Aleksandr Usiaih Wandkoflacs, Sr. was born — as the story goes — in AD 1965, under a rainbow, beside a waterfall, in Bruges, to a young single mother and a plural father. Emerging from a long line of Cold War spies, dirt farmers, and pygmy goatherders (pygmy goats, not pygmy Wandkoflacses), he didn't begin speaking the English until his mid-twenties, during a protracted disaffection with his ancestral digdirt-and-tiny-goat cheese (and occasional briefcase-and-trench coat) heritage.
Wandkoflacs was there when the Berlin Wall came down, when it seemed the world could change in the blink of an eye. (And if anything, that was his fulcrum, his axle, his sign of the times.) He still describes it as ‘Unbelievable,’ to this very day, and remains a devoted fan of Imperialist comedians Andrew ‘Dice’ Clay and Dane ‘Chief’ Cook.
Many years later, when Wandkoflacs wed his alien wife illegally (and began subsequently and repeatedly impregnating her), the center 'stone' in his bride's engagement ring was a 1.22 carat pebble of Official Berlin Wall Concrete, spray-painted Swastika red — the color of remorse — to match her beautiful red dress, beautiful red shoes, and beautiful cinnamon-colored beard. Mrs. Wandkoflacs bore him a litter of red-colored bear cubs, enough to have brought a tear to both of Mother Russia's eyes had she been alive to see them.
(Even though the Cold War is over, Aleksandr takes comfort in the ongoing Tepid War, a war on the culture, the spirit, the economy, and the social media of the global middle class, which, from all appearances, may never end.)
Wandkoflacs was successfully neutered in 2007 by a nice doctor with small hands and Valium, his postoperative hours a physician-prescribed swirl of frozen pea-sitting, fermented hops-swallowing, and pipe cleaning — tasks for which the lovely and talented Mrs. Wandkoflacs (and her beard) were happy to lend a hand.
"Something In The Middle — Small Fictions From The Far Side Of Consciousness" is Wandkoflacs's first English-language book, which he's penned partially under the pseudonym Augie Christie (August, his father, and Christie, his favorite NFL placekicker) and partially next to it.
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