The most irritating, demanding, pampered, unemployed degenerate in California finds out that the latest hipster spot is Northwest Arkansas; and so, although he has no money and must travel alone (because he has driven off all of the women in his life), and although he is too sickly to drive and there's hardly any mass transit - he goes, not only for the shallow purpose of just claiming he made the trip, but also to clear up a spiritual matter.

Except for a few pages in the beginning, where the protagonist is analyzed in a most unflattering way, the book is written in the first person, and in an extremely interior way - which is to say that the reader must really live with this self-absorbed, self-appointed, faux-prophet as he trudges against the wind to make his pilgrimage.

All the while, our so-called hero complains about everything and everyone. Perhaps the most heroic thing about him is that no amount of adversity, danger, hardship or risk can deter him from his insatiable desire to get to the bottom of everything, so that he might gather, from every corner of the earth, the evidence he needs to vindicate his unpopular and reductive view of humanity.

However, the world turns out to be a kinder, more hospitable and generous place than the protagonist will admit; and the gods, to whom he never stops bitterly complaining, turn out to be more than willing to put on a good show for him. And, although he in no way deserves it, the Ozark countryside rallies to his cause; and the spiritual questions he brought with him from California, receive a satisfying set of answers.

Mel C. Thompson is a retired wage slave who survived by working through temp agencies and guard agencies. Unable to survive in the real world of full-time, permanent work, he migrated from building to building, going wherever his agencies sent him, doing any type of work he could feign competency in and staying as long as those fragile arrangements could last. He somehow managed to get a B.A in Philosophy from Cal-State Fullerton in spite of his learning disorders and health problems. Unable to sustain family life due to depression, anxiety, sleep disorders, lack of transportation and lack of income, he lives alone in low-income housing and wanders around California on buses and trains. He began writing at the age of 14 and continues till the current day. (He turns 64 in June of 2023). In his early years he wrote pathetic love poetry until, in his thirties, he was engulfed by cynicism and fell in with a group of largely antisocial poets who wrote about the underground life of drugs, sex, alcohol, poverty, prostitution, heresy, isolation and alienation. In his fortes he turned to prose and began to write religious fiction with an emphasis on the comedic aspect of theology and philosophy. He now writes short novels focusing on the attempt to find meaning in a economic world beset with money laundering, unethical marketing, contraband smuggling, human trafficking, patent trolling, corrupt contracting and every manner of spiritual and psychological desperation and degradation. When he is not writing, he wanders from hospital to medical clinic to surgical room attempting to sustain what little health he has left after a lifetime of complications resulting from birth defects and genetic problems. When he is able, he engages in such hobbies as reading, walking, yoga and meditation; and whenever there is any money left over from his healthcare-related quests, he goes to wine tastings and searches for foodie-related bargains. Before the pandemic, he spent many years gaming various travel-points systems and wrangled many free trips to Europe. He is divorced and has no children, no pets, no real estate, no stocks nor any other assets beyond the $550 in his savings account. His career peaked in the early 2000s when he did comedy gags for a radio station and had about 10,000 listeners per week. However, currently, he may have as few as five active readers on any given day. He no longer has the stamina to promote his work and only finds new readers through ran...