Welcome to Well, What Now?
This series of short videos continues The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy.
Note: If you’re going to watch these on a phone, you will probably prefer the YouTube versions. You’ll find them at The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy channel.
Episode 1: “At Loose Ends,” in which Peter feels that he’s adrift, lost in a fog of uncertainty and indecision, and Albertine tells him that he needs a project.
Episode 2: “Keep Moving,” in which Peter suggests that he could build a shed.
Episode 3, “Simulations,” in which Albertine asks, “Are we living in a simulation?” and Peter asks, “Where are the martinis?”
Episode 4, “New News,” in which Peter and Albertine quote Robert Burton from four hundred years ago: “I hear new news every day, . . . of war, plagues, fires, inundations, thefts, murders, massacres, meteors, comets, spectrums, prodigies, apparitions, of towns taken, cities besieged . . .”
Episode 5, “Who’s Watching,” in which Peter and Albertine discuss kindness, with the assistance of Josephine Baker, Virginia Woolf, and Maria the Machine-Woman.
Episode 6, “The Pursuit of Comitas,” in which Chives the humanoid robot butler takes a ride in an autonomous vehicle.
Episode 7, “What’s That Noise?” in which Peter, Albertine, Walt Whitman, and William Penn discuss civilization and its discontents.
Episode 8, “Live and Learn” in which Albertine and Peter endeavor to expand their skill sets.
Episode 9, “What’s the Big Idea?” in which Peter encounters FluddBot the ChatBot.
Episode 10, “Something Knotty,” in which Albertine and Peter become entangled in the manifold mysteries of mathematical knots.
Episode 11, “Solid Citizens,” in which Peter and Albertine ramble through Manhattan seeking wisdom.
Episode 12, “Grin and Bear It,” in which Peter wonders if he has lost his edge.
The Personal History is one large work of fiction composed of many interconnected parts. Its parts are the memoirs and collected works of a fictional character, Peter Leroy, who tells an alternative version of his life story; explores the effect of imagination on perception, memory, hope, and fear; holds a fun-house mirror to scenes of life in the United States; ruminates upon the nature of the universe and the role of human consciousness within it; and searches the painful world of time and place to find the niches where hilarity hides.
I’m making the entire Personal History available online for free—the whole thing, all twelve previously-published volumes, in installments, and the contemporary continuation, Well, What Now? I’m hoping that Substack can help it “find its audience.”
You can ensure that you never miss a future episode of Well, What Now? by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
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thanks fats, hilarious