The Pagan User's Manual: Volumes I, II, III

In the sky, on the sea, through corporate goo or in just day-to-day living, life is all about navigation. Aids to navigation exist all over but they have to be located. Inversely, there are hazards to navigation like mountains hidden in clouds, submerged rocks, clueless managers and other dimwitted people that must be dealt with.

Gleaning just enough knowledge out of a failed college education, Ian Young moves through corporations, oceans and atmospheres teaching clueless rich people how to operate their expensive yachts and planes, and feeds the addiction that businesses have for information. He delves into his own philosophy on the meaninglessness of life by relating his experiences in flying, sailing and computer technology well before the age of gadget distraction.

Unencumbered by the constraints of society and family, he is free to pass through walls that repress most people.

Salmon Jack puts his cynical view of society to work in "The Pagan User's Manual." A triangle in the eastern Pacific Ocean formed by Alaska, Mexico and Hawaii serves as a backdrop for stories about many people who would have been better off had they stayed home. Salmon also derides the corporate lunacy that grows exponentially with the size of the organization. "The Pagan User's Manual" is one big incompetency festival that doesn't exclude the protagonist, Ian Young.

Volume I: Illegal Ian has quit his job, sold his home and flies up the coast of North America to deliver his plane he just sold to its new owner. An air trip instead of a road trip, he has time to stop, think, write and delve into old journals about his life at sea and in the air. Embedded therein are the first suspicions of solipsism and the nature of his existence.

Volume II: Tartarus He climbs aboard a powerboat for a long delivery from Vancouver, BC to Newport Beach, California. Here, he drills more deeply into his theory of layered dreaming. His journals and stories relate to the madness intrinsic to corporations and the oddities of flying, including scattering ashes from an airplane. His deepest dive, though, is into the peculiar passion of racing a cantankerous and rewarding Olympic sailboat, the Finn. At a world championship, he finds more reward in music than in the competition on the water.

Volume III: Pagan Ian grapples his own incompetence as he guides hapless students through the Inside Passages of Alaska on a sixty-four foot sailboat. He ridicules the unthinking people trying to negotiate the mighty oceans, including himself. He further excoriates a religion that ultimately killed his mother.