Grass Valley, CA — Recent Cal Poly graduate and area engineer Kevin Davis doesn’t understand the point of reading fiction and declared to an uncomfortable crowd at Carolines Coffee Saturday morning that people who participate in it “have mental issues.” Apparently he has grown tired with what he calls the public’s “gullibility and stupidity.”
“All kinds of fiction,” announced 27 year old engineer Mr. Davis who stood up as if to make a toast to the nervous Carolines crowd. “I’ve had it with all these fake stories and fake characters. People who believe this stuff have serious mental issues. People who push this fakery are both deranged and probably criminals.”
According to witnesses at the scene, he had a long list of grievances that were apparently driven by too much time on Facebook.
“He was acting all weird,” said Fun Park worker Amanda Fischer who stopped in to get a coffee before her shift started. “He was going on about how fake everything is and that it’s all caused by fake people and fake stories that people believe as true. He seemed all normal, like a regular guy, but he was ranting like a crazy person. He told us to read only technical manuals and textbooks.”
The Fazzler reached out to local High School English teacher Garret Deasy to help us understand the distinction between fiction and non-fiction.
“I know Kevin. He’s a former student. Bright and analytical with awkward social skills. He was a whiz at math but struggled with figures of speech. A very ‘literal’ boy,” said an irritated Mr. Deasy from the Nevada Union High School faculty break room. “I have a hard time with my dense students about this, so it’s no wonder they grow up to be dense too. Anyhow, the purpose of fiction is to battle loneliness. To prove, existentially, that we are not alone.”
Suddenly, just outside the break room window, a young male student shouted “Deasy is a dick,” followed a pronounced thump of a wet sock hitting the window.
“Are you getting all of this?” continued Mr. Deasy implying that The Fazzler correspondent was distracted. “Fiction connects; Non-Fiction as necessary as it is, can demonstrate how disconnected we are. This is particularly the more empirical-technocratic scribblings. How everything is an abstraction: instructions; the parts of things in isolation. It’s hard to place these things into neat categories, but in a nutshell, ironically, non-fiction can be more nihilistic under the guise of being informative.”
As for Mr. Davis and his crusade against everything “not real” in his words, he had this to say to the Carolines crowd who was growing more uneasy with each of his words.
“Fiction is clearly dangerous,” continued a terse Mr. Davis, “it serves nothing more than to fool the dim-witted into believing all kinds of erroneous things. Did you know there were people who actually tried to eat babies when Jonathan Swift wrote this crap A Modest Proposal. Obviously there was nothing modest about it and ‘Jonathan Swift’ is a fake name.”
