
Foreword By Nicholas Savoy
Let me begin by telling you, the reader, that right off the hop, I’ve been less than forthcoming in naming this story the “Arcane Diary.” A diary would lead one to believe that the story they were about to embark upon was the tale of the life of someone, but this you hold in your hands is a misnomer because,
as it turns out, it is my life story (with boring details kept to a bare minimum, I promise), but if it has been written, I am already dead as Nick Savoy and have gone on to another (hopefully better) life.
Pieced together in this story, an elegy perhaps a more fitting description, are the fragments of my life and mind that I have left to my confidant Xander Mercurio to make sense of where I have failed.
In essence, this diary is an elaborate advance suicide letter to serve as a record of the mysteries that I have found inextricably surrounding my life and, doubtless, my death as well. I leave my tale as a parting gift to a world that, while I was there, I can honestly say I tried my best to decipher and dwell harmoniously with to what degree of success is yet to be told.
Perhaps the story goes that an obsessively curious cynicism like mine is counterintuitive to successful coexistence in a world like this one. Still, I’d hate to spoil the ending, so I won’t because I honestly can’t.
In my life, I have tried to answer a higher calling and to live by eternal principles of good and righteousness. This has made me less than popular with many types of selfish, evil entities that, throughout my existence, I have sought to defeat in any way necessary.
Depending on your objective and perspective on life, I may appear to be a hero or a villain, but either way I am who I am, nothing more and nothing less.
That is all I can promise; this is my story, a reverse memoir. When I embarked on my journey, I knew I would need courage, faith, and an open mind to accomplish my task. All that I ask is that you provide one or two of these qualities, and I intend to help with the rest.

I made the transition from narcotics sales to illicit information retail smoothly: to me, they were the same – swimming in a cesspool, taking your cut, trying not to come out stinking.
Somehow, I managed to avoid prosecution while supplying the rich and powerful hopeless with their kicks, shaking hands with the devil as I turned a blind eye to their corruption and counted my cash.
Now, I hunted sleaze to feed off the stupidity in an attempt to redeem my past ignorant involvement with vice. The hours were the same, round the clock, and I loved it. In chasing other people’s messes, I could temporarily escape my own and be perversely amused by the foibles of people who would act out their candid misconducts without the knowledge of my presence.
Insurance scammers, parties on both sides of legal disputes, and my favourite, cheating spouses were just a few of the cases my camera lens and I were able to procure and close for profit. The voyeuristic aspect of detective work interested me probably more than it should have, but admittedly it was a lonely life despite the occasional thrills I got from the chase, overall it was jading.
Having felt all the artificial highs chemical substances could provide gave me a perspective from the lowest realms of the depressed psyche, such were the ups and downs.
At one time, as a naïve young man, I believed wholeheartedly in and longed deeply for true love. Still, as time and experience wore on and etched their cruel truths into my thinking and emotions, I realized that love was an illusion like so many other things dangled in front of people to keep their hope alive for the proverbial rainy day. For me, that was every day.
I still do think that love is the most powerful force in the universe (God is Love, Love=God?) and, as such has enormous potential for either wonderfully positive or negative effects on a person’s life. In my experience, I had only seen the latter. My family’s love relationships were those of pathetic desperation and control stemming from insecurity, never out of genuine caring or concern.
I would never stoop to the level of exchanging sex for the drugs that I was selling; however, I realize that most of the affections I received in my young adulthood were mainly due to my contacts and ready supply of the “life” of their vacuous party. I wish I could have understood this concept of insincerity before I let my wishful lusting get carried away, but all this in hindsight.
I desperately yearned for love in my life, and what I got myself into was simply the carnal procedure, missing the spiritual connection of lovemaking. Being raised in seclusion and discouraged from ever forming human bonds – particularly with the opposite sex – when my hormones took over my faculties in my teens, pornography quickly grabbed my attention. The anonymity and convenience were perfect for my non-committal personality. I quickly employed my technological prowess in doing a porn piracy business for my horny teenage cohort clients. What can I say? I’m an entrepreneur at heart. At 14, I had my empire in my grandparents’ basement: a top-of-the-line computer that went round the clock producing contraband CDs full of smut for anyone with sexual frustration and $20.
Some kids went to McDonalds for work, but I bought a car at 16 for watching and capitalizing on porno. Now I get to watch bored soccer moms fuck the pool boy. Not much has changed, I suppose. Nevertheless, I have learned the heartbroken way the vast difference between making love and fucking. Lovemaking is what everyone dreams of and aspires to, like the Olympics; fucking is what I ended up with at the end of the day, for me just a vicarious spectator sport.
I love women, but I got to the point where participation lost its appeal – fears, complications and having seen and heard it all – I lost interest and faith in humanity. So I was alone, with my spy gear and voyeurism. Work has always served as a diversion from reality, and dreaming has always played a focal role in my waking existence. I cared much for marijuana because when I smoked it, I felt like I was living in a dream, which incidentally felt “more real” than the real for most of my life.
I eventually kicked the habitual use because I realized that my dream states were becoming less pronounced in their subconscious vividness, and the residual memories upon return from my fugue state were nearly nonexistent. I have always suffered from depression, a minor mental affliction in contrast with the plethora of plagues rampant in my gene pool; just the same, I have always fought my depression by consciously working to improve my self-awareness and spirituality by diligent study and immersion in art and culture.
Once I got past my three-year weed binge, my dreams became extremely meaningful, colourful metaphors of my waking life that began to provide my life with direction, focus and insight. The messages were cryptic, however, and I read that dream journals were essential to encourage unconscious memory recall. So, I began this diary and continued to add to it despite many earlier futile attempts at journal-keeping as a child to document what I felt to be meaningful thoughts and events. Nothing proved to be of sufficient depth or importance to hold my transient attention span until I began delving into the unfathomable subjectivity…
[Write backward like a dream journal, revelatory at the beginning, unfold to introduce]
I always tried to reverse engineer my life, starting with the result in mind and working backwards to construct my existence according to my hopes, dreams, goals, and desires. These criteria, the variables of the equation, have, at some critical points, resembled a revolving lock mechanism or roulette table.
My memoirs, diary, obituary, or however it will be seen is my ode to death in all of its horror, beauty and potential – the tale is of my journey on this side and that of the ultimate end that unites humanity and divides the soul from this body.
[Suicide – the beginning of the story, the end (paradox)]