Pie Square

By d'ettut

Pie Square is a story of the most remarkable fast food chain ever conceived. It is rapidly spreading across the world, devouring its devotees, and creating enormous wealth for its owners. It supplies not only sustenance for the body, but for the mind and spirit too. Its all enveloping philosophies are moulding the youth of the world for an impending revolution that will turn global society upside down.

This is a story of “coincidence” and how various sequences of events can lead to power, fame and wealth. It is a tale of delusion, split personality, and divergent thinking. It is satire aimed at the fast food industry, its bizarre executives, the powerful forces of advertising, and the cancerous growth of big business. Youth is examined in terms of how it is exploited and of its wasted potential and how early experiences affect later life. There is nostalgia for the sixties and seventies; yet a wealth of comment on video games, junk food and computer technology, the clichés of today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tellwell Talent
• Release date: Aug 7, 2013
• ISBN: 9780992300890

d'ettut

d’ettut is an enigma and intends to stay that way. They have no vested political interests apart from a desire to help facilitate a movement which could bring about an equitable global society. They do not aspire to any particular role in such a movement nor do they wish to gain anything financially. The books are intended to assist in the quest to help the world gain social fairness.Their literary style varies. None of it is intended to be entertaining. It is confronting, didactic and enlightening (one hopes). They write about social justice and target youthful, very literate, Harry Potter-type readers who are now real-world savvy and, like Harry, are bursting to take on the establishment. d’ettut’s first four works are presented as novels and describe social despondency in all its manifestations.Greenwars (1998), the first novel, essentially covers the fact that technology and its evolution can outstrip social evolution. Moral and ethical development of society is not able to keep pace with its own driving technology. This is all described in the form of an animal allegory; a kind of 21st century Animal Farm.The second novel, Pie Square (2000), describes a different aspect of social evolution. In this situation it is the benign exploitation of youth through a highly sophisticated interactive electronic based fast food chain. Using this device young people are groomed for a more creative and constructive contribution to society.In Vampire Cities (2000) the brashness, the harshness, of unfettered capitalism is the main theme. But the subthemes rock!Amber Reins Fall (2006) looks in detail at an individual struggling in the 1960s and early 1970s to come to terms with contemporary society and the need for there to be a progressive evolution towards a moral betterment. The main protagonist invents the self-help concept.The fifth work, OWL: One World League (2017), is neither fiction nor fact. It is a literary work called fusion fiction which creates a ‘sugar coated political treatise’ condemning overpopulation, encouraging world government and issuing a clarion call to form a new global cyber-democracy ‘before it’s too late’; ‘before the elite snuff out social media’.Fusion fiction they define as literary ‘bisociation’, to borrow a term used by Koestler and Edward de Bono. It’s a pairing of semi fictional plots with slabs of ‘borrowed’ and authentic text taken selectively from journals relevant to their thesis with no formal quotation or referencing. d’ettut says, ‘Like Andy Warhol paintings of unacknowledged Campbell’s soup cans, this is a collage of written down ideas, a creative plagiarism, to send a cerebral message.’OWL is supplemented by the website http://owlvoter.com/ which dares readers to unite and light the fire of revolution (or is it transformation?) for 21st century redemptive politics.

Book preview

Pie Square

by

d’ettut

Copyright 2013 d’ettut

All rights reserved

Cover illustration © Danny Pantic 2000

This is an IndieMosh book

brought to you by MoshPit Publishing

an imprint of Mosher’s Business Support Pty Ltd

http://www.indiemosh.com.au

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to the place of purchase and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

FOREWORD

Dear Reader,

Coincidence always strains credibility; but then again, coincidence is the very essence of the remarkable. The mundane should not be reported; the remarkable has to be. The facts as reported in this book are true, although information from some diary extracts and notes has been filled out in retrospect. Here I have described events as well as my memory allows to the author, d’ettut.

The author has asked me to whom the book should be dedicated, or who should be acknowledged. There is only one person. Teforp!

Dr Carl Olde

PROLOGUE

Are you the new person drawn toward me?

To begin with take warning, I am surely far different from

what you suppose;

Do you suppose you will find me in your ideal?

Do you suppose yourself advancing on real ground toward a

real heroic man?

Have you no thought O dreamer that it may be all Maya.

Walt Whitman

SOMETIMES RELUCTANT MEN are forced to comment about their good fortune. I have been thrust into that situation by a marvelous being, who daily grows more mystical, more remote. I feel that if the opportunity is not grasped now to relate a series of incidents that have given me wealth, power and peace of mind, something beautiful will be lost forever.

The giant of a man who catalysed these events, who could conceivably be the instrument of a perfect future for all mankind, could disappear, could fade undetected from the very cosmos he intuited so well, flickering onto and off this gleaming orb like a speck of rust. The man who can produce blueprints for human harmony and success for such a chaotic world should not be devoured and spat out by the ambitious ones, the claim jumpers and usurpers of the empty gemfield we call society.

Adam Teforp by his occasional and fleeting presence has given me the gift of social awareness. Some might label this gift conscience, tolerance or love. Others might invite themselves to pass more cynical remarks, observing the material wealth I have amassed, and the techniques I have used for doing this. They might suggest I have learnt socially manipulative skills. Whatever the attempts at redefinition, I know and feel this new height of insight. This new aspect of life should be shared with all, and the man who is the creator should be known to all.

Yet I am not a writer, but a psychologist turned commercial maverick. So I beg the readers’ tolerance when they attempt to struggle with the unusual form of this document. An architect once said form follows function in an attempt to justify an ugly period of architecture. I hope my report is not ugly, but its form has been shaped by the different ways in which the information was gathered. Such is the way to describe the enigmatic actions of an enigmatic man. The author, d’ettut, the ultimate sculptor of the words, is in fact an old friend. It is he who I have burdened with this book’s final form. Although he did have some other notions as to what was the best structure, I persisted. History might well prove that d’ettut’s advice would have led to a better book. But lam stubborn.

I invite the reader to first muse over the Reminiscences. This series of vignettes is taken from my diary from many years ago. Readers might question why I have gone so far back into my youth when telling this story. However, this is to emphasise the coincidence that pervades every aspect of this report. Some entries have been expanded as accurately as my memory will allow, to render them intelligible. Here are recorded my first encounters with Adam Teforp, seemingly millennia ago.

It was then I became privy to Teforp’s past, his youth, his foibles. A rare privilege to win, you will see.

I had no idea at the time that we would meet again many years later, half a world away from the baked Bondi beaches, where his endless monologues had guided me through some dissolute years.

I include in the meanderings of the Reminiscences some aspirations and experiences of my own which I believe are an integral atom in the chemistry of Pie Square that evolved at the later stages. And this reinforces the remarkable coincidences that occur in human existence, begging frequently the question as to whether there are forces, other than our own, in control of our destiny.

The Epiphanies are written in a style I hope readers of novels might recognise. This discourse has been created close to the event, and outlines the series of frenetic activities that went into the formation of a multi-million-dollar enterprise, that was the birth of a new Teforp; one that reached great heights in transcendence.

Finally there are the Rhapsodies. How could I best communicate the burgeoning of a social genius? No, I decided a series of letters (d’ettut calls them the epistolary) would be the way to transmit his essence, his enthusiasm, his protean supremacy; albeit I see now that genius lies so close to insanity.

These letters are my last links with Teforp, and are so very precious. The way the letters peter out, like the dying strains of a beautiful, powerful piece of music, sounds the slow exit of a man who will return transformed. That is my belief. But I must point out that d’ettut did not relish the thought of finishing this book with an epistolary. (But again I persisted.) To make matters more complicated, last-minute developments, just before publishing, had me re-think the inclusion of the letters.

When the reader reaches the Epilogue he or she will understand my dilemma. The letters remain!

Well, here is this hybrid treatise which I sincerely hope aggrandizes a man who should pass into legend.

One final word to the reader. The number three has enjoyed a long and illustrious existence from the Holy Trinity to Freud’s atomising of the psyche, with his id, ego and superego. It is only in retrospect that I have noticed the power of coincidence manifests itself once more in the initially unconscious act of mine to relate my message by REMINISCENCES, EPIPHANIES, and RHAPSODIES.

Dr Carl Olde

REMINISCENCES

CHAPTER ONE: INNOCENCE RETRACED

IN MY SEVENTEENTH YEAR: NINETEEN SIXTY-FOUR

I WAS CALLOW AND LEAN, fearless through ignorance and innocence. Mid summer with a shilling in my pocket I had escaped the trivia of my school friends who were scuttling around the sand hills of Adelaide’s beaches tweaking virgins’ breasts and vomiting cheap claret, putting colour into empty holidays. I was lucky to have a friend in Jack Kerouac who helped me fail matriculation English, and pushed me into a refractory stance that pointed my thumb to an azure sky, and forced me to follow the melting black ribbon of road that led to Sydney.

You failed boy. You failed boy they had all chanted. No matriculation. No university. No guaranteed future. You will end up being a bum like all the rest.

I was probably the butt of many a truckie’s mirth, being a slight eight stone hidden behind a conspicuously concealed sheath knife (my instrument of death and revenge for those who sought to violate me).

I’ll just pull over here for a brief rest, he said as he pulled his thirty-five-tonne truck quickly off the road, sliding into the gravel. I’ll just put these blankets up around the windows so that we won’t be annoyed by headlights of other trucks, he obviously lied. There wasn’t much room for me in the truck cabin. Oh, I’ll get out and start hitching again, I suggested as I moved my hand toward the door handle. Oh no, you don’t need to do that, we’ll just have a cosy nap together. He must have thought I was completely stupid.

No I’m busting for a shit, I said thinking of about the most repulsive thing I could in these sorts of circumstances. I insisted on getting out and noticed he quietly got out the other side looking underneath the truck. That’s when I decided to leap quickly back into the truck, grab my haversack and say, well, not much happening. Must be a bit constipated. I must be on my way. Good-bye. Lucky for me another truck came rumbling past. Christ they’re all psychopaths, I thought to myself

Two days of desolation, running periodically from black masses of flies that would swarm on my back, sleeping on crushed golden stems, nature’s soft mattress, and eating from tins of cold baked beans, delivered me to my first Christendom, Bondi Beach. A day of walking and talking with a tongue glib with naïveté, fed me morsels. Further vagabond wanderings on the beaches and I was invited to a flophouse full of accommodating Maoris. Perched precariously, like an outland-ish cartoon drawing, sat their conference room, atop some Bondi terrace houses. Here I stayed, occasionally interloping into the bustling beach scene below.

Who were the marvelous tanned kings on thrones of sand surrounded by fawning concubines? They listened indulgently to my quaint adolescent banter, plying me with liquor until I waxed eloquent with my puerile ravings.

We will beat the Russkies to the moon you know. I’ll be joining NASA after finishing a year wandering the roads, picking up experiences, writing books. Would be an astronaut too of course but I am not fit enough. And if I can’t get into NASA I will be an architect. And of course if that doesn’t work I’ll try medicine; blah, blah, blah.

Bondi’s lessons of sunny hedonism were soon learned by this very green vagabond. But, oh I lamented the lack of substance, so the lessons learned had to remain a dream. I returned dejectedly to Adelaide, family and civilisation, still in my rude mode of non-contributory youth.

IN MY TWENTY-NINTH YEAR

More than a decade passed of restrained sobriety, dry education and occasional propriety. An eon of failed marriage and then tumultuous periods of playing the executive game, forced me once more to visit the shores of Sydney’s sensuous beaches. I had become now a corporate pawn in the great battle to fill the nation with as many different shapes and forms of predigested meat and bread rolls as possible. The idiocy of selling megatons of pre-digested cow-flesh wrapped in a soggy bandage of a bread-like substance had attracted me to the corridors of power in the high-rise castles of the hamburger kings. As a plenipotentiary of the hamburger warlords I had the good fortune to visit one of the lesser camps in the Bondi area.

Talking to the managing director of one fast-food chain; a franchise which had been brought over from the US and looked like they were doing well. I am still convinced if we actually do a nutritional analysis of our food and recount it honestly to the public that this would be a tremendous form of advertising, I said with total conviction. Too many people are starting to consider healthy eating habits as a mainstream way of existence. We have to justify the positive aspects of our food if we wish to convince them they need these meals more than three or four times a week. I rambled on.And of course there’s breakfast. The Americans have always eaten breakfast in diners. There is no reason that we shouldn’t be doing that in Australia. Breakfasts, breakfasts, that’s what we need. Nobody took much notice at the time.

NINETEEN SEVENTY-SIX: NO POLITICAL CORRECTNESS

Sweet joy again. This was a precious jewel of a day, a golden orb of energy pushed into a billow of blue. Below this altar of light, as in a weird genuflection, lay spreadeagled the booty of a satyr. Here were the brown, bare-breasted princesses of the sky lines. Stewardesses they were called then. Not the more egalitarian nineties cabin crew. Oh! Bondi had matured, even then, no more constraints for the nubile nipples that had fought so long for freedom. These were the days of aggressive feminism. Only the bold and beautiful dared reveal themselves in this way.

God, look at the tits on that one, gasped Randolf, how I love this liberation movement.

Randolf, I said, women being topless on the beach, they've been doing it for years, I have been told, like in Cannes and Ipanema. They have also been bare breasted in most other societies all of the time. The only difference between you and them are a few lumps of fat underneath your nipple.

I abandoned my car and clothes, struggling into ill-fitting running shorts, and then promenaded on cool sand at the point where my feet were nibbled by the caressing of the played out waves. Ancient Aristotle never had a better garden in which to perambulate and muse!

Feeding the unenlightened with foul fast food and the destruction it does to the brain cells of the executives who perpetrate this mighty feeding fraud, creates an insanity amongst the cabbalists so involved. I had found frequent excursions to Bondi lifted my soul, and cleansed my conscience. Moreover the freshness of the live flesh that basted silently and sensually, glistening in the sun, reminded me that not all meat was drowned in ketchup. It was on one of these spiritual sojourns I met Adam Teforp.

I was sitting on a mound of sand irreverently contemplating in a sexually objective manner little grapefruits of tanned throbbing flesh, half conscious that my innocent observation could be misconstrued as leering, when my gaze was distracted by the bulk of a dissolute-looking corpse. When the corpse shuddered a little and slipped further into the quicksand with a behemoth gesture of indolence, I realised there was life. It was blonde haired, clean shaven apart from some golden stubble, slightly overweight and almost mahogany as a result of the exposure to the Australian sun. Something mystical happened then.

All surfers and sailors know of the rogue wave, that surge of powerful water and frenzied energy that eclipses its minions. At the very instant I had spied the mass, the sand I was thrown into emotional turmoil as shrieks came from hordes of masochistically happy inundated surfers. A freak wave had struck. At the instant of that cataclysm the sun went out, enshrouded in an equally improbable cloud. Coincidence I thought, not more. . .

My confused reaction as a junior social scientist (I had reached the lofty height of an undergraduate major in psychology), now employed immorally to pander to the cravings of malnourished legions, was to look for a causal connection between these auspicious events and the body which was the object of my observations. My mind was in a heightened state of awareness, the result of two consecutive and ponderous drinking sessions with too little sleep. There was magic then, as I remember it. My mind must have climbed into Teforp’s momentarily ... This instance is so easy to recall now . . .

Adam smiled as he considered the self-indulgence of lying, luxuriating under the paternal warmth of the sun. Sun rays he mused, cleanse, purify and invigorate the brain, if not the body. Lazily he raised himself onto both elbows, dully aware of the sensual feel of the barely perceptible shift in the coarse golden sand beneath his thighs. Through the pastel filter of his glasses his eyes were darkened to a shade of blue one might imagine could be seen from a Concorde as the sky’s name turns to space. The eyes were slightly squinted and a fine white line of dehydration was stencilled on his bottom lip. There were small droplets of sweat coursing through the skin chasms of a face that had weathered the rigors of thirty Australian summers.

Adam gazed detachedly at a blur of tanned flesh pounding rhythmically away from the beach into avalanches of surf, the swimmer seemingly drowning between the crests. He sank down again into warm sand with his chin becoming encrusted with thousands of minute nuggets. Sun and singing surf catalysed thought; and his mind started again onto one of its frequent sojourns into time past, sped on by a spontaneous maxim, possibly grander than his reverie.

There is always tranquillity to be found, he mused aloud. (This was my first verbal contact with Adam Teforp. I remember it well.)

Pardon? I remember saying.

Tranquillity before the storm, before chaos ... and after. He paused, looking expectantly at a wheeling seagull. Tranquillity after chaos is my addiction. As I grow older my desire to avoid threatening situations or unsettling ones, becomes stronger. But I also enjoy the rich pleasure to be gained in the resolution of conflict. In fact I suspect I’ve engineered conflict in certain situations where I know I can manage it, so that I can feel better after it’s all over.

Teforp slumped into silence. He fumbled around blindly in the pockets of a safari suit jacket that had been neatly stacked beside a thick leather briefcase that shone in its opulence. With sheik-like majesty he half rose from his sandy pit and flicked me a gold-leafed card, thickly embossed with;

Adam Teforp.

Independent Agnostic & Advertising Agent Extraordinaire

C/-The better parts of Sydney.

I had formally met the incredible Mr Teforp.

CHAPTER TWO: ADAM TEFORP

HE CONTINUED, My less than successful experiences in the last five years continually remind me at my most optimistic, even chauvinistic times, that my prophecies are not always infallible. I attribute this mainly to the ‘other’ human element, and must do more study in this area.

I was confused by this apparent non sequitur. But later I was to learn there was always a thread of logic in anything that Teforp said. At this stage I could feel the essence of this man and was attracted to him. It was as though there was a melding of minds, a telepathic transfer. The revelation that he too worked in a commercial fairyland, creating myths and illusions for the lords of pernicious propaganda, must have helped in his fusion. There are of course real marketing and advertising executives in the world. These are the metallic kind; tall, strong and glossy, well hewn, sloshing around inside Porches passing out idiotic decrees here and there. All their internal organs are interchangeable (it was once said in an odd racist joke), to allow them to rattle around without any apparent change or damage to their behaviour. This enables them to be remarkably consistent with their outputs, a little like malfunctioning photocopiers.

In Teforp I had identified immediately a kindred spirit, also locked in to this Hollywood-type area of commerce out of a perverse need for stimulation. I knew too there was hope for him. Here was a man who no doubt had concocted escape plans similar to my own. I hurriedly introduced myself, Carl Olde, Carl Olde, hamburger business.

He eyed me up and down. I could see that he was taken aback by our similarity in physical appearance. Some say it is a form of narcissism but it simply starts friendships. I too was slightly overweight, with some bleached hair and a deep tan.

It’s amazing I haven’t met you before, dear boy, cried Teforp. The hamburger world spends more on advertising than any other industry I know of, I thought to myself. .The best industry in the world from that point of view. Australia still has a bit of catching up to do. Everybody knows everybody. Why are you here? he asked, looking around the beach with squinted eyes, perhaps seeing if I had a secret family of ten waiting to invade and destroy his privacy.

I’ve just come down here for the view. It recharges my batteries, I said. He looked at me and winked with a knowing smile. Ever heard of the Omega-point, Carl? Ever heard of Omega-point? I hadn’t the faintest notion of what he was talking about so I asked him to proceed.

The Omega-point is a profound concept. Something you might stop and think about. Think about it over the next ten years or so. He said this with the air of mysticism, revealing an insight that if it took the rest of my life to fathom, to understand, it wouldn’t really matter. The Omega-point is something that a fellow called de Chardin has recently been playing around with. He suggests that in the future humanity will convert all available mass and energy on earth into information. At this point humanity will know all that could be known and would collectively become God or God-like.

I was amazed not so much at the profound nature of the topic but more that he had raised it in this sort of location with squawking seagulls, gawking voyeurs and well, supercilious surfers.

He continued, When you look around us and start thinking about things, here we are supposedly in the enlightened ,seventies, and all we do is consume, consume, and consume. The way we are going we will burn up all matter and energy on this planet but I don’t know whether we’ll transform it into something important like manageable information. Anyway, food for thought. He giggled. Hey Carl, what do you actually do in hamburger land?

Psychology, I replied.

Oh, psychology is starting to see the light in the fast-food industry, interesting! Trying to put some talent behind the scenes instead of old Joes who knows how to handle a spatula in a bucket of deep-fry oil. I fully support it Carl, I fully support it. Just because we’re in a crass sort of world doesn’t mean we have to be crass. Put a bit of intelligence into things. A bit of art. A bit of thought. He laid back on his towel, fingers locked behind his head, looking straight into the blue sky. Hey Carl, if you are really a psychologist, does the name Pavlov ring a bell?

I had heard this one once before so replied quickly, No, but it’s food for thought. He immediately appreciated the joke and burst into a thick and hearty laugh.

My mind dipped once more into his as he began to recount his early years ... Although I had not asked him or encouraged him in the least to delve into his past. Nevertheless this was Teforp.

A tinge of nausea, the taste of stale wine. They are the result of the now familiar ritual of drinking away an executive position in some large, secure, prosperous, cancerous company, Teforp gurgled to himself. Perhaps the significance is in the nature of my extended adolescence. This Adam wrote invisibly into the smooth face of sand at his fingertips; as though adding to a new biblical parable.

He then launched himself into his Reminiscences.

My father was the essence of the late forties; white, Anglo Saxon and Protestant with a mind full of European war and pieces of the African tank corps tattooed into his left leg. His tank at Alamein had disintegrated after running over a landmine. He was the only survivor, badly wounded. He had limped with mother, tottering with me, across the world in a boat-load of optimism to find Kalgoorlie's gold didn’t underlie all of Australia. With the dankness of Tasmania’s outback (his first point of call in Australia), and an indelibly dismal England etched onto his heart in the form of rheumatic fever, he was forced to take the Teforp family to Sydney. Like everything else at that time, the yellow-brick road too must have run out. Teforp stopped and stared at me for the first time, squinting over the top of his glasses. His lips slid into a programmed smile.

Childhood memories are difficult, things full of ambiguous meaning and half-truths, he offered generously.

"At the very beginning of time memories are like quasars. So very far away they are difficult to gauge. Are they mine, I think; or mother’s memories instilled into me? Eating a pet duck for Christmas dinner; catching my father consuming the entire contents of an ice-cream container one summer; other children being paid to go to