Darkly comic and clearly tragic, these seventeen short stories of strange fiction will take you to the twisted landscapes of shadowed imagination. Dead animals purposely thrown in a neighbor's yard; a shiftless hitchhiker stalked by the "Ice Cube Killer;" two scientists who discover a new color and an even greater mystery; a writer doomed to tell stories that no one will ever read. Sometimes haunting, sometimes hopeful, these unique tales run the human soul through the ever-changing faces of death and futility. And who knows what else?

In MARGINS OF PHILOSOPHY, while discussing the challenge before phenomenology, Jacques Derrida speaks of the ground of signification and the pedestal of silence, but his two very apt phrases also apply to the ENTIRE human project of understanding ourselves and the multiversethe aim of THIS book. In other words, FOUNDATIONS OF MEANING expresses the ENTIRE range of human experience in the multiverse: dream-speak, stream-of-consciousness, dialog, storytelling, analysis, synthesis, meditation, music, and so onsynergized into a polyphony that resonates in frequencies that no one mode (from science to mysticism) can attain alone because all such modes reject one another and thus limit their effectiveness. In other words, as inclusive and multicultural societies are the most advanced and best-prepared for the future, so FOUNDATIONS OF MEANING heals the rifts separating the many human disciplines, synergizes the many human modes of expression, focuses our aims as a civilization whose inner ANGELS have been at war with our inner DEMONS, and shows how guarded optimism and free thought can empower humanity to mature and spread across this galaxy and then on to othersad infinitum.

Based on a local crime and set against the lull before everything changed for America in the summer of 2001, this novel looks at people battered by the happenstance of their own lives and by the defining event of the turn of the century, the attack on the Twin Towers on 9/11. The novel is concerned with how people survive and how some even manage to reach a state of grace.