The new quest begins ...

Cone Man was living in a new world. Actually, he was still living at the same house, street and town in the Land of the All Black Tribe, on the same planet, but let that go. Cone Man had succeeded in paying off the mortgage on his man cave, and while he had no job, he had no mortgage either. He was free of debt and income. He hoped to live long in a world free of debt. He hoped not to live to long in a world free of income.

The sense of relief was both surreal and superficial. After years of craven servitude to the Mortgage Monster, Cone Man was a free of its dour dominion, and from time to time he let out an audible sigh of relief at the surreal sense of liberation. On the other hand, the reality of this new freedom had only superficially impacted on his mind - the impact of reality would occur on the 24th of the month when money mysteriously remained in his bank account, no longer disappearing into the monstrous maw of the remorseless monster.

"What should I do with this freedom?" Cone Man cone-templated. Cone Man could live more easily, but could he live more effectively? He was already writing each day - could he not write more. Writers, pretentiously, liked to talk of "writer's retreats", or aspired to be "writer's in residence" or "being in exile" if living outside the country of their birth, even if no murderous regime had driven them over the border.

Cone Man could not see the point of such phrases. As the resident writer, living alone in a three bedroom man cave, in a quiet suburban valley, in the hills to the east of the Land of the Huttites, from which he had been driven by murderous real estate prices in 2004, he was already living in a "writer's retreat".

Cone Man could not help wondering at the wondrous practice of paying for writers to go to live in France for a year. "Why does the government go to all that trouble when they could simply send the same writer to live in Wainuiomartia for a year?" Cone Man wondered. "I am sure that they would feel just as retreated and exiled if forced to write while resident Outer Wainuiomartia" Cone Man shrugged. Alexander Solzhenitsyn had to endure eight years in the Siberian gulags before he was able to write the Gulag Archipelago, so a year in Wainuiomartia would hardly be the end of a promising literary career.

Contemplating the peculiarities of the literary world was not the same thing as contributing to the literary world, so Cone Man ceased from his peculiar contemplation and returned to his keyboard ...