The Disruptor: A Novel

A never-before-published novel I wrote in 2013-2014 and finished in 2023

Note: I wrote this ~21,000+ word novel called The Disruptor way back in South Korea in ~2013-2014. For some reason, I never finished it and never published it anywhere, only showing the manuscript to a few people. Well, just today, February 18th, 2023, I wrote an ending for it. Most of Chapter 10 is new material that I wrote today to finish the novel. I re-read the whole novel today and found it to be quite an entertaining read that reveals a lot about my own ‘origin story’ and illuminates the impetus for a great deal of my art and work-play over the years. I hope some of you will enjoy it. For now I am only going to make the whole thing available to paying supporters of my work, though I’ll probably make it a public document sometime sooner or later.

The Disruptor: A Novel by Jordan Bates

Prologue

There comes a time in every fool's life when he's got to change. Actually, scratch that. Most fools never change, and all people are fools, so by extension, most of us never change.

I think most of us think about changing, though. Maybe.

We feel within ourselves some cavern of unexplored possibility, a system of tunnels that diverges in any number of directions. And there’s an aching---a miniscule kidney stone embedded in our intestine of intuition---that suggests to us that we really ought to explore this vast being: that we should go be a pot-smoking lumberjack for a while, or live with the great apes, or check out a bunch of library books and skip town. That we should do something utterly unexpected. Of course this is entirely terrifying to most of us. The idea that we possess this measure of freedom entails that we are responsible for how we live, who we become, ya-ta ya-ta ya-ta.

Duty is a much easier method for most people. The conviction that there are obligations, m’boy! Things you must do, a type of person you must be, a set of rules that you must follow, lest you sacrifice every fiber of common decency, sophistication, success, and all of those other made-up words.

People like this narrative, though. And who could blame them? To decide for oneself how to live and to see how far one can go are deeply frightening propositions. How could any mere mortal avoid being paralyzed by the sheer number of possibilities? No, no---much simpler to let other factors decide for us. Much simpler to listen to our parents, guidance counselors, politicians, newscasters, friends, etc., etc. We can heave a tremendous sigh of relief---others will happily decide our lives for us.

But the kidney-stone-Buddha doesn’t go away simply because we’ve opted not to listen to it. It knocks patiently, singing softly at the window of our awareness; we overlook and ignore it, pretending that we are finally and exactly nothing more than what everyone else decided we were. Granted it's so easy to pretend when everyone else has agreed to pretend. We're all damn good at pretending, aren't we? Human civilization is a big game of dress-up, but the fucking scary thing is that most of us forget or never realize that we’re wearing masks, that we’re just playing a role. We take ourselves and our affairs entirely too seriously. Carve out our jack-o-lantern smiles and scurry about our "very important business" in pressed suits and shined shoes, convinced that whatever we’re doing is the Task To End All Tasks.

But then there's just another task. And another. Task after task after task after task. It's really an infinite list of tasks, and when you think about it, an infinite list of tasks is a lot like slavery, or the life of that one fellow Sisyphus, if you're into Greek mythology. Maybe that's all there is to human life, though? Endless, trivial tasks. I don’t mean to sound bitter or cynical. I guess it's all in how you define "trivial". If you've convinced yourself that what you're doing is important, then in terms of your subjective consciousness, it is "important". So I guess we make our lives meaningful based on what we convince ourselves is valuable, where we invest our time, how we conceptualize what we’re doing.

Maybe the kidney-stone-Buddha is closely intertwined with this meaning-making process---like a biological or spiritual safeguard against grave errors. It stirs from hibernation to tell us that our definitions of "trivial" and "important" are all mixed up. That we need to take a peak at what we’re doing and expand in some way. Because what we've deemed "important" is actually squeezing and squashing that cavern of inner music (groovy-soul-mixture) and possibility that yearns to be acknowledged.

But as I said, ladies and gentlemen, most of us pretend it's not there. Because it’s convenient and because we’re afraid. After all, it whispers insane things! Urges us to do daring, uncomfortable, unpopular things! What could be more frightening?!

So we bury it. With Jose Cuervo and Volvos and coitus and Twitter and Desperate Housewives, we beat it into submission.

Well... most of us do. And then there are those of us who listen to it. Who act on it. To be fair, I think it speaks to all of us at different volumes. For some of us, it screams like a teenage howler monkey whose smartphone has just been snatched away.

I believe I’m one of those people. It screamed at me, or more accurately, seized me, and I hardly had a choice but to pay attention.

Yep, I listened to the kidney-stone-Nietzsche on the inside, and some wacky, unimaginable stuff went down. Things got positively horrific, then absolutely absurd, then I don't even know what happened, and now I'm here. But, man, oh man, I'm glad I did what I did. I couldn't take it back. Nope, never.

Listen up. I'll tell you how it went.

****Chapter 1****

In what I consider to be my past life, I was an actuary. Yeah, that's right. I did things like tabulate life insurance premiums and streamline spreadsheets for financial projections. Honestly, I can't recall the first thing about how to do any of that gobbledygook anymore. I've forgotten the load of it. Good riddance.

I majored in actuarial science in college because, well, like most college students, I didn't have a single fucking clue about what I "wanted to be". I was into heavy bong rips and heavier music, and I was pretty certain no one was going to pay me to be a professional stoner or jammer.

My parents said being an actuary would be pragmatic, secure. They said it was an "in-demand career", that it payed well. I figured sure, okay, those all sound like good reasons to do something for thousands of hours of my one short, precious life, so I went with it.

For the next five years, I was basically a blind calf walking to the slaughterhouse. I can admit that now. At the time, though, I was doing a damn fine job of deceiving myself. My disposition, translated roughly into words, was, 'Man, this is hell, but it will all be worth it when....'.

I pass this big test. I graduate. I get a job. I'm financially secure. etc.

Sound familiar? That's probably because the dissatisfied-toiler-who-banks-on-future-gratification is such a common trope of our collective consciousness by now that it almost seems too cliché to talk about. But it gets more interesting, so stick with me. I was Sisyphus, pushing the boulder up the hill only to watch it roll back down, tackling the infinite list of tasks. Internally, I was as stagnant as a lake three hundred miles below the surface of the Earth: light years away from fulfillment, always envisioning satisfaction lurking beyond the next fabricated "milestone".

And that's about the time the aching hit me.

*****

It was a sudden worst-hangover-of-all-time-type pain, like that of a stomach ache when you put down 15 shots of Jim Beam and two fat, spicy breakfast burritos the night before. Makes me cringe to recall it.

I clenched my gut at my desk and vomited on my HP computer monitor. Quite a jolt, which I needed. I imagine the Jesus of my bowels had probably been trying to jar me from my slumber for some time, and by then he was pretty livid.

Anyways it was like simultaneously a flash of lightning struck my asshole and a flash of enlightenment struck my inner stuff, my groovy-soul-mixture. I heaved, convulsed slightly, then stood up with a whoosh, rigid as rock, hardly of my own volition.

This little episode must have made somewhat of a racket because everyone in the open, sprawling office was now staring in my direction. But they weren't themselves.