sign.  Only the bad would die young in a perfect world.  And, on the aforementioned date, I would receive a letter from a publisher requesting the manuscript for Tome One of my Trilogy Of Trilogies, commenced nearly a decade ago.

Why at this particular historic juncture — nay, herstoric — should I finally achieve a breakthrough?  It was Friday The Thirteenth, also the day before my birthday.  A good omen, I perceived, since my life changed drastically for better and for worse on a Friday The Thirteenth twenty years before.  I was turning forty-seven (that’s roughly three thousand in feline years, factoring the nine lives), though I looked thirty-seven at most, and it was just plain time.

More importantly I was ready, I felt my work was ready, for belated long-awaited recognition and approval.

Despite losing yet another short story contest.  (What did they know?)

Despite believing on countless prior occasions it was time.  (What did I know then?)

Despite daring to hope again and again only to be shot down.  Having the courage to dream after being crushed repeatedly, consistently, redundantly, by the judge-mental gavel blows of disappointment and rejection.

Despite an evident curse, my lousy ill-fated karma when it came to “The Fickle Finger” of fortune.

It was definitely, decidedly, just about time.

(Author’s Note:  Read the fine print.  Speaking of time, in case You didn’t notice I’ve begun at the end, even if it’s not the actual conclusion for my opus nonfiction epic that has been in progress umpteen years.  Seventeen to be exact.  I’m a different person now who deserves a say.  And suddenly, out of the deep blue sea or wild blue yonder depending on your viewpoint — whether You happen to be standing right side up or upside down — it was time to complete this journalistic trek of dreck so I might refocus my attention on fiction.  The draft hereby begun will be the end, paperclipped to the beginning.  Or something like that.  Remixed and resumed, the pages of a life devoted to the page.  A meddled medley, a potluck potpourri porridge of linguistic artistic autistic linguini.)

(But why, You are supposed to wonder, should a candy-stuffed papier-mâché donkey — alluding to the title — symbolize my grimly euphoric existence thus far?)

(You’ll have to read the book.  You can’t expect me to give the plot away.  This is a preamble, not a free-amble.  A prepostulatious ramble.  A foregone conclusive afterword.)

Or was it?  Time, that is.  Was it finally irrefutably time?

            (There are too many questions!  Skip to the end, I don’t care.  Which is, if You may recall, no longer the end but the beginning.)

            (This Time business can be confusing.)

(Ahem.)

(Footnote-slash-Disclaimer:  An official ending has yet to be attached and subsists only in the future tense.  As time-warping has not been availed to the public, The Reader will have to wait and see how the story goes.  Unless said Reader is from the future.)

(Pssssst.)

(Better yet, if the entire tale has already been released beginning to end, or end to beginning, or end over end . . . I urge You to skip these assiduous asides and find out faster.  I know I should save the denouement material for later, leave You dangling by the participled gnawed-off fingernails of suspense.  Alas, in the genre of Reality I lack the diabolic mind for such devices.  I am almost certain I’m absolutely certain to blurt it out.)

(Ahem!)

(What’s that?  You’ve solved the riddle of the title?  It represents the giddy quest for glory?  As monkeys fly, however, there is much else about my paranormaldoxic uninconformed outwonderlandish Ozmotic life with which to keep You enthralled.  At least entertained.)

(Nonsense, You claim?  Follically absurdist folderol?  Of course!  But every word is true, in a creatively unfictitious manner of speech.)

(Side Aside:  Don't despair.  The narrative won't always be this laden with adjectives, superlatives, and pretextual pretensions.)

(Is there an echo?)

(Yodel-eh-hee-hoo!)

(???)

(Okay then.)

Upon its surface, Friday The Thirteenth validated the legendary hype.  No affirmative life-altering letter arrived.  Or even the polite refusal of my submission after a three-month wait — a frantic interval of book polishing and revisioning, of last-second thoughts and nit-pickety retouches.

My incessant worry that a response had been stuck into the wrong post office box was heightened by stray envelopes received for other people.  It could easily happen, especially to me.

This concern was increased by the paranoid suspicion my return postage on the enclosed Self-Addressed Stamped Envelope might prove insufficient due to an unforeseen raise in the price of stamps.  Sure enough, stamps went up two cents during this precise period!

For whatever reason, there was still no reply.  Triggering further anxiety that if a rejection had been misdelivered, my innovative ideas for the entire project (including the "trilogy of trilogies" concept) were stolen.  Were intolerably possessed by some anonymous party, one of the myriad prolific aspiring perspiring wannabe scribes like myself.  But clearly the type to pilfer from those with genuine talent, who intentionally neglected to restitute my property.

This was no simple identity theft.  It was the hijacking of Originality, of the pulse and voice, the very essence that flows through my veins!

And yet, from a disastrous day’s ashes were salvaged a few promising scraps of positivity.