Gideon's Chapbooks

I've been travelling lately and have noticed that there is this strange gravitational pull toward the bedside table drawers of hotel rooms. I always check to see if there's a bible. I somehow always find myself flipping through it. I particularly like to check the opening few pages (no, not the part where The Almighty makes tacos from the special sauce left over after His First Burger) but the part where it suggests readings for particular emotive states. For loneliness read such and such a passage. For adulterous thoughts sleep with the bible between your legs. That kind of thing. I do like the idea that there are books, readings, left in hotel rooms.

But why should there only be bibles in hotel rooms? I would like to start a Gideon's Chapbook series. Shouldn't travellers be able to read poetry and fiction. If you're feeling ectoplasmically surreal turn to page 23 of the chapbook. If you have an overwhelming sense of technocratic phallocentric corporate consumer priviledge, turn to...

I'd like to encourage writers to create their own chapbooks and leaflets and leave them in the bedside tables of the world's hotel rooms. Perhaps interleave them in the bibles. This is about dialogue. It's late at night. You've turned off the TV for the National Chewing Tobacco Spitting Contest is over. The Seventh Seal has finished. The landscape is even bereft of "Everyone Loves Raymond" Reruns. You feel drawn to the bedside table drawer. You reach out, open the drawer. Inside is "The Endless Future Chicken Pecks at Spacetime as if History were a Cosmic Seed and We Humans were Tiny Farmers Praying for Rain," the latest chapbook by Bikini J. Dogwood, published by Insatiable R. Libretto Press. You turn to page 11 because you need help for those without socks.