The Dream Thing Again

I just finished a book with a series of anthropological essays. Then the editor wrote an epilogue. He concluded that through scientific analysis the future can be predicted someday quite accurately, when scientists really have it all fine tuned in how to read the data.

I guess I can go with that, just wondering how us mortals can accomplish and not leave out infintesimal data.

But his last paragraph went further. He said, it's like everything we humans have done until now is simply a dream, with the real on the horizon.

That, of course, caught my eye. It goes along with religious philosophy I read. And this was written in the early 1960s.

C.S. Lewis talked about that creative spark that scientists seem to not evaluate. This guy may have somehow included that spark in his analysis, but still to take in his overview, the macro vision of life and the universe. He even included eternity. That it was probable, even considering that the sun would one day burn out and the earth die.

We live our bogged down, dim witted seventy plus years. Everything beyond our two inch grasp seems to take us by surprise. But something is there beyond us.

Ghosts

My oldest was again in a boyscout camp, so I was alone this weekend with my youngest. It was that way last week also, except we went to part of the campout to watch my oldest get Order of the Arrow. My youngest is in the same troop, but would rather be with his dad than camping out. We had to study all weekend then and now too, for the TAKS.

So, I'm writing my ghost story now, and actually several stories that I've started or planned have ghosts involved. It seems coincidental to me, but maybe more Freudian. I noticed Friday morning an advertisement on CBS about ghosts for a weekly, Ghost Whisperer. So me and my youngest watched it together. I didn't enjoy it very much. I have to be a good writer to get anything excited about anyway, but I don't have to be as good as I thought, going by the show.

Then we watched Field Of Dreams, with of course, baseball ghosts. Still intriguing overall, to think about. With research on the subject through the years I read about some things that happened to me that I had told a few very intimates about, thinking people would think me crazy, things that happened even as I was very small, sure I must be making up, and then I read about it in adulthood, that others claim does happen, to sensitives.

I decided to tell my youngest a little of it, since we were on the subject watching the shows. He just sat there, and I guess believed me, since I'm his dad and acted like it really did happen. I left out the most bizarre, things I was certain no one would believe, the old, oh yeah, sure it did, right.

The first person I ever tried to tell the most bizarre to believed me point blank. Shocked the total hell out of me. Even used terminology on me about it. I brought it up again, sort of an encore performance to the same person twenty years later, just to check out again, and still trying to believe it did happen to me. Same response, same terminologies thrown at me. Now, I'm reading the exact same stuff thrown at me in books I'm researching.

And in my story, I'm also using some incidences that my little sister told me when I came home from the service. Bizarre things that happened to her while I was overseas. She had such vivid memories and the stories were so real/surreal, that we were scared out of our minds as she related it even as a memory. If we could get so scared just talking about it, what must she have gone through as it was happening. We were so scared in fact, we went to the bathroom together, one hiding their eyes in a corner turned away as one relieved themselves, then the other. Then we slept together in the same bed, scared to sleep alone, even afraid of how all this looked or sounded. I mean scared, just from stories she related. I'm using some of her stories in my novel.

So, I do feel, the better I am writing it, the better chance I have, of course, but I am haunted, for lack of a better word, by all the guffaws all the normals have so easily on the subject, of which I don't blame them. I guess it shouldn't be easy. All the more challenge to do it good. Best.

I'm more and more beginning to believe it. Not really it, but something. That things do exist in this direction in some form. And I'm putting it down, in fiction, hoping to make it sound real.

Formulaic

My favorite music has always been Gospel. But I cannot identify one iota with what I hear these days. It's definitely not Gospel, no matter what they call it, and I don't think they bother with that word anymore anyway.

I have a business degree. I understand the market place. I understand that times change too. No matter what I understand, or try to anyway, I don't get what's going on, and I know I hate it.

You can blame producers, but it's people's taste. Producers maybe some too, they can get short sighted, but they still are catering to what people want, or at least trying to like everyone else in the market place.

So, I want to be a writer. I used to want to be a singer. I compromised a bit as a singer. I did want to make it, even badly. But not just for the sake of singing. I wanted to move people like songs and styles moved me. Crap didn't move me, so I surmised, even if it moved others. I'd rather not make it than sing crap. I did a great job of not making it.

So, I want to make it as a writer. Formulas. All these stupid formulas. What people want these days. What sells on the market. I love the business challenge of it, actually, just hate doing the ingredients I despise.

But all of a sudden, some of this is fun. I have spent the better part of three days now writing from scratch a new first chapter for this old concept I've had for a novel for twenty years. I have chewed on plots, researched volumes, experimented with ideas for maybe a month now on this latest story of mine.

I loved my first chapter overall, but I could feel it. Too slow. This remote control world I keep hearing about is going to want action sooner than I'm giving it and I won't get past the first editor, if I get that far.

I thought about it and the light bulb came on. Yeah, this might work for a new opening. And I got it done in five pages. But by the second day, five pages felt an eternity. They still are going to flip my channel off.

So, I squeezed it into three yesterday morning, and before I could start feeling snug, I started getting paranoid again. It's still three pages, but after seventy-five thousand more rewrites, it's almost approaching what just may have a chance in today's formulaic world.

And I'm having fun doing it. I want to say things I want to say, and fit it into this formula too. I don't want it stiff. So, how do I keep it flowing and have some depth too for whoever doesn't want to be deepened.

Suddenly I'm loving the challenge. I guess I'm turning more into a writer. I still hope the word good gets attached to me someday, but at least maybe I'm becoming a writer now.

Tomorrow Belongs To Me

After I got out of the Marines and my best bud got out of the Army, before settling down, we figured we wanted to see the world. We hitchhiked to New York, flew Icelandic to Luxembourg, hitch hiked to the Lakes of England and worked in a luxury hotel. Just as we were getting our work visas, on October 6, 1973 war broke out between Israel and Egypt, the Yom Kippor War. We couldn't let that one pass, quit our jobs, hitched to London to take an El Al flight to Israel to help the cause.

It was three days before the flight. Caberet was playing then. We had seen all the sights and decided we wanted to see this movie we had heard so much about. It's still one of my favorite movies of all time, in fact.

It contains the best scene in Hollywood history as far as I'm concerned. In the movie we see the obscure thugs called Nazis suddenly become a force to be reckoned with by the time the movies over. One side was using them against the other for political manipulation and Hitler was using everyone to gain power.

Suddenly, just before movies end, it made sense. The Nazis, yeah, the Nazis, they are the ones that can do it. The movie did not spare them, make them look heroic, or inevitable. It just showed how it could happen and the scene that represented that is my favorite scene ever.

You could feel it. The electricity, the timing, the meaning, the energy. A young blond haired kid gets up from his table in the outdoor area of a restaurant. People are haggard, perhaps indifferent. But this kid begins to make sense. A stirring melody, meaningful words, conviction, determination and one by one you could see the look on the faces of the people there. It makes sense, the kid makes sense and he's a Nazi. Hitler makes sense.

It was very stirring and the title of the song was Tomorrow Belongs To Me. The rephrase rang:
Fatherland Fatherland
Show us the sign
Your children are waiting to see
The morning will come
When the world is mine
Tomorrow belongs to me.

The song almost never ends and almost everyone is singing it and I began to look at myself, me too, that's what I want. I could see how it happened. I wasn't living in a depression like they were, I wasn't curtailed by treaties like they were, but what you could sense, was the power that was forming and you saw the corruption by those around in power, in Germany and throughout Europe. A vacuum existed that Hitler was going to fill. It was incredibly seductive.

But I didn't need to be a Nazi, and who cares. You could still feel the power, and I was in life's arena. I didn't want to be home where my friends were. My friends bored me. I wanted this tomorrow like in the song. Just seeing the world was seductive to me. Just meeting people that I had seen in movies or news or history books. I could not live a normal life, even nobody that I was.

It's easy to see the folly and destructiveness of Hitler, but to me that was only a warning, not the lesson. The lesson was that energy, that fervor, just a different path. One I've never heard of before, only about.

And I'm still looking, still not satisfied, but light years beyond from where I would have been by staying home and minding the store.

I still chase that dream. My El Dorado. I still only regret not having found it, not the search.