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Manifesto : Anonymous : dedrabbit

June 9th, 2006 · 4 Comments

manifesto.JPGManifesto
Author: Anonymous
Publisher: dedrabbit International Artist Collectives

If you’ve ever dreamed of dropping out of society, becoming a faceless vagrant living a life void of responsibility and indulging in a wanton overindulgence of alcohol, cigarettes and drugs whilst keeping a psychotic journal rivaled only by Hunter S. Thompson, perhaps you wrote Manifesto.

The wandering first person account put to paper is an anonymous novel, now in its third edition paperback form, published by dedrabbit International Artist Collectives - an underground network of people committed to “art, individual freedom and social activism.”

Over the course of 200 pages, the young author drops out of college, hitchhikes across the U.S. and then overseas, smokes what can only be 1,100 cigarettes and sporadically returns home to the security (and boredom) of well-off parents with open arms and wallets.

A story of freedom weighed down by an open mind belabored by a critical worldview, Manifesto tells the tale you always wanted to live if you just had the initiative.

Find a full list of distributors at DedRabbit.com, including Aardvark Records in Minneapolis.

Read the first page of the novel after the jump…

MANIFESTO - PAGE 1
I hated school. I hated work. I hated boredom. I had no interests. I had a happy childhood. There was school, adolescence, growing up, questions about the future. I was twenty-one. I had no dream.

I dropped in and out of college. After three years I wasn’t going back.
Students sat on lawns, drank coffee, held books, discussed ideas, wore expensive sandals and footwear. Professors taught classes on campus greens. Students basked in youth, in the fine times of college. I was told I’d meet my friends for life in college.
Everywhere people smoked, sat on wide steps of academic buildings, enjoyed the outdoors together, like people in glossy-paged catalogues.
I hated college atmosphere.

I left college for the last time as impulsively as ever—free and happy—like I had a bottomless pocket of money, fully funded, like my lungs were fresh and I could still run a mile in under six minutes.
Cars passed slow with the wind brushing up my hair. I listened to the dusty dirt on the bottoms of my new leather shoes. I felt slow like a fish underwater, like a soft cloud pulled along.
I was content to be slow, away from the vague traps between cause and effect.
Birds made noise along the roadsides, up high in the light-green pine needles. I smelled the sandy heat. When I closed my eyes I believed I had a grand future; I had no problems; the past didn’t matter.
I was going to make my life an adventure.

I hated being told I needed health insurance. I was sick of car insurance; tired of people that told me to go back to school, earn the degree, make something of my life.
People went to college and got what they paid for. I hated the relationship, the equation, the vending machine dispensing crinkly-packaged candies and chips.
I didn’t want a high-paying job. I hated jobs. I didn’t want an obvious life.

Tags: Literature

4 responses so far ↓

  • 1 noelle // Mar 14, 2007 at 9:00 pm

    I knew I wasn’t the only outsider, slacker, wanna- be somebody but don’t know how, self-conscious yet secure in the fact that every one else really is like me, but different in their own ways…I really enjoy reading this manifesto–having the comfort in knowing we’re connected by human emotions but deviate from our similarities in unique ways…like trying to match numbers in the mega millions lottery…it’s very unlikely we match in identity, yet we are all made of shuffled combinations of the same numbers.

  • 2 el jefe // Mar 21, 2008 at 2:54 pm

    I have been accused of writing this, and well I wish I had.

    r eading this was like listening to my life story told by someone else…

    scary.

    good book though.

  • 3 zerooneseven // Jun 23, 2008 at 10:27 pm

    I picked this blank cover book and read the first page above and thought, wow this is spot on what I think! Then it’s like someone else wrote the rest. It goes from condemning the college life style, to “Hey I drank myself silly and smoked cigarettes!” On the very next page…. Way to be a hypocrite.

  • 4 Lyall // Sep 25, 2008 at 9:15 pm

    I bought this book from my record store in New Zealand the other day.

    Half way through so far… elements of Catcher in the Rye, On the Road, Charles Bukowski and William S. Burroughs, all in a contemporary setting. I’m really enjoying it. I wish I could say I’ve finished it to offer a full judgement, but so far, well worthy of becoming a classic. I don’t remember who said it - but a classic doesn’t necessarily tell you knew ideas, but tells you the ideas you already had. Definitely the case with “Manifesto”

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