Uncompleted Projects
As long as I’m thinking about writing projects, and as long as I’m confident that nobody will ever look at this (thus possibly getting me in trouble), here is another writing project. I’ve actually put pen to paper about this and started something, but I have no idea where it’s going to go. It’s “speculative fiction”, I suppose, in that it takes place in a near future America. It could even be called dystopian, except that the term is problematic. every dystopian scenario serves someone. Even the government of Oceania in 1984 no doubt made some people feel safe. Winston Smith was a troublemaker!
Here are the principal characters of mine: first, offstage, Madame President. She was a former New Age spiritual guru with many thousands of followers, and many best-sellers. As she moved up, she re-imagined herself as a “thought leader” and “author”, dropping some of the more arrant bullshit. She stopped wearing sari-inspired dresses, and started wearing sober pantsuits. Among her followers (now, “constituents”) are powerful lawyers, CEOs, heirs… mostly, but not all, women. Also, many wives of powerful lawyers, CEOs, etc., who have moved beyond just yoga into the vast spirit-osphere. I’ve called her (tentatively) Aurora… though, perhaps that was her name before, and now she may have moved to her birth name, Diana, shedding the woo-woo stuff.
Of course, any resemblance to anyone living or dead, is purely coincidental.
So, Diana won a seat in Congress, made a speech that garnered national attention. [Here it gets vague] She has figured out how to triangulate among hippies, seekers, Christians, the labor Left, and the angry, frightened white Right. Her language encompasses nurturing Mommy and Angry, vengeful Daddy. She runs for President against a weak Republican who makes mistakes and whose vote is split by a crazy-ass Far Right Tea Party candidate.
During her first 100-day honeymoon, she gets a rattled Congress to pass a national service law, but not all military. It is arranged such that the young volunteers are the most fervent Dian-ites. They are taken away from their homes and distributed, seemingly at random, around the country. But it’s not random – they are posted where they will feel the most threatened, where their bond to Diana will be all they have to hold onto. They are given a small “care package” with a picture of Diana and a book of her sayings and tenets. They will have no allegiance to the locality or community where they are posted, and will carry out her orders. And they will KNOW that they are doing right. The little care packages are individually tailored to the volunteer, even down to the picture of Diana, which will be nun-like for some, and borderline cheesecake for others. All volunteers are given exhaustive testing before deployment, and an elaborate, detailed profile is constructed, by which they can be fully manipulated. Psychology is a fully tested science, with predictable techniques.
So, good. We have our President, we have a corps of acolytes all over the country ready to do her personal bidding.
On her right hand is her “chaplain”, a beautiful young man who was born into a secular Jewish family but has discovered Christ. He proves that the country can unite in Christ, because, my goodness, if the Jews can be made to come over, then that’s everyone (almost), right? and there will be no need for strife. Diana brings us all together for the common goal of spiritual enrichment, not materialism.
This young man, Joshua Berliner, seemingly (and probably actually) celibate is pure tabloid fodder. Who is he seen with? Is he as virtuous and smart as he seems? Yes apparently.
His mother, Leah Berliner, is a scientist – a psychologist whose specialty is memory. She got into trouble a number of years before by conducting a study showing that false memories can be implanted, and thus beliefs changed. Our beliefs are formed by our memories and stories we tell about ourselves, after all.
Again, any resemblance, etc., etc., coincidental.
In fact, she received death threats from followers of (then) Aurora, for having testified against her in a court case regarding “recovered memories”. Aurora lost and had to pay quite a lot to a family had been wracked by rumors of Satanic ritual and sexual abuse; all found scurrilous.
So, wonder of wonders, irony of ironies, Diana (then in Congress) sees this young man at a National Day of Prayer thing and recruits him. He had been living hand to mouth, but now had quite a lot of money. His weakness is clothes… he travels with Diana to Paris and spends a lot of money on bespoke tailoring. His excuse is that he’s public now, has to look good, and has trouble fitting in ready-to-wear; his shoulders are too broad, etc.
Josh doesn’t understand his mother’s sense of betrayal. He sees himself as a peacemaker. If there’s still resentment, well, that’s just sad. Diana, he maintains, is over the whole thing. It was, after all, just money…
***
Here we are, today, and Diana’s grip on the nation is very tight. Her Dianites are the equivalent of the piety police in Iran, or the secret police in Soviet Russia.
And Leah has angered them all by a speech she made in which she calls this out, and hints at anti-Semitic trends. Joshua is enraged – Diana couldn’t be less racist, and any Jews who feel that the nation is turning against them always have the option of turning to Christ, whose arms are always open, ready to forgive, if only one would come unto him with humility. That’s really all it takes.
Leah is now under a kind of informal house arrest, and the Dianites have taken away anything that could be used to “harm herself,” such as knitting needles and kitchen knives. Since Leah was a dedicated cook and knitter, this is terrible.
Her son, Josh, comes by to talk her into recanting. He’s not going to pressure her to accept Christ (he doesn’t like the word “convert,” it’s derogatory), but he’s ready if she feels it in her heart.
Unfinished Projects…
In line with my belief that NOBODY will ever read this, I hereby store a list of unfinished projects. Some were really good ideas that time has enervated, some would have long been thrown away even if I had finished them. But I think a leitmotif in my life is the Unfinished Project. I may not finish this list!
- The Cutty Sark—This was a model boat which my Uncle Bob bought me at the South Street Seaport, ca 1970, when it was a seaport and fish market, not just another mall with Yankee Candles and Gaps. This was not a plastic model – it was wooden, with a roughly finished hull which I was supposed to sand. It was hellishly complicated, and I remember being utterly stumped by the rigging. The unfinished model sat on my dresser looking more and more like the Flying Dutchman. I suspect that it even had its little ghosts of disappointment whiffling in and out of its portholes.
- Raytheon VoltOhmMeter Kit—One day my father took me to visit some guy at RCA. I don’t remember his name, or what he did there, but he had an office and a desk, so that counts for something. Since everyone my father knew was “the top man” at wherever, or “the most important” whatever, it was always hard to tell truth from puffery. All I remember, aside from being vaguely miserable the whole time, as I tended to be with my father, since he was an indefatigable source of criticism and low-level anger, is that this guy gave me a kit. This was along the lines of the old Heathkits, but was Raytheon. Very exciting! I loved to solder things, just as I had loved to do copper enameling. Just being around a white hot coil thrilled me. I started putting it together, carefully following the instructions, but was missing a couple of parts, including a “selenium rectifier”. I wrote to Raytheon, and it took the two months that things took in those days. I got the parts, but when I put it together, it just did… nothing. It didn’t work at all! I even took it to school to show the guy who ran our science lab, and he had no idea. Looking back, I expect that my solder joints were lousy, but I’ll never know.
- Prof. Rainwater’s Experimental Physics Class—I actually did finish this, one day before I graduated. A good example of the energizing power of deadlines.
- Graduate School—I look back on this as a particularly tragic one. I should have stayed at Columbia (I was invited back with a full fellowship) but wanted to get away from my parents (like you can do that; THEY’RE IN YOUR HEAD, YOU IDIOT!). I should have stayed at Berkeley, but was in a state of near-constant misery/panic the whole time. Also, my legs were covered with hives; I put on calamine lotion and wore shorts – I can only imagine… They didn’t give out SSRIs then, and I wasn’t good at looking for therapists. Also, I wanted attention/love, and grad school didn’t seem like the place for that. So I stayed for nine months, and came back to NY. Right back to the parents which whom I wanted nothing to do the Spring before.
- Acting Career—Hard to say about this one. I think I just didn’t give it the kind of push that’s needed, but I also think I wasn’t all that great. Oh, I was OK, even sometimes quite funny or moving. But, generally speaking, meh. On the other hand, it’s not like all aspiring actors are Oliviers, right? Even mediocre actors make money if they push. I just didn’t have it in me to push. So I’m calling my acting career unfinished.
- Sci-Fi Novel—Never had a title for it, but it was/is interesting. I totally foresaw tablets (though not apps). Here’s the idea. We’re in a future where the US is mostly desert, with a few arable areas, with widely-separated villages. There are a few rough, unpaved roads. There are also rails, but no way to travel on them. Some smart person built a sail driven, wind-powered wooden train. Our ensemble is a traveling theater company, doing Toby shows (American comedia), with iconic American characters – Tricky Dicky is the clever, tricky servant, Marylin is lovely ingenue, Elvis is the romantic lead, etc. The actors and their audience have no memory of where these characters come from, but they love it when the show comes to town. Our heroes have a manager who also directs, and they all write the shows together. Mostly, they’re traditional. Our crew is on its way to a tiny village, when the young comedian, sneaking up on the marylin, accidentally breaks her most prized possession, a mirror. He’s in deep trouble! Also, he was sweet on her, and now she hates him. Anyway, they get to a town, find a rival manager who has lost his Show, due to bandits. He scorns their plays as rustic foolishness, and says that if they went to legendary New York, they’d be able to find real Plays, old Plays. Literature. Our hero, ends up going to NY with a sidekick, but just as the rest of the country is mostly desert, New York is mostly water, just rotted husks of buildings, full of wildlife. They are chased by a representative of one of the few prosperous, successful populations of the continent, the First Americans, or Inuit. They have technology, and an Inuit aristocrat is on a hunting expedition in the hollow abandoned towers of NY. She sees our two heroes, and chases them into a building, where he finds stacks and stacks of rectangular mirrors, made of a kind of unbreakable, bendable material! He not only can replace Marylin’s, but he can sell whatever he can carry. He’ll be rich! They take whatever they can carry out of the building, but when the mirrors are exposed to sunlight, they turn matte black. Useless! what he doesn’t know yet, is that they are absorbing sunlight and charging up. The next day he picks one up, and it talks to him. It learns his language, and teaches him how to use it to access the entire corpus of world knowledge, which is still housed in satellites. He goes back to his Show, and they start to do Plays. Oh yeah, and civilization starts to reboot.
Well, that’s it for now.
Moody…
It seems I forgot to take my St. John’s Wort last night. Mistake! I’ve been moody and thoughtful all day, without it being particularly fruitful. No fabulous insights, just moodiness and a little obsessiveness, thought-wise.
I had been on Xanax for a number of years after I got married – I was having trouble handling my natural depressive mentality in this new family environment. I used to be able to just sit in my apartment, moodily. But now I was in an environment with two young kids and my new wife, and moping was no longer an option. So I found SSRIs, and they were awesome.
But three or so years ago I stopped that, and started taking St. John’s Wort instead, and it seems to work perfectly well. Couple it with the nice climate and it does wonders. If I add in some light exercise, even better.
So, tonight, SJW.