The Man In The Floating House

By David Francis Jeffery

Number three in the Particlism Novel series. Mostly short chapters but a couple of old-fashioned, long form chapters in there as well. A man leaves his wife and family to live alone on the ocean and contemplates his life as a massive storm approaches. Or it could be about something else; you're free to make up your own mind on it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: David Francis Jeffery
• Release date: Apr 7, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370021871

David Francis Jeffery

David Francis Jeffery is a writer living in Australia with his wife and daughter. He has a had a few things published here and there and has self-published two chapbooks and a literary magazine in the early '00's. He writes everyday but not everyday does he write something worthwhile.

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The Man In The Floating House

David Francis Jeffery

Copyright David Francis Jeffery 2017

Smashwords Edition

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This book is dedicated to my amazing wife Lara; you challenge me every day and I always come up wanting; yet you’re still here.

It is also for my lovely daughter Sydney, who gave me the title for this book and, inadvertently, set this whole thing in motion.

I would also like to give a special shout out to Clementine Ford and her wonderful book Fight like a Girl, that inspired chapter 57 and pretty much the back end of this book.

This is a work of fiction and should be read as such.

1.

Ah. Right then, batten down the hatches.

The storm was coming in from the North-East. It was going to be a big one - I could see that. About as big as anything I had seen. I was prepared though. I was pretty sure that I was prepared.

2.

The way I see it, being born is all a matter of right time, right place. I mean, one turn left, or a minute too early or too late - who knows? You could end up being born American.

3.

Possibilities are not endless. People like to tell you they’re endless but really, they’re not, are they? How many possibilities exist for a person born into extreme poverty? Or for a woman born into our patriarchal society? Or for children shuffled from one abuse to another? No, possibilities aren’t endless. But they are, at least in some form, existent.

4.

The grey sky was turning purple, like spreading blood. The wind was spitting jagged glass and the sea; the sea was growing muscles.

Bring it on, you fuck.

5.

The Catcher in the Rye has not held up over the years. I remember reading it in school and quite enjoying the book, but I don’t ever remember it actually speaking to me.

Even back when I was 13 or 14, it didn’t feel, to me, like it was written in a language that any teenager actually used.

I picked it up again, a few years ago. I was, probably, 45 or 46; had written a few books of my own and was going through a kind of ‘back to the classics’ phase. Of course, not the proper classics - Wuthering Heights or The Brothers Karamazov. But, classics nonetheless. (I’d recently finished The Sun also Rises and For Whom the Bell Tolls). I got about two pages in when I had to put it back on the shelf. What a piece of garbage!

Well no, I probably shouldn’t say that, because it’s not true. It’s still being read today and is still in print; which is more than I can say for myself.

Catcher in the Rye. Yes, well, it’s not a piece of garbage but it hasn’t aged well. The writing, the dialogue - hell, even the whole plot seems to be from another, long gone time. Which is a pretty stupid thing to say; I hardly think the world of Dickens, or the Bronte’s is still around either.

The point is though, that you can take these books and put them in a modern setting and nothing, really, is lost. You can’t do that with Catcher in the Rye because it doesn’t sound authentic. It sounds like it’s been written by an old man who is trying to capture what ‘the kids’ sound like. It sounds like it’s been written by an advertising executive.

Sure, when it came out, it would have sounded modern as hell. I mean, it made Salinger’s career, didn’t it? So, obviously, it spoke to a lot of people.

But now? Well, how many people now do you hear of declaring it a great novel? I can still read people praising Hemingway; Kerouac; Bukowski; Plath; the Bronte’s; fucking Shakespeare but I don’t read much in the way of Salinger anymore. Tell me I’m wrong.

Catcher in the Rye, in this day and age, reads like it was written by a man who liked children, but neither loved - nor really understood - children at all.

6.

Electricity is sometimes a problem. Solar panels are great but, they only work when it’s sunny. I have a generator, of course, but I couldn’t quite figure out how to keep it powered.

That’s when I came up with the windmill. It only needs a slight breeze to turn and it powers the generator more than adequately. Even that has drawbacks though.

When it’s really windy (and it gets extremely windy out here, let me tell you) I can’t use it, as it overloads the whole system.

So far though, it’s been ten years and I’ve only been out of power five or six times and, even then, never for more than a day.

7.

My wife and kids still don’t understand. I haven’t heard or seen them in a long time. Oh well, no great loss.

For them.

8.

Have you ever read the bible? Or the Koran? Or the Dharma? Or any of the holy books of this world? I have. Some amazing writing in all of these books. More than any human can do, in this day and age. And I think, in all of them, that message is being distorted somewhat.

It seems to me, the constant message being interpreted from all these books, is that Love will always conquer Hate. Yet, that’s not true, is it?

Hate is, by far, the stronger emotion. Hate is, by all I’ve seen from the world over these fifty years, the way we live our lives. The way we choose to live our lives. We don’t live our lives as loving human beings. We live our