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My Hands Were Clean
My Hands Were Clean
My Hands Were Clean
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My Hands Were Clean

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My Hands Were Clean by Tom Bradley tells, in outrageous and hilarious style, Tom Bradley's teenaged story of working as a musician for pseudo-Mormon polygamists who conducted Alister Crowley-style sex magick rituals under their place of business. Cover art by Justin Aerni.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateJul 10, 2012
ISBN9781476462653
My Hands Were Clean
Author

Tom Bradley

Born in 1954 and serving three years in the Army I have lived in different places and I always liked to share with others in good conversation. I enjoy reading a good book and I retired from the Department of Veterans Affairs. So I thought that I would write about apartments because I wanted to share with others what's involved in apartment living. For I lived in apartments for years and I wanted to explain the things that you will not hear from others. So I hope you will find this book informative and enjoyable.

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    My Hands Were Clean - Tom Bradley

    Cover Art: Open Mind © 2013, 2016 Nick PattersonBook Design Copyright © 2010, 2016 Unlikely Books

    Publisher’s Preface to the 2016 Edition

    My Hands Were Clean was Tom Bradley’s twentieth of his twenty-seven, or so, published books. It was initially published by us, here at Unlikely Books, in conjunction with the now-defunct small-press printer/direct mailer, Make It New Media, LLC. It was published in one volume with Dr. Gonzo: A series of loosely related essays on equality, visibility, and modern mental health, or, How the Mental Health System Drove Me Crazy by Dr. Deb Hoag. (Tom Bradley has a doctorate, too, but you don’t want him touching your psyche directly.) Both books use loose memoirs as entrances to social commentary. Deb’s book is about overcoming and treating mental illness in the context of a dysfunctional medical industry. Tom’s book is about acid, orgies, and how Aleister Crowley and Mormonism go together smoothly like Christian teens with Satanic t-shirts.

    When these two books were initially published, they were, in imitation of Henry Rollins’ 2.13.61 Press, published as a flip-book. If you were holding My Hands Were Clean right-side up, then Dr. Gonzo would be the back of the book, upside-down. Dr. Gonzo’s back cover was My Hands Were Clean’s front cover, and vice versa. This 2016 Edition, being the full and unaltered text of the 2010 Edition of My Hands Were Clean, makes several references to Dr. Gonzo and the flip-book format.

    Make It New Media was an attempt, by myself and a few other small-press activists, to put print-on-demand technology directly in the hands of small-press publishers. Whatever merits its business plan lacked or possessed, it had one thing going for it: we at Make It New Media knew how to turn pieces of paper upside-down. The large print-on-demand publishers, for whatever reason, have forbidden upside-down text to all of their clients. This is technologically ludicrous and professionally fuckfaced, but it is specifically unfortunate in this instance, because My Hands Were Clean is a book that should be upside-down at all times. Just take a moment with Nick Patterson’s cover art. Rotate it slowly. Stop. Did you see that? Did you manage to find your way back to this paragraph, afterwards? Have the psychedelics not hit, yet? Take a minute. Oh, do you not have your own? Don’t worry, there’s some hidden inside this volume. Turn the book upside-down, then lick every page, individually. Be careful with your saliva–you’re still going to want to read it, when you’re done and the mood hits. I can’t tell you which page has the acid and which page has the molly, but you’re going to want to read the book twice, once on each hallucinogenic, and then a third time while straight. If you accidentally ruined the book by licking it, be sure to purchase another copy. If you’re the sloppy-tongued sort, you might want to do that now, in advance. Ready? Good. Vamp to coda. Read the quotes and turn the page.

    –Jonathan Penton

    Author’s Introduction

    to the 2012 Electronic Edition

    Speaking of the Chinese, earlier that very month when they began to pirate the products of his soul on a gargantuan scale, our visiting author had waxed bitterly eloquent in denouncing such thievery from the pulpit of the electronic broadcast media. He was courageous enough to speak out, despite the protestations of certain leftward-leaning naifs in the press who pointed out that the Chinese could never afford his books at the regular price, anyway. They cited Faulkner's words to the effect that the true novelist's sole desire should be to scratch his name on the door of eternity without regard to the service charge that could be extracted in return for such scratching. These lefties also claimed that certain writers existed (maybe all dead now) who would be flattered to the point of mania to have members of such a vast and formidable civilization taking an interest in their books, regardless of the financial arrangement, or lack thereof, which had placed the latter in their hands.

    –Tom Bradley, Fission Among the Fanatics

    The end of everything is going to be like a jumbo jet crash: what kills you is the sheer bouncing avoirdupois of all the other assholes jam-packed around you. The unprecedented apocalyptic monstrosity of the internet makes it obvious that our universe, and everybody in it, is hurtling into the final few screams of the Great Dissolution, as promised in the Vishnu Purana. The Night of Brahma will follow, when we all have to shut the fuck up, and even stop publishing e-books.

    Our barely-average star, just another nondescript zhlub in the crowd, stumbles ever closer to the eliptical band-saw of the galactic plane. Spirits that have managed, during the preceding dozens of millennia, to grapple all the way up from a rock to a plant to a beast to a human (just barely in many cases), are grabbing for some self-consciousness, by means of which they might discharge a bit of karma before the shit hits the fan. It’s the last few minutes before closing time at the big fire sale, and all the cash registers are mobbed.

    Unfortunately, in way too many cases, self-consciousness entails self-expression. There are only slightly fewer publishers than writers, and more writers than demons in the guts of the Gadarene swine. And ninety-nine percent of them have chosen to oink digitally. A broadband balloon of electromagnetic dreck is oozing from the top of our ionosphere and bulging at the speed of light toward the dumpsters behind Pluto’s squalid strip mall, to be slopped on top of Hitler’s televisations of the Nuremburg rally. To a radio telescope tripodded on the shore of a methane lake on some shitty distant moon, our published oeuvre must look like a blood blister distended to the point of bursting.

    There was a time when we scribblers banished to the contemptible wilderness west of the Hudson River were able to play the simple Essene. We planned our biblo-retirement in terms of inurnment, Qumran-style. Now the sand in which our Dead Sea Scrolls must be buried is composed of drifts of electrons, countless subatomic egos, splintered and sterile as the bits of shivered quartzite that make West Bank dunes writhe like salted slugs.

    Apparently huge mobs of The Great Unwashed are born with–what? You can't call it a need, any more than drinking and breathing are needs; those are simply conditions of embodied existence. For artists as well as artists, it would seem that flushing the psyche is no less metabolic.

    But writing is strange. It’s easy to posit a dancing gene, or a singing gene, or even a painting gene. We were spasming and belching and smearing our diarrhea on rocks before Ardipithecus ramidus came slouching along. But we’ve only had the written word for six thousand years–unless the experts are correct in their recent efforts to push it back another thirty centuries by imputing lexical import to the squiggles nobody notices at Lascaux (FaceBook of the Paleolithic). Still, is that long enough deoxyribonucleically to Darwinize writing as an inborn behavior? Is it natural to be tinkering with these little bits of alphabet, like a bonobo tweezing termites with a twig? That’s the level of skill displayed by most knuckle-draggers with book contracts clenched in their prognathous jaws.

    These days, becoming a published author requires less of a grunt than evacuating the bowels after breakfast buffet at a Mexican restaurant. And if you are among the shrinking minority of mutants who don’t even pretend to have this predispositional urge to be literary, I can barely imagine the enviable sterility of your imagination, the lucky

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