The Maryland Prize

By Richard Wesley Clough

Here’s more of the adventures and poems of the juggernauts’ spirit clashing with physical reality that might either belie or prove his true status in the black hole.

The fact it exists became “quite a coup by him of French-lettered desire as I began toiling on this reverie on a midnight dreary, feeling cold and weary” was a little of the eloquence I perused and felt as I gimbaled my way through the seething morass into the ethereal light.

Thanks to this unorthodox alchemy, the speed of light’s original concepts have been broadened by using the technique of seeing a glimmer of something almost other-dimensional, then pulling it coolly into reality after first applying some moderating effects to make it palatable to those who otherwise couldn’t understand.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Nov 3, 2017
• ISBN: 9781543461190

Richard Wesley Clough

N/A

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COPYRIGHT © 2017 BY Richard Clough.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

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Rev. date: 02/06/2023

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CONTENTS

Mysteries

Treatment Plan

Croix De guerre

The Black-Hole Agent

A Weather Story (Continued from the Speed of Light)

Precognition

The Recovery

The Devil

Herr Clough

In the Hallowed Halls of the University

The Mystique of Time

Destined to Write

The Spirit of a Writer

Minimum Wage

The Fourth Time

Death

Shang Croix

Writing

Running

The Brain and the Heart

The Last Survivors

The Spectrum of the Unknown

Evolution

The Black Hole

A Real Man

Spirits of the Division

Santa Monica and Reality Catching Up

Overload

Being in Society

Changes

Dr. No

Loveland, Iowa

The Cemetery and the Garden

The End

The Army of Glory

Philosophers and Murderers

Dark Southern Night

The Ephemeral Summer

August and November

The Spirit of Genius

A Midnight Dreary

The Late, Late Show

Chesapeake

The Siren Song

The Last Spartan

Freedom Again

Evolution

Who’s Who

Twilight

From the Old

Richard

The Gladiator

Life in Price

Philosophers and Murderers

The Morning Papers

The Mall Principle

The Long Road to Recovery

The Therapists

The Therapists

Deep Locale Key

Condensation

The Reason

Tidbits

The Phantom Prison

The Plague

Skid Row Hotel

The Real Release

Marine Street

The Solar Eclipse

Infamous

Of Two Coasts

More of the adventures and poems of the juggernaut spirit clashing with physical reality that might either belie or prove his true status in the black hole.

The fact it exists became, quite a coup by him of French lettered desire as I began toiling on this reverie on a midnight dreary feeling cold and weary, was a little of the eloquence I perused and felt as I gimbaled my way through the seething morass into the ethereal light.

Thanks to this unorthodox alchemy, the Speed of Light’s original concepts have been broadened by using the technique of seeing a glimmer of something almost other-dimensional than pulling it coolly into reality after first applying some moderating effects to make it palatable to those who otherwise couldn’t understand.

MYSTERIES

Before what has stimulated me to write my great insights converges to obliterate this runner, I’ll make this last effort to substantiate my existence.

In the beginning, religion was the product of Pretoria’s scientists to try and curb the black sickness sweeping the world incurably. It was thought that its introduction in the world’s infancy could have some power over the zombies as one righteous faction after another fell naturally by the great forces backing their ignorance—an ignorance that did, in fact, bolster the errant Christianity until the apex of time when the zombies intuitively sought to overpower their own sickness by the fact of their sickness. It seemed easy in light of this portrayal, but when one factors in how they had been misled to protect the initial fallacy, it became a sort of divine comedy for them to do this. As voracious and successful as they were, it didn’t change the fact that some people who were both dead and alive had cleverly led them astray, but those same enigmatic people knew it was only time before the zombies succeeded, which was when they sent me at the apex.

It was futile I felt as I watched them use me to resurrect their sickness against the inhibitions that had been implanted in the beginning.

In this apex, religion was just as much a hindrance to me as them, but it was religion that became my only hope when I wrote about how the world was changing and other things based on my growing perceptiveness. In other words, I had to prop up my nemesis, religion, as unlikely as this might be, by the sheer hope that some truth of its existence could counter the zombie surge. Of course, in league with the unknown inverse principle, the more truth there could be to a religion that does have life after death, the more it worked against my efforts. This and more I was finding out, like how my healthiness drew venomous attacks.

It was all part of more than a curse but a truth that became ever maddening in showing how my precognition of its impediments set me up for the purported mental illness they saw in my great resilience. Because they weren’t sentient beings but zombies, leaving it to my wife—with all her privileges of my sacred act in the dilapidated house—to cast the last stone.

Sure, I like to think fantastically positive things like she’s my wife and has all these privileges due to me, but it’s that unreality invoking the inverse that gives her the strength to cast the stone even if it’s so unbelievable that she really could even be my wife.

My real wife could be that mysterious girl whose debacle would put me behind the fornicating couple that profited from my sleazy act this time.

It would, therefore, be a great struggle the next life to overcome how the fornicating couple who could be so far behind used the inverse to catapult themselves beyond my real wife.

It was real smart how she used the slight football player on me, but it tapped into all things that couldn’t be reconciled like my glorious losing fight at Stalingrad.

For the mysterious girl to say he won was just like the last meaning of the last bitter onslaught and all that came. Of course, if the Germans won and I was dead, it could have been just as bad because my father, Jose, might have my skin more dark colored for this new life of tribulation. In other words, as much as I contribute to one side’s victory, I become the representative for the loser, which explains the hopelessness Pretoria implanted for me to deal with the greater question beyond whoever won or lost but resolving the zombie world into the proper light at the unavoidable apex.

This, in a sense, answers the changing course of the world as it spins into an ever tightening structure to fit into the little place the black hole has created for it. Because in the beginning, besides religion, there was just life that was colored by politics as denigrating as those politics could be but was spiced by a growing wisdom, technology, and populace that, in the end, couldn’t fit in that small place relegated by the black hole the same way men launched their vain wars that were against the gods like Troy, but then the inverse demanded this sacrifice to reach the greater sacrifice. I’ve seen it at work in my own life. In accord with the special program, I was good until I fell, but in life, it’s all a special program that considers all endeavors, like there is a god where someone special like me can find the special program even if the same Bible toters can’t believe God’s works.

What kills me isn’t bullets or bombs but the great burden these beings placed on me in line with the game theory of existence I espoused in the prior Speed of Light. Like I said, they’re both dead and alive, and their interactions with me were as variable as a barometer, which kind of explains how A Weather Story never made a dime since it was just the tip of the greater story.

It’s this variability, both pro and con, and my resilient utilization that keep me going and power the world’s apparatuses as if they’re connected to the psychic kinetic powers I orchestrate.

Like in the greatest math problem—no matter how much data one interjects into it, it is unsolvable. But then there’s my incorrigible wife, who might just appear at the real apex contrary to what I believe exists right now; and that wife isn’t the mysterious girl who’s all part of her retinue but the black-hole agent who always must prove herself stronger than her husband before she can reap him. Therefore, in light of all my efforts and considerations, it has been necessary in a way that was all a wasted drama in order that my wife would, in the end, prevail in spite of all my irrational attempts to avoid her. It might even explain how I survived as a hero in World War III in 1981 when the army wasn’t overrun by the zombies because such an incredible person in denial of his wife’s meaning always survives except when the love is reciprocated. This could mean the war is only a part of my mental gyrations similar to the Forbidden Planet when resolution between my wife and me negates the whole need for the conflict. But because I created her, does she want resolution? Isn’t my act, in itself, a reaction to the black hole’s imposition than any breaking of its laws that supposedly created her?

Of all these accruing mysteries, only Pretoria knows if, in fact, Pretoria isn’t just the product of a deranged mind. But then, does the truth ever come out in a world that is essentially unknown and possibly founded on something errant that created the whole constellation in the first place?

TREATMENT PLAN

FOR

RICHARD WESLEY CLOUGH

The events depicted in the coldest month between winter and summer, November, are mostly real except for the omission of the fact that a check from the Veterans Administration of my voc rehab at UCLA was returned to the post office by my neighbors who shared my mailbox. When I was in Castaic, they thought I had moved. Of course, in terms of significance, the receipt of the check would have only made a complicated situation even more complicated. I might have actually achieved a temporary success in a crime that would have then denied me the rim of the world by a stint in prison that would have let me out long before I ever realized the rim’s succor. Of course, if I returned to prison, I might then have been sent to Patton after finishing my prison sentence by the new law.

All this is just speculation. None of this would even be known if I didn’t return from the black hole that was the LA County jail. I say black hole because I wrote a convincing rationale behind my theory called the Speed of Light, whose rosy picture in the since-defunct treatment plan representative of the rainbow happened just before that black hole usurped me in November 2007. Now I’m more realistic. I see how dangerous my life on the outside could have been, and I really have more happening for me here at Patton. In fact, in light of my creative disposition, the real world would be a disaster unless I was recognized as one of those rare literary professionals the world hasn’t really seen since the days of Gustave Flaubert and company.

A brief history: Mr. Clough was sentenced to five years or longer beginning in 1981 when, after a comparatively productive spell, he was sent on his first extension to Foothills Rehab Center, where he escaped after three and a half years of general ennui.

In subsequent years, Mr. Clough returned to Foothills three more times before subsiding into his present span of ten years since ’98.

Mr. Clough’s main problem is his sensitivity that he feels the hospital is trying to exacerbate. When Mr. Clough had the boom-box fight on 23 in 2003, he felt the unit he was switched to, 36, was unnecessarily rough until it was closed in 2006.

Mr. Clough feels he has made real progress with his treatment