Modeled after the aphoristic writings of Pascal, Lichtenberg and La Rochefoucauld and emerging from the unlikeliest soil substrate of plumbing in rural America, these astringent, inventive and often unsettling literary and philosophical fragments, ranging in tone from the exalted to the obscene, and dealing with subject-matter as disparate as coyote-hunting, Schopenhauer, Middlemarch, a backwoods psychopath devoted to Modigliani, stages of organic decomposition, human extinction, pregnancy, world domination and the evolutionary continuum that exists between sleeping and voluntary death, taken together constitute an absorbing and unprecedented portrait of a fascinating mind.