Precisely at the moment in the fall of 1967 when 50,000 war protesters encircling the Pentagon begin chanting in unison to bring about its levitation, Theodore Seldom’s newlywed parents conceive their first and only child in their second-story apartment on the other side of the country in San Francisco, California. Like the Pentagon levitation attempt, the conception hits a snag; at the worst possible moment, Uncle Richard, an uninvited houseguest who will not actually become an uncle for another nine months, crashes into the bedroom when he thinks he hears a new Beatles song on the radio. (Not only is Uncle Richard quickly on his way to becoming an uncle, he is also turning into an obsessed Beatles fan who to this day refuses to acknowledge the band’s breakup and espouses that the only Beatle who ever died is, as rumored, Paul McCartney.) Thus begins Jokerman 8, a romp of a book about laughing more and taking the world less seriously; about learning to swim and fly; about following gentle impulses; about not sitting still while Earth’s flora and fauna are shaved, poisoned, and burned off the planet's surface; and about daughters and sons learning what it is they are about. Reaching college age, Theodore Seldom (whom his adoring compats dub TS) joins Jokerman, a troupe of forest radicals based out of San Francisco State University. Together, TS and Jokerman engage in a wild array of pranks -- they sink whaling ships at harbor in Iceland, skydive into the winter forest of British Columbia on a bend to save a pack of wolves from a government-sponsored slaughter, and stage a Tree-In in a southern Oregon old-growth forest where it is believed the first pine trees evolved. Jokerman spikes trees, jerryrigs tractors, spoils traps, and conserves enough energy to drink beer at the day’s end. The troupe then stumbles upon Dean “Foot Apples” Burchetta, an SFSU graduate student in the Department of Egyptian Studies, who himself has stumbled upon the low-intensity, machineless technology behind ancient pyramid building. With Foot Apples aboard and with nothing better to do in the summer of 1990, Jokerman embarks on its most monumental (and ridiculous) escapade ever -- to build an American version of the Great Pyramid . . . along the Potomac at the present site of the Pentagon. The troupe travels up the West Coast in a barnacle-covered Volkswagen bus (that spent thirteen years “parked” underneath the San Francisco Bay) en route to an the abandoned Oregon commune where the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh once sojourned, where they plan to use the open space to try out their pyramid-building technique. Along the way, they begin to believe that anything is possible. Jokerman 8 is written in a multi-voiced prose style that is simultaneously rollicking yet meditative, whirlwind yet lax, lush yet stark, ghostly yet grounded, complex yet accessible. The novel can best be summed up by its shortest (and closing) sentence: “Live happy.” JOKERMAN 8, a novel by RICHARD MELO Published in 2004 by Soft Skull Press