For your amusement and, hopefully edification and enlightenment, I present to you the character of Napoleon Shakespeare, known to his close friends and confidants as, simply, Leon Shakes. Leon Shakes has been a North Beach, and Druid Heights, fixture for decades and is part of the Moondog, Quantum Coyote, Benny Pristine, Crysta Bella inner circle. Indeed, Leon is a WOW! Initiate and was in attendance when QC and Moondog took their fateful leap.(Satori Tango, Chapters 6-10).



Leon Shakes believes himself to be the reincarnation of Alfred Jarry, claims to constantly channel Jarry and, like Jarry, has succeeded in turning himself into a work of art…a fictive character of his own creation.



As Mark Sanders in an article in The Idler
states:
"Resulting from personal theories on Pataphysics, which Jarry used as both an onieric and rhetorical philosophy, his life became a hyperbolic version of existence: at once a deformation and an exaggeration of reality. “Action and Life…” howled Jarry, “are more beautiful than Thought. Thus, let us Live and by so doing we shall be Masters.” His outlook on life was calculated to distort accepted “reality” and thereby trigger catastrophic changes, creating imaginary hypotheses that could replace the known or the probable. As such, each person was the master of his own contradictions. It was only by virtue of his will power that the individual could directly transform his environment away from the rational confines of bourgeois culture and so escape the suburbia of the soul."

We will return to the doings of Leon Shakes in due time. His introduction into the mix always gives the stew an outlandish tang.