Category Archives: writing

The Story Within The Story

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I had the most wonderful of experiences the other night, of all things while coming home from work. It really is a fun story, but to tell you about it I need to explain a few things for those who do not live in Los Angeles. Please bear with me as I set up the story.

For starters, the first thing you need to understand about LA is that we love our stories. Between the film industry, the television industry, the gaming industry, the music industry, and even our growing fine arts industry (because it is an industry) there are hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of people living in LA who create the stories we use to entertain ourselves. We all work to make the stories you like to read/see/play/buy. Just to give you an idea of the reach of these various entertainment industries, consider the block where we live. Its a solid middle to upper middle class neighborhood in the middle of the valley.  On this small block of 18 houses lives an advertising guy (me), an actor, a television director/writer, a explosions/special effects expert, a mid-level manager who is also a screenwriter, an advertising director/producer, and an accountant. All of us making money as a result of our participation in the entertainment industry. That’s 6 out of 18 houses that get their money from entertainment.

But its not just a money thing. We also consume the stories we help to create. We read books, watch movies, binge watch TV shows, listen to albums, play games, all of these things and more. We do this because the creative process is not a one-way experience. It requires input to maintain itself. So we consumer what others make because it drives us to make more and better work.

So we make stories and we consume stories. But there one more way we interact with stories, and this is by far the biggest and most important one; we become them.

For example, consider the lowly film school graduate, of which there are legion in this town. She comes to this city to learn how films are made, and in the process of her studies will make some films herself. She will become an expert at the various directors and their schools of filmmaking, she will consume art films, and foreign films, and even begrudgingly tent-pole films, and she will always be working on her own small projects. She’ll be writing or directing or producing, or editing, or even just holding the microphone on someone else’s movie. She’ll be involved in something. Why? Because this is how one moves up the ranks of filmmaking. But there’s one more point here about her experience, and its the most important part. During all of this schooling, and work, and part time jobs, and driving all the fuck over town, and holding cameras or microphones, she will also be dreaming. And what she dreams of is a very specific story, the most important story of all, the story within the story; the story of her success.

Success stories are by no means limited to film school graduates. They are essential to every person who comes to LA to make stories. Everyone you meet who works in the various entertainment industries will have one. Mind you, success stories are not just limited to these industries, one might say they are endemic to ALL humans. But the success stories that are endemic to those working in entertainment are very specific, and all follow the same trajectory. They are all the Horatio Alger variety. A lowly filmmaker comes to the big city, works hard, receives a lucky break, and creates a piece of art so explosive and so important her pin is forever stuck onto our collective cultural map.

So endemic are such success stories that down here we don’t really talk about them. They are simply assumed. If you come to LA to be a (fill in the blank) you come here to fulfill your success story. Everyone gets that. Mind you, we do other things. We all come down here to work, and we work on something, because lets face it, someone has to pay the rent. But under all of that work and hustle is a story, and its such a powerful story that it gets girls and boys living in far off places to leave the comfort or their well-known worlds and travel to a city full of dirt, and crime, and cars (dear God do we have a lot of cars), all in an effort to fulfill that inner story. To take part of a larger story. To become a story itself.

Think about it. Who is Tom Cruise, or Oprah Winfrey? Who is Steven Spielberg, or Jean Cocteau? Who is Beyoncé or Tom Waits? Who is J.K Rowling or China Miéville? These are not people to you. You do not know them. You don’t really know almost anything about them. So what is it you do know? Their story’s. That’s it. When you read about them you’re not really reading about the person, you’re reading their story. When you watch Tom Cruise act, you don’t really think you’re seeing the real man behind the face. Or when Beyoncé sings about loosing a lover you don’t really think she just broke up with her husband do you? No. Do you really think that when Sting has a few beers with his mates they call him Sting? Of course not. We all get that we’re experiencing a story, that the person we’re looking up to is not really a person but a construct. A thing. That thing then is a story. And not just a story, a myth.

So we’re not just talking story here, or even story; we’re talking myth. Myth is the underlying story to this town, it is the gas that moves the cars of our collective egos, and you cannot understand this town or its people until you can understand that.

With that in mind, I will now begin with my story.

The other night I was coming home from work. It had been a long 10 hour day at the office. The kind where you eat your lunch at you desk because you’re working against the clock. We finished up at 8:15, but I stayed longer to eat dinner. (For those that don’t work in the industry, yes they often buy you dinner, but only because they need to to keep working). So at about 8:45 I requested an Uber ride. Within minutes my driver Fabion (call me Fob) showed up at the building near LACMA and the Tar Pits, and we were off for the valley. As with happens with Uber, the service will often see if they can double up on the ride. In this case Uber told Fob to pick up a guy named Dave in West Hollywood. So maybe 10 minutes later were stopped at some intersection in West Hollywood on a street covered in two-story apartment buildings dating back to the 30s and 40s. Suddenly the back door opens (I’m a front seat kind of guy) and not one but two men get in. They are Dave and his best friend Brent.

Dave and Brent are highly sociable, so we’re not even 100 feet into our trip when one of them says, “Hey front seat, what’s your name?” Before long we talking and carrying on like you do with strangers who are affable. Its the verbal equivalent of smelling each other’s butts to see what you’re made of. In this town it means talking about the entertainment industry, which really means talking about your dreams. Except, as I noted above, we don’t really talk about our dreams as they are implied in every conversation. So instead we talk about what we’re working on, which is a nice round about way of talking about your dreams without really stating them. (I know, its weird, but its how this town works. If you openly tell people your dreams you are immediately seen as a tyro, an amateur. You are a rube, and so wet behind the ears that no one except other rubes will believe in your success story. And everyone knows success stories have to be believable to work. That how they roll. So the serious professionals don’t talk, they do.)

Normally this is not my favorite topic of conversation. Probably 90% of the work I do is on television shows or movies that are so boring or so minor that you will have never heard of them, and unless you are a deep insider you will probably not care. Mind you, the checks go into my bank account the same as those from big name movies, but the social cachet I earn from the work, that is to say my rank as a “player” in this town, is not strengthened by such meager projects. So when people hear what I do for a living and immediately follow up with, “What are you working on,” I usually have to mumble something sad and pitiful sounding. But as it happens, right now I have a couple of nice aces in my hand thanks to some friends who called me in on a couple of tent-pole movies. All that to say I can do some serious name dropping.

On this particular occasion I really didn’t have to do that. Not 30 seconds into a description of one of the pieces I did for Jurassic World, we came to the corner of Hollywood and La Brea. High in the sky on that corner is a 14 x 48 billboard I did for the upcoming Will Ferrell series called Ferrell Takes The Field. So all I had to do was off-handedly say, “Oh that’s one of my pieces,” and I instantly tripled my street cred. Boom.

But, as I was about to discover, I was soon to be outgunned. Not only outgunned, but totally blown away. And completely and incredibly happy to be so.

Dave and Brent it turned out, had some street cred of their own. And it wasn’t that weak ass, second-hand shit I was passing out either. It was the pure thing. The Real Deal. The stuff that dreams are made of. We’re talking pure, 100%, USDA, success story. And it was joyous to behold.

Dave and Brent, it turned out, had just made a big pitch that day. They’d walked into a room full of 8 or 11 Television Executives (each with their own big salaries and fancy new cars) and ha d sold the shit out of their TV comedy series. “Basically,” Brent said, “we did 30 minutes of intense stand up in the biggest room we’ve ever played.”

“Yeah,” Dave added, “I’m not kidding when I say this. It was the most important room I’ve ever walked into.”

The two writers were roommates and had been busting their asses for the past three and a half months, working hard every day, coming up with every funny and off the wall idea they could throw into their show idea called Manhood. Then when their agent had scored a meeting they went in and sold their idea. Sold it hard. Sold it successfully too because they left that room, some 45 minutes later with a huge check and a contract to write a pilot. They had three months to write the Best Pilot Ever, and deliver it with another pitch to the same executives. If that went over well then they’d be given and even larger pile of cash and they would actually film their pilot. And if that worked, well the network might just buy their series. And then they will have made it. If the series sells. If the people watch it.

So it was a big day for them. They had made the first step on the story of their success, and they were full of the same excitement and energy as if they had won the lottery, which is a very real sense was what they had done. They had won the story lottery, and they were on their way up, because that’s how stories work. Whether it would take them up to the rarefied air of stardom, or down the wicked road of perdition, no one can say. But they were on the first step, and ready for the next.

But dig this, Here’s the crucial part. They were not just making stories, they had now become one. Their success had become a story of its own, independent of their actions. A story that would ripple that night through family and friends, and slowly in ever wider circles throughout the industry. Even to such far flung places as your mind, for this very thing you’re reading right now is essentially a ripple of that larger story wave. That night when they talked about their work they were speaking success story, in its purest form. Straight from the story mines of heaven and drenched in the beautiful humility of luck.

See they didn’t have to talk about their dream. They just talked about their work, and the dream was inherent in the work. Which is the best story of all.

And deep in the middle of they telling, drenched in the beauty of their own success story (which they were obviously editing as they went because that’s what good writers do) there was also the tinniest glimmer of humanity, and all because I threw in a wrench into the gears. See these type of success stores are wonderful and all, but they are often way too impersonal. And I don’t like impersonal. I like to travel with real humans and listen to real problems. So while they were going on about the room and the show, I asked them a crucial question. “Did you call your mothers?”

“Well,” they said breezily because they were still caught up in the success, “We called our agent first, and then our partners.” Then their tone changed, and a bit of the real boy came out from behind the successful men, “But yeah,” they admitted, “we called our mothers.”

So after they left (Fob dropped them off at a bar on Ventura) he and I just sat there silently the rest of the way to my house. All we could say was, “Wow.” Nothing else would do. It was an incredible experience, and we both felt deeply lucky just to be near it. We had seen a success story, just at the moment of its birth, and it was a beautiful thing to behold. I hope their mother’s are proud.

 

Bad Writing Advice #1 On setting goals for your characters

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Rule #1 in a non-existent series of bad advice for writers.

When you (as a writer) introduce a character to a reader, it is like introducing them to a new friend. But that character won’t really become your reader’s friend until you give that character a goal. Once you give him or her a specific goal to direct their actions–they need to avenge their father, they need to kill a monstrous whale, or even they need to get home to their family–it is at that point that the reader will start to anticipate that character’s actions. And that is the point of stories. We live to anticipate.

For example: If you are playing a game of chess only a few minutes of your game time is taken up with the physical movements of the pieces. This is true even of a game that lasts for hours. The vast majority of your game consists of watching your opponent and anticipating both their moves and your own. And it is in this watching and predicting that we take our enjoyment. In short, the enjoyment of the game comes from the anticipation.
In the same way, a reader will enjoy your story as long as they can anticipate your character’s direction. It doesn’t matter if they anticipate wrongly (indeed there are many good reasons to mislead your reader) what matters is if they can. Objects and obstacles only enhance the experience of the reader. They love to see the impossible pulled off. But they need to know what to anticipate, and if you don’t provide that (in terms of a clearly defined goal for your characters), then you’ve failed.

 

The other time travel story

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I’ve been working recently on a time travel story. Its the one I finished last week, as least finished the first pass. (as I’ve discovered, the first pass is only the start of a story.)

So last night I had a dream in which I was telling someone about that story. And then I told them about the other time travel story I had written. The second one was completely different from the first; different protagonist, different plot, different everything except perhaps they both exist in the same fictional universe. It sounded really cool, better and shorter than the first one.

When I woke up this morning I realized I had yet to start on that second story. Probably because I hadn’t even thought it up yet. Even now all I can remember is that I thought it was really fun, and it featured a female protagonist. In my dream the story seemed completely familiar, exactly like any story I’ve written. I could tell right away it was one of “mine.” Only of course it has yet to be written.

So was it dream from the future? What do you think?

At least its a start

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If you look carefully behind the dangling participle you can see the remains of a theme that was hastily ripped out in favor of a scene about flowers.

If you look carefully behind the dangling participle you can see the remains of a theme that was hastily ripped out in favor of a scene about flowers.

I just typed the word “End” at the bottom of a story. Its not the end of the story, there’s a lot of work still to go with this one, including finding a title I like, which is exceedingly rare for me. But overall I’m very happy with the story, which is the important part, and I’m raring to rip it open and dissect its structure like a crazy 19th century scientist waving a scalpel and a thesaurus.

Now I need to find a way to celebrate.

 

Finding the voice for a character

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I’ve been working on a novel of late, trying to piece it together. I’ve had the story in my head for quite some time, but my regular way of writing wasn’t working for it, so I thought I would attempt a new direction. In the process I realized I really didn’t understand the antagonist. Oh I knew who the protagonist was, and had a pretty good idea of his story arc, but the antagonist, the bad guy, well I didn’t have a clear picture of him.

So first thing this morning I opened up my word processor, like I normally do, and thought maybe I’d let him speak for a moment, to see if he had something to say. And let me tell you, he had something to say alright.

To give you some context, this story takes place near a thin spot in the Stratum, which is a placeholder name I’m using for the line that divides the souls of the living from those of the dead. The antagonist is giving a speech, or more accurately he is monologuing. To whom I don’t know yet. I don’t even know if I will use this at all. But he sure is a poisonous little creature, as you will see.

* * * * * * *

“I can see them. Everyday. They fall down here like a rain. ‘If only I had known,’ they say. ‘If only someone had told me,’ they say. They wear their regret on their sleeves like a badge of honor. A hundred clueless people a day. A thousand. They slough off your big cities like dead cells washed off a body. They fall down upon us by the thousands, by the millions.

“Do you have any idea how many people die in a big city each day? Do you even have a clue? In places like this where the Stratum is thin, they crawl across your soul like worms crawling over your skin. Each one complaining about their lives, like they didn’t know, didn’t understand. Each one acting as if they were ignorant of the fine print on the contract.

“But that is all so much bull shit. You know. All of you. You know. You just don’t want to deal with it. Reality gets in the way of your precious little lives. You don’t want to face the uncomfortable truth that you might end you existence one day because it will get in the way of your shopping, or of your stupid entertainments. It will spoil your precious plans to see the football game on Sunday. And God forbid your precious plans get spoiled over a little thing like death.

“And so you come down here complaining about the end of your days, poisoning the air around here with the last foul stench of your humanity. And then you move on, because it’s the other thing you do after blaming everyone around you for your own stupid ignorance. You leave. All of you. You go through the last door and fall into the river Styx, forever forgetting your lives, your loves, your regrets, all of it.

“But your passing leaves behind a cloud. A sickening smell. A stench. A miasma of regret. A pollution. And it clings to the underworld, and all of us who live in it until we are drenched in your decay. We are covered in your stupid shit. All because you don’t have the balls. You don’t have the cojones to live your lives like you know you should. To face your fate. You don’t have the guts. None of you. You’re all a bunch of spineless worms. And you come down here and think its okay to smear all of your stupid crap on us before you go.

“Well, I’m done with that. Done and past done. No more are we going to take your shit. We’ve had it. We’ve had enough. Which is why we’re here.

“There’s a crack down here, a weakness. And it happens to be in a thin spot of the Stratum, a place where the souls of the world and the underworld rub together. Well we’re going to hammer that spot. Hammer it until it breaks. Until it shatters into a million pieces. And all of your foul smelling regrets–the ones that have accumulated over the passing of millions of souls–will be released back up to the living. All of your sickness, your foul pollution, is coming back to you. Each of you. By a thousandfold.

“I hope you choke.”

Early 2015 clean up

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Sand at Palm Desert

Sand at Palm Desert

L.A. is a desert. A desert with water. An ancient ocean-bed, dry and long buried, suddenly thrust back to the surface.

At any time, day or night, if you listen carefully you can hear the sound of the ancient sea, lost amongst the cacophony of millions of automobiles whooshing past or the harsh dry winds called the Santa Anas. The sound comes from the ghost of an ocean or some vast inland sea, calling up from the long dried mud on its bottom, begging to be wet again, to be submerged.

And the land responds. You can hear it whispering in the hot dry wind, or catch it rising slowly from the hot flat stretches of cement.

It says, “Never.”

It says, “No.”

It says, “Leave us alone.”

It says, “Goodbye.”

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

This morning I was going over my notes from the past year, many of which I wrote on the way to work and hadn’t yet integrated into my stories. I got in the habit of using the Notes App on my phone to write down ideas as they come, and then later integrate them into my flow. The entry above was one of the things I put down, way back on April 16 of last year.

Going back over them this morning was deeply refreshing. I kept finding these unexpected ideas and many of them were very good. It was a nice affirmation. One of those, “Oh yeah. I guess you can write after all,” moments.

Last year was not a good one for my writing. I really got bogged down in a lot of stuff which was all useful, but difficult to get through. Sort of a winter of discontent. Some things are like that; they are simply difficult to get through and there’s no easy way to get around them. There’s no shortcut. Grief is one of them. I supposed a long illness like cancer would be another. To get better you simply just have to keep going until you break through.

So I’m slugging away hoping to break through. Hopefully we’re near that point. I don’t know. I just keep putting my nose to the wheel and try to learn as fast as I can.

A ghost story

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Canteen

The other day in preparation for a hike, I got out my old camping gear, including a couple of canteens. One in particular dates back to 1981. Its an old army surplus canteen I bought for my first class in college. Alas the cover for the canteen was in poor shape, so the canteen stayed home. Later the next day I broke out the sewing kit and made some repairs; reattaching the belt loop which was about to fall off, fixing up the wool felt lining which had fallen into pieces, and tightening up the corners so the canteen fit more snugly.

Just as I was finishing up, I flipped the canteen over and saw on the bottom the initials PJ. And that’s when I knew I was in a ghost story.

You see, back in 1991, which was a few years after I moved to LA, I hit a point in my life where I seriously crashed and burned; loosing a friend and a girlfriend in a one of those big dramatic messes that seem to come with youth. When the fire finally went out I found myself broke, and renting a room in Sherman Oaks from a man who ran a dance studio. For about a year I lived in that place and slowly rebuilt my life from the ashes.

My next door neighbor in that place was a newly single mom with three bright boys. Over the course of that year the mom and I became close, and I began to see the boys often. At a very dark time for me they were the bright spot of my life. The oldest boy, PJ was about 10 at the time. He was kind, and smart, with a ready smile and a passion for jumping into things. So when he went on a camping trip with his school I was happy to lend the use of my canteen for the journey. His mom, being especially good at motherhood, was careful to mark his initials on the bottom of the cover, and thereby guaranteeing, by some inexplicable rule of the universe, that the canteen would never be lost. Hence the PJ.

And that’s about it for the story. Time went by and I moved on. I stepped out of the nice safe shell I had built and slowly stumbled into adulthood. The mother eventually remarried a wonderful and talented man, and the boys grew older. PJ went to a nice private high school, and did quite well. He gathered around him a collection of friends who were kind and bright and fun. He was by all accounts the kind of child any parent would be proud to have. My last strong recollection of him is talking math with him and his friend who only ate cheese pizza and was about 20 times better equipped for the conversation than I was.

If by wishing we could make things happen, then I really wish I could end this story here. PJ would quietly move on into that nebulous and shiny land that people go to when they exit your life. The same place one wishes upon ex-girfreinds, distant family members, and former workers. The land of happiness, and wealth, and opportunity. But, as I suggested in the title, this is not a happy story. This is a ghost story.

They say marriage changes things, and its true. Only sometimes the things it changes are not the things you expected. My friendship with the boy’s mother, which had limped along for years and had every indication of lasting longer, did not survive my marriage. I say this not as something I wished for, or even something I liked at the time, but something that happened. Nor was it the only thing that fell from my former life to make room for the new. Maybe a bigger man, or a wiser man could have walked that path. All I know is I couldn’t or didn’t. Alas, along with that friendship went my ties with the boys.

But friendships are tricky things, and once someone has burrowed their way into your heart they leave connections behind like a spider’s web that tug and pull long after they have stopped being the center of your life. While you may stop seeing a person, you will still be connected to them indirectly through the friendships you once shared together but now maintain separately.

Thus it was that I still heard about PJ from time to time. I learned that he graduated from high school, that he had in interest in music, and that he apparently showed some talent as a music producer. Then one day that spiderweb of connections was tugged, the various strands tightened, and just like that PJs bright shiny future ended.

I was a car that did it. A drunk driver if I recall correctly. It happened right across from his high school. He was 21. And. Just. Like. That. He was gone.

I may have got the details wrong. It was some years ago, and like I said, our connections were indirect. But still, the results were the same. He was gone.

At one time I was quite close to PJ, but now, some 23 years on, I find I cannot recall much about him. When he was young he liked Transformers, and had a fondness for video games. He was at times fiercely protective of his brothers, but at other times was happy to use his larger size against them. He liked to play, and could be strongly competitive, but he also had a big heart and a ready laugh. Even now I find I can recall his laugh quite well.

And that is largely how I remember him. In my mind he is still the boy he was when we met. He is still in that nebulous fog all kids exist in until they grow old enough to discover their future selves. Because to me he hadn’t discovered his future self yet. To me, all his futures remained unmapped, and uncertain. Not that these things didn’t happen. I just never saw them.

In a happier story, the one without a car crash, PJ would now be around 33. Old enough to start getting serious in life. Maybe marry, maybe see a therapist, maybe start a family of his own. Old enough to grow up into a interesting adult, and surely PJ would have been an interesting adult. Many of the people I count myself lucky enough to work with are about that age, and I like to think that in that happier story I would one day run across PJ at an office and share old remembrances. Maybe we would have lunch together, tie up some loose ends, reconnect in ways that are healing and less painful.

But this is not that kind of story. This is, as I said, a ghost story.

There is a hole in my heart from a boy who is no longer a boy, and who is no longer there. There is no future I can connect him to so he can safely move on, and no past I can remove him from without also destroying myself. Thus he sits. A hole that cannot be removed nor repaired. A wound that cannot be healed. In short, a ghost. Perhaps he is only my ghost, which would be a much nicer ending for his friends and family, but a ghost none the less.

So when I flipped over that canteen cover, and saw his initials on the bottom, all of this came to me in a flash, like a wave that rolled over your head and buried you in the bottom of the surf. Because this is not a happy story. This is, as I said, a ghost story.

The other side of the creative process. The one they don’t tell you in art school.

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There’s a thing about art that they won’t tell you in school. What they don’t say when you’re getting a degree in creative writing, or in a performance art. There’s something that happens between the tour busses and the ballet barre, between the late night ads and the morning coffee shops. There is a price for pursuing the creative process, and that price is fear.

Imagine if you will that we live on a world perfectly divided in half at the equator. On the north side, there side where we live, there are plants and trees, houses and apartments, cites and farms. It is light and sunny, exactly like our world, with one small difference, the best fruit, that is the fruit that everyone wants to eat grows on the fabulous trees near the equator.

Now the south side of the world is dark and populated with monsters, horrible and terrifying ones that will happily chew you up and spit you out. We are a delicacy to them. These monsters mostly keep to themselves, but they like to come over to the other side now and again to get a nice snack of human. So what they do is hide near the fabulous trees at the equator, waiting out of sight for the humans to come and pluck the fruit.

A few other things. The fruit from the fabulous trees grows sweet just about everywhere, but it is sweetest the further south you go. It needs a certain amount of darkness to be sweet. Also, the trees you first encounter, that is the trees furthest to the north, have fruit that is already very sweet. From there the amount of sweetness increases slowly as you travel south, the difference being more and more subtile the further you go. So when you first step up to the fabulous trees the fruit is wonderfully sweet, but you cannot get too far south until you’re not sure if the fruit from the next tree is going to be as sweet, or sweeter then the one before. Eventually you find yourself having to pass 3, 4, 8, or more trees to find fruit noticeably sweeter then the previous. And all the while it is getting darker and darker.

And of course, the further south you go, the more likely you’re going to run into a monster.

For me, being a retoucher is like picking fruit right near the beginning of the fabulous trees. The fruit is sweet. Sweet enough, and I make a good living selling it to the people who have neither the inclination or ability to reach the fabulous trees. The nice thing is it is a fairly safe place to pick the fruit. The monsters have to travel a long way to get you, and you can usually see them a mile off. There’s plenty of time to pick up your bags and run. Also there are a lot of fellow pickers around you. This makes it easier as you can watch over each other like a herd, and gang up on them if they come. Mind you, there are retouchers who pick their fruit further south than me, some of them much further, but the difference in price they get for their fruit is not all that much higher than mine, and of course they work at a greater risk.

This is not the only time I’ve traveled to the fabulous trees. I’ve been there before as a musician and songwriter. Back then I was too scared to go very far south, and too ignorant to know the difference between the sound of an approaching monster and that of someone picking fruit a few trees ahead. This ignorance was costly, and eventually convinced me to give up fruit picking all together, at least as a musician.

What I didn’t realize when I started writing stories is that I’d be working much further south than before. And I’d be working alone. And this is the price that you pay as a creative. Sure my appreciation for the fruit has grown stronger. I can now detect the subtile differences in flavor that used to baffle me before, but I got that way by picking fruit closer and closer to the monsters.

The people who never pick the fruit know all about this of course, but their knowledge is perforce limited by their experience. They think the line between the safe side of the equator and the other side is a clear and distinct. Like its a line marked on the ground with one side being light colored, and the other dark. But those of us who travel deep into the trees will tell you there is no line. The world does get darker the further you go, but the differences eventually become so subtle that it is almost impossible to tell. Worse, the change is so subtle that its easy to get turned around, and head the wrong way. You can think you’re walking home, and instead head straight for the monsters.

Sometimes when I am out there I can hear the monsters. The ones I fear the most are depression, paranoia, and schizophrenia, but there are other ones nameless to me further in. Depression I’ve battled so many times he almost counts as a friend. Sometimes he captures me, sometimes I kick his ass. But he’s a devil I know, so I fear him, but I also understand him. Its the other two that really scare the shit out of me. And I swear to you, there are days when I can feel them out there. They are just over the horizon. I can smell them. Hell, I can point to them. Sometimes, to pick the fruit of a particular nice fabulous tree, I find myself up on a rickety ladder, my body extended way past what is safe, clinging to the tip of the tree with nothing but thin branches to break my fall if I should make the slightest mistake. And all the while I’m up there with my back turned to the monsters. When I up high like that, I can feel them. I can hear them slithering around just beyond my vision. And I know If I make a mistake, they will drop on me in and instant.

But the fruit….

The kind of notes I send to myself…

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Cool idea 11/24/2013

A heads-up display on a motorcycle shows the driver a image of a motorcycle in front of him that he should follow. The image turns color to represent speed (more green for faster and more red for slower) flashes yellow if the driver needs to really pay attention or if they need to brake or accelerate hard. A radar plots a path through traffic so all the driver has to do is follow the image and they can drive much faster than normal.

Also a motorcycle is made of a very strong but very heavy material. Something much stronger than steel. The motorcycle weighs 8-10 tones. If a car pulls in front of it the motorcycle just pushes it aside.