Disposable Thought

Cole Scott-Knox-Under, an idealistic technophobe purposefully relegating himself to a minimum-wage fast food job, suddenly notices he is suffering from a strange neurosis: inanimate objects appear to be speaking to him, and the symptoms are worsening. Hallucinations of lethal drink lids, personified congratulations balloons, desperate old VHS tapes, buried-alive beepers, chatty styrofoam cups, and a holocaust of waste threaten to sever him from his family, friends and job. Or are they hallucinations at all? This final installment of a triptych of novels about technology and madness sends characters both animate and inanimate on a sweeping adventure into neurosis, metaphysics, drinking, garbage, love, crazed artists and entrepreneurs, powerful furniture magnates, hyperbolic intellectuals, family politics, world revolution, and, eventually, into South Dakota. A weird dark comedy examining one of the foundational pieces of U.S. modernity and crisis-disposability, in all its concrete and abstract forms.