Born under a bald and steaming moon in the grimy back alleys of Oakland, California, Michael J. Riser exploded upon the world in a torrent of angst and dreams unfulfilled. He sensed this keenly, even during his earliest days, and it was only a few years before he began his eager ascent up the cruel ladder of history. Time’s great chamber still awaits him at the top, mocking laughter filtering down from the halls of its blasphemy, daring him to grow older. Mikey remains defiant as he battles an endless stream of Seconds, Minutes, Hours, and Days, those wretched machinations of his great adversary, and has continued to increase in age. Daily he avoids falling prey to the 89,000 Sacred Deaths he has already witnessed himself dying in bright dreams of picnics with elder gods and day trips to the Apocalypse, and perhaps he will continue on to at last reach Time itself. Perhaps he will live to thrust a stake into that wicked heart.
Perhaps.
In December of 2010, one of Mikey’s long-held dreams was finally realized with the spawning of The Flying Monkey Apparatus. The website and blog didn’t merely herald its own birth, which was in evidence from the time that it crawled out of the recesses of its creator’s mind into the lemony-fresh sterility of the unsoiled Internet; it also signaled Mikey’s departure from the world of professional hamster-wheeling that he’d been caught in for 13 years. When asked for comment about the origins of the site’s strange name, he had this to say:
The name had long existed in my head as a gag, a funny image, but it wasn’t until I was walking back from the El Cerrito BART station to my humble apartment on Liberty Street one rainy evening that it occurred to me what the image actually meant. I had always thought that I would call my collected work The Flying Monkey Apparatus just because it seemed like an amusing thing to call it, but that night I realized that truly, that’s what my work is. For in all things creative, doesn’t Man work to be like God? Doesn’t he strive to create and bring to life things from within himself every time he puts his pen to paper, his brush to canvas, his voice to song? So I believe my work, and the work of the great many worthy artists to whom I am so indebted, to be an unconscious homage to God in some form or other, an apparatus built from many pieces by the hands of simple land-bound mammals wishing with all their might to fly.
What more may come as Mikey continues to age, like a fine wine, or perhaps a good cheese, none can say for certain, but after defeating 730 consecutive fortnights in Survival Mode to reach this stage of life, we may rest assured that he intends to do his very best in putting his love of writing to work. He hopes more than anything that he will in some small way be able to inspire and instruct others as so many beautiful, delightful purveyors of the written word have inspired and instructed him in years past, and indeed continue to do even now.
Mikey is a lifelong Californian currently living in Fort Worth, Texas with a collection of musical instruments, books, video games, and piles of quasi-sentient dust bunnies. He sometimes cuddles with his Chicago Manual of Style and makes disturbing kissy noises at it. He politely asks that you not confuse him with Michael Riser, the talentless pop/rock hack who got to the domain first. Mikey regularly fights for the rights of animals in a society that often neglects them, and wishes he was the parent of a happy, loyal pit bull. His landlady is glad he isn’t.
