12-12-12

By John Rachel

Welcome to the parallel universe of 12-12-12. This not what actually happened during 2012. But what unfolds is not more implausible. Nor is it less implausible. It is reality with healthy doses of surreality and comedy, spawned by the tragic absurdity of our times. It is laugh-out-loud brain food for hungry minds.

2012 was the year America played a game of chicken with destiny itself.

Everyone like it or not was on board for the ride.

The pedal was to the metal.

People hung on for dear life and hoped for the best.

Everyone wanted to believe that those behind the wheel knew what they were doing.

But even the most foolhardy gamblers weren’t making bets.

They knew a single unwavering truth.

Destiny never blinks.

Twenty three year old Noah Tass, like most ordinary Americans, was trying in the midst of all of the chaos, corruption and incompetence, to just live life — have his little piece of the pie and a few laughs along the way.

He thought he had conquered the main obstacle to his happiness by escaping his home town in the hayseed heartland of America, the little blackhead on the face of America where he had grown up and spent most of his life.

Little did he know that taking this simple step would send him tumbling into the vortex of events unfolding in an America that was broken and sure to make things worse by trying to fix it.

Destiny never blinks.

But it does occasionally cut loose with a thunderous belly laugh.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Melange Books, LLC
• Release date: Mar 18, 2012
• ISBN: 9781612353159

John Rachel

John Rachel has a B. A. in Philosophy, has traveled extensively, is a songwriter, music producer, novelist, and an evolutionary humanist. Since 2008, when he first embarked on his career as a novelist, he has had nine fiction and three non-fiction books published. These range from four satires and a coming-of-age trilogy, to a political drama and now a crime thriller. The three non-fiction works were also political, his attempt to address the crisis of democracy and pandemic corruption in the governing institutions of America.With the publication of Love Connection, his recent pictorial memoir, Live From Japan!, and the spoof on the self-help crazes of the 80s and 90s, Sex, Lies & Coffee Beans, he has three more novels in the pipeline: Mary K, the story of a cosmetics salesgirl with an IQ of 230, the surreal final book of his End-of-the-World Trilogy; and finally, The Last Giraffe, an anthropological drama and love story involving both the worship and devouring of giraffes. It deliciously unfolds in 19th Century sub-Saharan Africa.The author’s last permanent residence in America was Portland, Oregon where he had a state-of-the-art ProTools recording studio, music production house, a radio promotion and music publishing company. He recorded and produced several artists in the Pacific Northwest, releasing and promoting their music on radio across America and overseas.John Rachel now lives in a quiet, traditional, rural Japanese community, where he sets his non-existent watch by the thrice-daily ringing of temple bells, at a local Shinto shrine.