The Diary of Osric Martext 2012 (Aug-Sept) (Paperback)

Editor's Note Osric Martext was born in Miami in 1949. He was taken to South Carolina in 1953 when his family moved there, settling in a large house built before the Revolution, Dirleton Plantation, in the crossroads town of Stateburg, which lies between Columbia and Sumter, just south of the Wateree Swamp. His parents divorced, bitterly, in 1956. His mother, being very young herself and desperate for funds, struggled to manage the plantation (which she had purchased with an inheritance from her father), but eventually sold out, moving Osric and his four siblings to the coastal town of Myrtle Beach, where they hoped to make a fresh start, in 1962. In 1964, Osric began his "Diary," which he occasionally refers to as his "journal." He would add to this work throughout his life, though many years of entries were lost to quick moves, fires, hurricanes, political and social upheaval, and the ever-present necessity during certain unfortunate phases of Osric's life to leave apartments suddenly through the back door when the sheriff was waiting with the landlord at the front door to collect rents long past due. The surviving portions of the manuscript were discovered around 2010, when Osric set about the task of editing them along with some surviving letters, into this current manuscript, in a fervent hope that whatever residual income they might provide would ease the burdens of old age and provide him sufficient quantities of cheap white wine and three-year-old Scotch to see him through his final years. As the Reader will see, this is the sad record of a misspent Life that would turn out to be, much to the surprise and dismay of young Osric himself, entirely inconsequential in almost every regard or judgment envied by Man or esteemed in the annals of History. As the early Osric might have put it: Sic transit gloria mundi. And, sometimes, in the case of the ill-fated Osric, there wasn't all that much gloria.