It was a day like most in Harrietsburg, Pennsylvania, a suburban Anytown of 3,000. Many still remember where they were and what they were doing that cold January ninth. Trenchcoated salesman Norm Befalnerstein walked up three steps and knocked on an unfamiliar door. George Feckleby came down the hall from the kitchen and opened that door. Across town, Renee Feckleby kneeled on the Humane Society floor and brushed a Cocker Spaniel. Reggie Feckleby did his math problems and sucked on a jawbreaker. Policeman Fred Slitt stood on his corner sucking his candy whistle and walked small candy-homework-sucking children across the street.

But there would be a break in life’s flow that day. Many remember the dread they felt as the thud of the explosion was felt along every spine in town. One Harrietsburg resident probably never heard the explosion. He was Darren Darjeeling, a publisher by trade, and was going about his daily work-at-home routine when his home suddenly and unexpectedly filled with natural gas and ignited, knocking out his doors and windows and starting a fire that engulfed his three-story suburban home.

They didn’t find the fireproof safe for hours, not until sunrise of the next day in fact, but there it was, the only thing unbroken under the masonry and lumber. The men pried it open and there they lay, in cold quiet. Two manuscripts. Darjeeling had sealed them in the safe only minutes before the explosion. One with a note saying – “Yes.” The other – “No.”

They were put there for his assistant to find. The assistant who was paid to deliver them, to do all the paperwork, to congratulate the lucky author – to make the manuscripts into books, by proxy, for eccentric publisher Darjeeling. And they were there still – the notes – when the firemen pried the steel door loose in the presence of water that dripped and sunlight that mocked and three entertainment lawyers.

And there beneath the lawyers’ laser stares, irony worked its fearful magic. There was more in store for the people of Harrietsburg than a mere emotional rollercoaster. Oh sure, there were shocks aplenty. It hadn’t been an accident, first of all, and the saboteur turned himself in almost immediately. But despite the shock of the murder, the outrage of the crime, the prolonged bloodletting of the trial – not to mention the terrible boredom felt by all when they learned the bomber was arrested carrying a copy of The Catcher in the Rye, so utterly tedious and predictable was the fact – all these painful emotions eventually faded from public consciousness.

What was left behind was a bizarre turn of events that continues to stun us all today. For Darjeeling had unfinished business. He had left specific directions. Publish THIS book, he had said. DON’T publish that one. THIS one, he seemed to say, was a towering achievement; THAT one a monumental joke.

Three sociopathic lawyers were more than enough to ensure that his wishes were carried out. But we know now that in a moment of carelessness Darjeeling mixed up those notes. And so this book – this wildly unexpected, tantalizingly illogical, totally ridiculous book – was never meant to be published. God knows that other book deserved to be published. It was a good book. A worthy book. A book about paleontology or something. But – it was not. And the other book – this, some would say, absurd treatise on peace and music – was. We bought it…we read it…and we will never be the same.

And so it was that, for better or worse, the world came to learn of two disciplines, once thought separate but now united: Global Conflict Resolution and the KISS Solo Albums.

We are, truly, united in fear.