(not)Walkabout Thoughts #97d - A Teen's College Tales from 1973

Still on the strength training. 91 degrees here today.

Yesterday, I kind of went down a rabbit hole that took up most of my day. I found a blog I wrote in 2010 about my experience at the UW in 1973, in trying to get in there, taking my SATs, and time I spent the night before at the Zeta Psi frat over Christmas holiday vacation, with the frat's president and treasurer. I'll never forget it.

One night in 1973 at a UW Frat house

Zeta Psi Fraternity, University of Washington, Seattle

I jist thought I'd read it to see if I had forgotten things. I'd forgotten a few things. This is why after all, we write, film, or document our lives so we can remember what really happened. 

So I thought I'd edit that 2010 blog, add some things, and repost it.

I knew I had taken photos back then and thought I'd update the blog and add those photos. So I went through my old photos today and found them. I scanned them in, they have always been pretty foggy or not great due to bad lighting. I enhanced the photos as we now have the capability to enhance them in ways we did not have in the 70s.

I put them in the blog. When I looked at them, I was quite pleased.

I had been wondering when I had gone to the UW to take my SATs. Something I had never planned on, never studied for. In looking at the photos, however, I solved the case. Christmas decorations were up at the frat house. I was leaning toward thinking it was the Thanksgiving holiday, but apparently not. Case solved. 

I find little things like this very rewarding. 

I've never been a "tech bro" or a "frat boy" type. I'd never have considered joining a frat. It wasn't my idea as the blog attests to. But once I got involved, and checked it out, it seemed to my 18 year old self a pretty interesting idea. An adventure. 

I've always been into adventures. It's how I got into Civil Air Patrol Search and Rescue in junior high. I think all the sci fi books I read when I was young. Those my grandmother used to read to me before I could read. I was just into the adventure. Into an alternative to my boring life in 1960s Tacoma, Washington. I could do more in life, I wanted to do more.

Actual friends from the screenplay  ©1973 me

In my true crime/drama screenplay, "The Teenage Bodyguard" people (the producer & interviewed directors) who kept misunderstanding the main character's orientation that: "He just wants the girl," or "it's about sex", or "it's a teen romp", were the typical orientations. However, it was actually just about, boredom. Seeking adventure. Escape from a boring life that kills a person's life. The photo above has the protagonist on the right (the "teenage bodyguard"), and his friend on the left. 

The problems as I've experienced it in life weren't the adventures or even the dangers, but the misadventures. 

But that's part of the charm. Escaping the boredom into adventures, even "adventures" many perhaps wouldn't label as such, escaping from the dangers, or misadventures the adventure can turn into. Often because of ignorance, Selective Ignorance (there is good SI and very bad SI: MAGA), ill will, or simply the stupidity of others. Much as we see in politics today. 

And that's the issue. 

Anyway...it's an interesting blog on an late teen's adventures into the university and fraternity system.

Cheers1 Sláinte!

One night in 1973 at a UW Frat house

Walkabout Thoughts #79

Thoughts & Stream of Consciousness, rough and ready, from an award-winning filmmaker and author you’ve never heard of, while walking off long Covid, and listening to podcasts…

 
Weather for the day… starting out, 56°. It was 52° when I returned home under dark clouds, sprinkling rain and threatening much more, and after only walking a mere 2 miles. I was ready for 5.. Alas, the weather had another idea in mind...

Podcast today: WTF? with Marc Maron Episode 1542 - Molly Ringwald

So this is cool!

My book, “Death of heaven” is a May 2024 American Legacy Book Awards Finalist!

I can’t seem to get past finalist position on this book in contests. I think I have three more award contests that I’m in this year. So there’s still some hope. They’re all in the fall though, of 2024. It’s funny or ironic. From the beginning, people had trouble pigeonholing or categorizing my writing. I thought that was cool. Nope, not so much. My artist brother ran into that too. If you're too creative, it makes it hard for people to monetize you and take you on. Best to say to paint only flowers or butterflies or something, he said.

Which I find laudable. Being diverse, and multi-talented. I tried to learn how to write literally every kind of writing to better my favored style(s). But I think it’s hurt me in some ways. I don’t think it’s ridiculous to consider that I might be the kind of writer who dies and then somebody goes, "Oh, this book is good. Why didn’t it ever get anywhere?"

Yeah, exactly. Lots of talented people out there who never get anywhere for not having a strong sense of business or someone to help them with that. If not for Van Gogh's brother, or more so his brother's wife after he died, no one would know who he is. Everybody who reads my writings really seems to like them a lot. 

And no, they're not just being polite. I've won awards after all, it's not just my imagination or the politeness of others. I'm also not just full of myself. It's not ego, it's awareness. I despise touting my works or skills. I've always found distasteful, job interviews. Selling oneself to a stranger. But that is the industry of the arts and the goal is to pay one's way, or at least, to see one's efforts observed and hopefully enjoyed by as many others as possible.

"A good man knows his limitation." But also their quality, accurately. It's taken me many years to realize I'm the only one who will push my work out there until I can get an agent or manager. It was miserable at first. I still find it distasteful. But, one is a professional, or forever an amateur. Cheers!

Ah, well...I'd be good with that, fame after death if my kids benefit from it all.

I sent that book off to a publisher in Europe once and they said they liked it but as a first-time writer at that time, they didn’t want to take a chance. I thought that's what publishers did. Which I thought was kind of offensive. This is the same thing I go through with my screenplays. It just takes getting one produced and turning a profit. I’ve gotten as far as an actual Hollywood producer being interested, but then again I always seem to fall into that between-genres kind of thing.

You can go on Amazon and read reviews of my book "Death of heaven" [yes, "h" not "H", there's a long story about why that is] and make up your own mind. Yes, it’ll be a book you read like you’ve never read before. And it's massive and spans eons from before the Earth was created until perhaps, its end. It's a book you can read more than once and get more from it the second time around. It's a book that offers more insight if you read my first published book, "Anthology of Evil" in reading the ending novella, "Andrew" from whence "Death of heaven" evolved out from. And another short story, "Perception", about the first human ever to look up into the heavens and realize, however incorrectly that they were the center of the universe.

This reminds me of my other book, my last fiction published which Anthology of Evil 2 which is (obviously) a sequel to the original. I split that sequel two into two volumes. Volume one is short stories. Volume two was a novella that grew into a book I titled “The Unwritten.“ It’s a good story. Weird, but good. Three universes, one ending. Try writing that! Anyway, I really like the ending and the two angels debating, so much, so very much...

But whatever…

Molly Ringwald on Marc's podcast has been kind of an eye-opener. I loved John Hughes' films. By that time I was out of the Service and had graduated from university. I think I was working at Tower Video, when I really got to know the John Hughes' films, in the 80s. I saw "Sixteen Candles" and although I knew a lot of people who loved it...and I had seen "Breakfast Club" and I did love that movie. I just couldn’t bget into 16 Candles and I found Molly Ringwald really annoying. 

I thought she did good and was great in "Breakfast Club". I mean I thought everybody did great in 16 candles. Even though she wanted Robert Downey Jr. rather than John Cryer. I just didn’t like the film. And while I thought she was miscast, I guess I was wrong. I say all that because now on this podcast and hearing her experience and history, I am impressed and somewhat blown away. I watched her in the Capote series. I’ve always loved his writing. I read "In Cold Blood" in maybe 11th grade in 1971 or '72.

My interesting story about that book was... I can’t remember if it was a literature class in high school or an independent reading class... but one way or another I read “In Cold Blood“ and I was completely blown away by the story, topic, and writing. That next semester I had another class that required reading "In Cold Blood". I outright refused. I said I just read that book and I can’t just read it again. It was too intense. I am into intense. But that book being nonfiction just left me wanting to take a shower on the inside of my mind. Not to mention Capote’s obvious attraction to the protagonist or his antihero, to the point that he was there when he was hung and his description left one, confused? Certainly, it left this 15-year-old at the time confused.

My teacher was very understanding and he said, "OK pick a book of a similar kind of subject matter and length." So I chose “The Godfather “. Surprised to find it was also pretty intense. That book blew me away. But being fiction, I found it much more enjoyable. Or at least more palatable. Don't get me wrong. Both books were amazing.

The Trump criminal trial now has the jury deliberating. I will just be glad when this is over and I do hope they convict him. Enough of this denial from MAGA and Trump which he’ll continue to do, to deny until he dies. Which we can all hope is soon. America needs a break from all this lying and crime and authoritarian bullshit

I just saw that Dennis Quaid, long a favorite actor of mine just said in an interview that Trump was his guy. Good grief, dude. Really? How depressing.

So I mentioned in my last few "walkabout thoughts" that when I start my walks lately, there’s a tightness in my chest, which got down the last time to fading within the first quarter mile or so. Not noticing it at all today!

Back to the podcast and Molly… She’s talking about a film she did with someone. Jean Luc Goddard? She said she thinks it’s the most beautiful film she’s acted in (King Lear, 1986). It’s interesting hearing her talk about the experience. I’ll have to watch that movie now. I’ve been a fan of his movies and other auteurs from Europe since I was a kid. I always thought it was interesting how I was watching great European films by some of the best directors in film history on PBS in the 1960s, while my parents and everyone else I knew didn't have a clue about those films.

Molly says she’s written three or four pieces for The New Yorker magazine. I never even got a rejection slip from them. So color me impressed. And she never went to college.

She says she’s married to a writer-editor now of fiction and nonfiction and they share everything and edit each other. I think I made a huge mistake. I was married 3.5 times as I like to say, and not one of them was supportive of my writing. God how life could’ve been different perhaps, had I married a writer? Maybe?

My last year at university, when my girlfriend and I (we lived together), had both gone for psychology degrees. In our third year, maybe the beginning of our fourth, I was concentrating on phenomenology, as was she. Then she decided she was going to shift to be an existentialist. All the existentialists I knew in college used that philosophy as a way to rationalize having affairs on their partners. 

Our relationship ended with her having an affair the year after we graduated. So…to be fair, I remember saying before we graduated that if we were ever to break up it would take one of us hurting the other so badly that the relationship never could be mended. Long story.

In my final year I decided I could get a second degree but I would need extra classes so I just went for a minor in creative writing. My intro to Fiction class professor said at the end of the class (I was one of two top students in that class), I needed help with dialogue (I hated writing dialog) in my stories. He sent me to the theatre department for playwriting. What an eye-opener that was! The Theatre department is NOT the Psychology department, by a long shot. But as one of my classmates said in hearing I was from "Miller Hall" (the psych building): "We're the people you study over there, aren't we..." We laughed. I'd said, "Kind of, maybe. But I like it here. A lot."

From playwriting and I was chosen for year year-long team script and screenwriting class series. And I guess, just as I got disturbed with my girlfriend changing over to existentialism, she got disturbed with my moving from the field of psychology for screenwriting. I didn't abandon it, I just added writing to it.

I had a couple guys over from scriptwriting (we seemed to focus on team tv show writing), one night to brainstorm. When she got home she was really gruff and the guys left pretty quickly. Which I’ll never understand as she left me that next year. So I wasn't allowed to have new friends?

One of those friends, Mike Rainey and Dave Skubinna. Those two together with a few other friends on Bainbridge Island started the Annex Theatre. Which is still producing plays in Seattle.

After we graduated, I used up my last remaining money's worth of VA educational benefits to do the summer quarter and leave the university with a finished screenplay under my belt. My girlfriend moved back home, got a job, and found us a house. When the summer quarter was over, I moved back to Tacoma with her.

In response to Molly, talking about having a family and kids, one has to have a job and hustle. I think that’s the thing. I’ve hustled hard all my life. I’m done with that. I don’t mind hard work. I’m just sick to death of having to constantly sell myself. To convince every new person that I'm more than they think I can be. 

I have proved that throughout my life. You get settled in, think you're done with that, and then you find you're doing it all over again. What was really annoying was at a company, when they changed managers, especially when they came in from outside the company, even if you’re very highly thought of, they have to learn that first hand about you. Eventually, their opinion matures but you still have to get through their orientation period and it's just kind of annoying after a lifetime of it. I think that’s why I retired younger than I had meant to...nuts, it's starting to rain…

They’re both talking on the podcast about writing stories that are true life, about things that you’ve lived through and how others you include in the story, especially if you name them, can react to it. How no matter how light it is or funny it may seem, or how it may put those others in a good light, even if you're seen in a bad light, those people may well still want to control their own narrative. Or as Molly put it, their own mythology

I find this interesting and relevant because whenever I write something about my past, I throw it into a folder on my hard drive called "autobio" under my "non-fiction" writings area. Every time I’ve tried to write that book, I’ve felt like I've led too many lives with weird interesting stuff that turns it into writing a series of books. So how do you choose maybe one incident out of each life led?

I had considered each chapter titled for a whole decade. So the "1950s", which is only five years for me. And so on. But I don’t know, maybe one of these days it’ll go click and I’ll figure it out and whip it out into a book. Throw it out into the public. See what happens.

Well, that’s it. 2 miles today and the weather has turned against me

On that note, I’ll bid you adieu…

And I’ll leave you with that. And it’s nearly noon and time for lunch.

As always, I wish you all, all the greatest success and good health!
Just put in the time and effort for those successes.
Until next time!

Cheers! Sláinte!

Walkabout Thoughts #54

My thoughts, Stream of consciousness, rough and ready, while walking off long Covid and listening to podcasts… July 17, 2023, Monday

Weather for the day… 63 degrees starting out,

Podcast Marc Maron with Felicia Michaels

I Instagram for the day, this just seemed appropriate with comics on the podcast... Also.

OK... I’m walking on my 1st mile for the day. I spent the entire day yesterday editing my true crime biopic “The Teenage Bodyguard“. Big history with that, and all the work I’ve done on it, including with producer/actor Michael Douglas' producer Robert Mitas on some films (one of my favorite being, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, so fun talking to him on the phone about it from time to time), and who I worked with on this project. Really nice guy to work with. He helped me rewrite it into a shorter, tighter, screenplay format. But it's just not the original which is the actual story. Likely more sellable. I’ve sent it to screenplay festivals over the years and the ones where I got notes back on it, I fine tuned it, ignoring the notes as you do, where appropriate. Usually when they don't get something and are wrong on something, you still need to do SOMETHING. Because if they don't get it, something wasn't clear. Clarify it! I entered one festival recently and got some good notes back. So yesterday I did all the obvious fixes on mistakes and a tiny bit of re-ordering of scenes, which I admit are better now. I thought, hey those were good notes, maybe I should send them the Mitas version? But the festival is now in waiver only status. So I took a shot and emailed them and explained the situation. Couple of days of no response and then, sure enough, yesterday they sent me a waiver to directly email them the screenplay and then pay $40 on PayPal which is like 56 Canadian. So they're in Canada apparently. I wasn’t gonna bother with update using their notes, until I thought about sending it to some other festival that I came across this weekend. So thought might as well give it a shot and first few notes were good so I kept going and updated it all and submitted yesterday to the new festival. Along with my "Pvt. Ravel‘s Bolero" film. Since I’m in a situation where I have other things going on, it’s hard right now for me to produce a new film. So I thought I have all these screenplays sitting around, I might as well send some off. 

I then went and looked at my "International Screenwriters Association" profile at ISA.org and it needed updating. So I added my horror/comedy screenplay, “Gray and Lover The Hearth Tales Incident“ and this updated Teenage Bodyguard screenplay. My "Gumdrop", a short horror film was already up there, so I added "Pvt. Ravel‘s Bolero" film. Oddly enough, for anyone to see my screenplays I have to pay for a monthly or annual subscription. At this stage of things I might do that. See as a rule, since the 1980s, I had decided back then, as things like AOL we’re around making difficult Internet access...difficult, that I refused to pay for the Internet, partly because that I was broke in the 80s, until I got my first IT job. I tried to do everything cheaply, "on the sly" (According to Etymonline, the word sly has been used since the year 1200 in Middle English as sley. This comes from the Old Norse sloegr or Old Norse slœgr meaning cunning or crafty). So while I could’ve thrown thousands and thousands of dollars down the drain over the decades, I really spent very little, but probably learned a lot more than I would have otherwise. Because I had to do it with brute force and in the hard way. I had to study, I read a lot of books, I researched and... here I am. It's ironic because when my wife and I split up, part of the complaint was I wasn't making any money, much money. Not a big complaint, but it was there, mostly put upon her by her parents. Before we split when she said they'd mentioned it, I pointed out I was working all the time. I worked on a mainframe at nights at the University of Washington Medical Center for their Radiology and Pathology (and the regional trauma Harborview Med. Ctr, affectionately nicknamed, "Harborzoo" by many) and that I was studying manuals and books on PC design and IT issues, and learning all the software (sans manuals) I could get my hands on. Which all paid off years later. I ended up making a good deal of money and had she stuck around...while she never really did and built a much more difficult life for herself and by association, our son. Which I didn't know about until he became a young adult.

Anyway, I got a lot done yesterday. Probably more than I’ve done in a long time on any one day. I got all these blogs up-to-date and edited in the last one to get out this morning. Now I’m creating another damn one, here. But I got that entire screenplay updated, except for some of their more serious structural notes. They hate my SUPERS. Which I do keep hearing from everybody, but this is that kind of film where you need to be oriented in the moment, because it jumps around in the timeline. Yes I could do a linear format as this guy noted, but…the thing is, part of the reason everyone hates SUPERs now a days (text on screen in a movie, also called, "cards") is two fold. I do like how you have to guess you made a jump in time forward or back in a film and it's notable by elements within the frame. But it also has to do with people watching movies on their pads and phones. You'll notice some series and movies now have GIANT writing on the screen indicating location, mostly. Well? It's easier to read on a cell phone.

I’ve always liked Marc Maron, and I’ve been dabbling in his podcast lately more and more. Especially the ones where he has on a comic from back when he started out and what they were doing then and today and reminiscing. Too fun.

Listening to Marc’s podcast with his old friend, who started out in comedy before him Felicia Michaels. He got me thinking. She kind of started out as a stripper, and you have to hear her story to appreciate that. The type of person I'd always avoided. Maybe that was a mistake. I mean a lot of them were not having their shit together to be sure. you know? Maybe I needed the stripper who had her shit together a little and was just doing this to "get her degree" or something. But I always seem to end up with more conventional women. Not when viewed back then in the moment, but when you look back on it. Yeah. My oldest son‘s mother was the least conservative in being an artist and a partier. Weird relationship in a way. I kept trying to get away from her and kept not being able to. We started working at Tower Video in Seattle, Mercer Street store. I was a supervisor and she got hired one day. But that’s another story. Apparently she was a blossominkg alcoholic not until after we got divorced. Then she moved to Portland while I remained in the Seattle area. So I didn’t know what was going on in her household for years. I mean, knowing her for who she had been, from her upper middle class family, a woman who could just sit at a piano and rip off a classical piece of music. While I came from a lower middle class that grew into maybe middle, then I heard from my son, how things were there with beer bottles all over the house all the time… Oh, my. Well, she ended up only having him from age 4 for 18 months because their family had money and threatened me with lawyers (she did not them but I assumed they put her up to it) and I figured as I was a dad in 1992 little chance I'd get the kid. But I tried until I had to give him up after she left (I tossed her out for kind of reasonable reasons). But then she gave hi up and I brought him into my new marriage with a young child I adopted a year or so later at age 2 (as birth dad was an alcoholic). When I had married that very sweet woman, a horse trainer, who turned out to be seemingly building into some kind of mental issues which led to a rather abusive nuclear family situation for I guess. all four of us. I know that woman’s entire family doesn’t like her much now because apparently she’s cut them all out of the parent's will and took everything after the they recently died. But in mental illness, narcissism and megalomania, I’m sure she has a completely rational and normal view on all that. That was oddly enough, ironically enough, the story of my siblings and our mother who needed mental help, but exhibited an appearance of sanity just enough to where you couldn't do anything about it to help her (or us). So I started off life serious about that never happening to any of my children should I ever have any (that was up for question for years until my oldest's mother just took that choice away from me) and then, it all came to be as if I had planned it or something. But then, when you’re attracted to mental illness because you’ve lived with some form of it all your life and don’t know that yet, until you’re blindsided, until it's too late, well... I'd thought I had a sort of intellectual armor since I’ve got a university degree in psychology. I was at the top of my class, according to my professor. But there's a joke that was around the psych department that was pretty standard across all psych departments most likely, that psychologists make the worst parents. You could probably synthesize that into other associated issues. But when you know a discipline like that and help others, you have a kind of blindness to it at home.
Anyway, did my kids turn out OK? Well? Better than me, and worse than me, in different ways. Which sounds like childrearing in general I guess. Basically, I’d say they’re both happy people.

I was going to skip over, since Marc’s podcast ended. to another one of his, but Felicia mentioned her podcast. She’s on, "The Liars Club", they mentioned it several times, so if I check it out, though I was going to another Maron podcast, anyway, in going to Marc's podcast, up popped The Liars Club podcast and I saw one with Bill Burr. I like him, friend of theirs, they talked about him on the last podcast, so I thought, well, check out some of this and see how it goes…

So, The Liars Club podcast starts and Felicia starts talking and they introduce themselves and she says what they do there is, they invite one of their friends on, another comedian, who has to tell two stories, one true, one a lie, and then they try to figure out which one's a lie. Well, that sounds entertaining.

Fascinating. I"m editing this later in the day today and had to go downstairs to get my sheets out of the dryer. Ever wonder what my basement/house looks like, it's detailed pretty clearly (most of it) in my film, "Gumdrop", a short horror. I got into the basement sometimes and look around and remember "killing" people down there (for in the film). Anyway, I put on Marc's new podcast with an Irish actor I've been enjoying on screen for years, Cilian Murphy, and they're talking and said they both had the Sears Silvertone guitar with the amp built into the case. Cillian says he only has the guitar. I had both, given to me by my older brother who had a band and at some point in the late 60s pulled my sister into it. I can't count the number of times I took that amp out of its case and put it up on my ... ok, yes, true...gun rack on my wall in my bedroom growing up. I had a .303 British and a breaking single shot 20 gauge shotgun, and shells. My brother got that when he was 16. He gave it to me when I was 16 (he should have kept it for his son someday). So I gave it to my son when he was 16. One time I was putting that amp into the case again and I accidentally forgot to unplug it from the wall. I had been plugging it in and unplugging it multiple times in trying to figure something out and got confused. So I put my hand on the wires to crimp them down flat and the power shot into my hand and up my arm feeling like an iron rod going up my arm. I couldn't open my hand. I just stood there being electrocuted and began to fear for my life. I couldn't figure how how to stop it until I realized the freezing effect hadn't gone to my knees (yet?). So I relaxed my knees so I was fall from a standing position and it pulled my hand off the amp, ending the shocking event. Guess what? Never made that mistake ever again. I was the one in my early teens who changed out the house electrical on/off toggle switches and I never turned off the power. It just wasn't necessary. Only go shocked once doing that, very briefly. But after this experience with the amp (I told my brother and he explained amps to me in a more comprehensive way), I never did that again. Naw, I'm lying, I still don't tend to turn off the power today in swapping out a switch.

I was really liking the noise cancellation function on these AirPods, because I never had that before and I’ve always been curious. Yesterday I started being disappointed because so much sound was coming through. I thought maybe they’re not in my ears correctly or something? So I just checked on the Settings on my phone just now and it was turned off. I turned it back on. And now it’s weird silent again, except for what I’m listening to, obviously. Especially cool because there’s some landscapers who are trimming a giant hedge and it's so much quieter now. So that’s cool…

About talking about these AirPods… If you back up in my blogs to when I got them the other day, I was calling them "air buds". Nope. Then I started calling them by their correct name only lowercase and separated, "air pods". Now I find if I say it correctly, they transcribe correctly… "Air pods". I tell ya, AI maybe scary and it maybe gonna destroy us, but so far it’s actually pretty cool.

So far, my only complaint with these… AirPods… is they keep rotating out a place and you have to slightly twist them back in, moving the bottom forward towards your chin and that’s really fucking annoying. But as I had discussed, some of that probably has to do with sweating. So having some way to hold them correctly in place at all times would definitely be a bonus. Maybe they should ask the AI how to fix it?

Speaking again of AI… as I said, before, my oldest son has my book “Suffering Long Covid“ in his brick and mortar health food store in another city that he manages. But it’s sitting there by the door and although people will pick it up, it’s not yet been selling. Why? Probably because you have to have long Covid. Which isn’t everybody. And you need some advertising material to sell it. So I thought I might take a second today and produce a one sheet to put by the books. If I hadn’t grown up when I did, the cool thing about this now is I can do it quickly. I don’t have to design it, draw it up, cut and paste it together and make a copy of it, then mail it to him. I can whip it all together in a few minutes and just email it, or stick it on Google Drive so my son can grab it and print it out at work [which is what happened today over the course of a couple of hours rather than a couple of days]. Which is where I keep a pitchdeck/lookbook for my "Teenage Bodyguard" screenplay (on Google Drive) which was made up professionally, cost me a couple grand and it’s so big in file size, that I can’t email it to anyone. But they can easily just go to a link and download it if they want. Or I can upload it to a website where it says to upload your pitchdeck here, or something.

On another topic, I just sent this to my son, and I’ll share with you:

So I was thinking of paying for a year of "International Screenwriters Association" account again. Which I haven't done in years, just to have my screenplays up there and then it suddenly occurred to me. While we are having problems here in America today, and we have a writers and actors strike going on right now,  that the industry says could kill them. Because tech companies like Apple and Amazon have gotten into making movies and they're killing it and have way more money than Hollywood… But by putting my screenplays into where an international audience of producers and investors around the world still have a group of money out there! It's a bigger audience for one, Some of those people out there are so rich they just aren't so concerned about small amounts of money to make a film. So maybe it's worth the $100 to make my profile fully live again. Am I dreaming? Isn't that what filmmaking is all about?

I usually start this walk with a light short sleeved shirt because it’s cool and then gets hotter before the end of the walk and as I said yesterday, I took off my shirt leaving just my kind of soaked T-shirt and life was better. So today I’m starting my 3rd mile and taking it off now before I get all worked up and hot, and it feels good to have the air hit my T-shirt and dry out what little needs drying out, and knowing I'll avoid that getting overheated thing. Yeah, I know this ain't rocket science but it is what it is.

I bunch of people tied talking me into doing a podcast or video podcast, a Vpod, but I don’t know, I don’t much like getting on camera. So I’ve got my blog here and a friend, Kelly Hughes, who has his own video "Rising Star-Music That Matters" podcast, and doing rather well and he has had some incredible guests, I’ve got to say. But it just occurred to me, I wonder if there’s an AI to turn my text log into an audio podcast? I mean, I suppose I could just read the damn thing as an audio podcast, and maybe I could try that?

OK I just walked back past those landscapers with a big long hedge trimmer which is really noisy, even though it’s electric, and it’s much quieter now with the sound cancellation. Though I can still hear it too much with these AirPods, it is much nicer now.

OK The Liars Club podcast with Bill Burr and his first story starts, One time I was an altar boy…
OK then Bill. I was an altar boy myself. We had a tiny Slovak church in Tacoma, called "St. Joe’s" how we called it (Saint Joseph's Catholic Church). Says right on the building it’s a Slovak church. My mom was Czech, Grandpa came over on a boat at a young age, Grandma was born in America. Then my dad‘s family‘s Irish. In eighth grade, I went to Holy Rosary Catholic Church and school (closed as of 2019 due to a need for $17million in repairs), with the big cathedral you can see from many places in downtown Tacoma if you look south. There’s the church, the school, a rectory for the priests and a convent for the nuns, and and a big playground area. South of it is the I-5 freeway and up above that on the hill is our little St. Joe’s church. My little brother went to Holy Rosary all the way through school until he died. Decades later I heard that everyone knew our family because of what he and we were going through back in the mid 70s as the priest would say prayers during mass for him. Didn’t work, but it was a nice try. I thoughtful effort. I'd had some trouble in seventh grade at Stewart Junior High (only 3 blocks from my parent's house) and wanted out. So I got finagled into eighth grade at Holy Rosary. No, I didn’t realize, although I knew eighth grade was the last grade there, and then you go, probably to Bellarmine prep, an all boys school then, which eventually became co-Ed. In fact, my girlfriend after I got out of the Service graduated from there. Which weirded me out because I didn’t know it turned into a boys and girls school. I turned down going there after eighth grade because I didn’t wanna go to a school with no girls. Which kind of shows you my orientation back then. But in going to only eighth grade in a Catholic school, I'd not realized it I was stepping into the morass of being the new kid in the last year at a school where these kids had been together for eight fucking years! I got along really well with the outsiders in the class, who are either really poor Catholic kids, or not even Catholic but their parents wanted them to get a good education. Well, the nuns smacked you around, so yeah, you paid attention, for safety's sake. And we had the oldest Nun, the principle, Sister Rogers. Good God, was she a piece of work! We had several rich kids in there who were really annoying. But not so bad once I forced my way in and got to know them. The girls anyway. The guys were mostly just all assholes until several year later, those who got out of the Catholic school system and had entered public life. I had the most fights in my K-12 years of any grade level, in that school, over that single year, with... the altar boys. Apparently, stepping into the last year of a school is a bad idea. Unless you bond with the kids and make friends. So they were nice at first when they asked me, Do you want to be an altar boy? I was very proud of the fact I was an altar boy at the little church up the hill and I saw this giant cathedral as say the corporate version Church over our mom and pop version. St. Joe's was a great experience. Small church, small community. I mean, going into Holy Rosary a cathedral, was literally awe inspiring. There was one day I was asked to serve Mass because all the altar boys had gone on an outing and I wasn't invited because I wasn't an altar boy..at their church. You know, one might think I'd get a complimentary invite to show some affection for the church up the hill, as I WAS going to their school, but no. Nada and it was explained to me very clearly. I just always thought it an odd situation. The Church is based in Rome, so it's international. But they can't show some love for an altar boy ONE church, ONE block away? OOOkay.
Anyway, after being asked to join the gaggle of Holy Rosary (affectionately nicknamed, "Holly Roller" BY the altar boys, by the way..), altar boys, I’m afraid I may have expressed my indignity in saying no thanks. They kept pushing at that meeting, cajoling me into joining, which was a mistake. For all of us. Until finally, I said, Look, I’m head altar boy at St. Joe’s and I’ve gone there all my life. I don’t want to be altar boy at two different churches as it takes up a lot of time at two. And I don’t want to quit being head there to just be ordinary here. But they didn’t understand why I wouldn’t want this esteemed privilege. I think at that point I might’ve gotten a little irascible. Anyway, that was the exact opposite of a bonding experience for them. Or me. And so they harassed me mentally and physically that entire year and I’ve written about this elsewhere…worst day/experience? They got in a big ring around me and kept hitting me in the head with a basketball until my head hurt so bad I just walked off "campus" and went home. They may have given me a slight concussion. Nice guys. I remember some girls in that ring around me that moved as I moved. It was bizarre.

My point in bringing all this up getting and back to Bill Barr and I don’t know what his story is about to be, but it continued with... they would take the altar boys on a field trip… It was when I became an adult and started hearing about pedophiles in the Catholic Church ad I was shocked. I went to Camp Don Bosco, a two week summer camp, run by priests, and those studying to be priests and I couldn’t of had a better experience. Amazing people. And no, I’m not suppressing memories. But other than the obvious problems in the Catholic Church, being the dogma, and how I was a very analytical child, and wasn’t buying into the Bible overall, I had a pretty good experience being raised Catholic. It was pretty strict. And there were downsides and yes it took me into my 30s in actively studying and researching, and looking into other religions and such, before I could wash my mind of all the Catholicism. Which granted, will still be there in my roots until I die, but hopefully not there afterward. My Buddhist orientation now, where I don’t buy into reincarnation, and by the way I didn’t see any of that in the original Buddha's teachings, and while my oldest and I continue to talk about physics, and how there may BE something after we die, though I doubt it, as existing in a discreet unit of existence, as we do now, that is, we may more realistically end up being dispersed into the energy of the universe and what the hell good is that as an individual? I know, I know, you’re getting to be in the presence of “God”. But that doesn’t do me any good if I don’t know I’m existing.

Funny, if this is the true story Bill Bar is telling, oh damn, I have to say Bill Burr, not Bill Barr. Burr had a similar experience with the altar boys. He got the shit beat out of him too. Well to be fair, I didn’t get the shit beat out of me. Public school, I did a few times. But the thing was, those altar boys didn’t know, because we were in eighth grade, that I started fighting tournaments around the Pacific Northwest in Karate in fifth grade. So I did pretty good anyone fight in particular and ended up beating the shit out of this one kid who took a swing at me first and then when the fight was over and I was walking away, tried to jump me from behind. I had fine tuned awareness from fighting tournaments so I threw a back kick and dropped him like a rock. A kid told me years later in high school, who didn’t go on to Bellarmine prep, that after I got in the car with my mom and little brother and we drove off home, which is what started this whole fight as somebody had thrown a snowball in my mom‘s car. Abuse me, fine. Abuse, my family? Fuck you pal! So this kid had noticed the kid Mark, from the fight was missing just after as the kids were milling about talking. I think this was Johnny White telling me this one day, as we were walking to Lincoln high school one morning years later. He went and looked for Mark and found him on the other side of the church, huddled up in a fetal position and told or threatened him that, You better not tell anybody you saw this. So I guess I won that day. Catholic school is supposed to smarten and toughen you up for life, but I don’t think that was the best way to do it, to throw you into a lion's den with a bunch a little spoiled fuckers. Anyway, back to Bill Burr story…

It’s funny how I keep hearing mostly well-known people talking on TV or Podcasts or wherever, even in movies and I guess on TV, hearing this commentary about how "back when I was a kid it wasn’t like it is now, it was more dangerous "back then". I've heard that succeeding, if you want to call them “classes“ or generations after me through each decade, in looking back how it has a more dangerous group when you were young, then you see today. So by extrapolation I would have to say that when I was a kid in the 50s and 60s, OUT scary kids must have been carrying around handheld nuclear bombs or something.

Bill’s second story on the podcast is about his being involved when he was young, stealing alcohol from a package store. He didn’t do it. He was waiting in the car, if this is the true story. But it got me to thinking… I don’t remember ever stealing alcohol, and I certainly drank it in high school. It’s one of the reasons why, by the time I got in the Service at 20 (after kicking around America a bit) I really wasn’t into drinking any more and much preferred getting stoned on weed. For Christmas one year my sister gave me this long thing pocketbook telling you all about wine. It was designed to talk with you to buy wine. And so I got into wine. In the late 70s I would always have like six bottles of $40 wine at the ready One of my friends who worked in the shop, up front of the parachute shop, in the fabric and rubbergear shop, came over one day and I turned him on wine, taught him about it. He’s from California so decades later he sent me six bottles of California wine out of appreciation. Last time I heard from him he was very into Jesus, so...another lost to the ethereal. At some point in my late teens, early 20s when I got that wine book I read it and got into it and that led to my lifelong appreciation. Years later, when I got to Western Washington University, Prof Rees, told our class that he was gonna teach us how to think. Give me a subject, he said. People called things out until I said, almost jokingly, BEER. He stopped, pointed at me and said, Good, OK, good. Beer. And he started drawing on the chalkboard and spent the hour explaining to us why you can drink beer as you would wine, for taste. You don’t have to drink it just to get fucked up. I didn’t know that about beer back then. And it enhanced my respect for beer. It's interesting. When you drink for quality, you can lose the desire for inebriation.

I love "stand ups". So it’s ironic that I’ve only been to one comedy club in my life. It was some comedy club on Roosevelt Street in the U District in Seattle. Called Laughs Comedy Club now, might have been back then when I lived a few blocks away. Typically we went to the Monkey Bar (Monkey Pub now) until it was sold, and the clientele changed to bunch of assholes. Next to the comedy club or nearby so was a college bar called Dantes, which always had attractive girls in it but also had a bunch of drunk asshole frat boys. So I was in there a few times, but mostly steered away from it.

Good grief, I just saw how long this blog is today… Sigh…sorry?

So I started doing the elliptical and dead lifts on my off days when I’m not walking I’m feeling pretty good from it. The more exercise I get the more motivation I seem to have to do things.

Bill, now talking about the fights he had when he was younger weren’t as many as it sounds like, but in his family, there was like a fist fight every day. And that his dad would threaten to "put them through the wall", which sounds like my stepdad who was from Crisfield, Maryland. He had more education having graduated from high school then my mom, who made it through ninth grade, but my mom was a hell of a lot smarter and knew it. My stepdad liked to terrorize me once in a while and was a grouch overall on a daily basis. He treated my sister though like a princess. Who wasn’t his kid either. But if my screenplay "The Teenage Bodyguard" ever gets made into a movie, there’s a scene in there where you’ll get the idea what it was like growing up around him.

Bill Bill is talking about going to a college party where he didn’t go to that school and in hitting on girls from another school they could figure out pretty quick like that, You don’t go here, do you? That reminded me when I was in USAF tech school in Illinois, and a couple guys and me went to a bar in Champaign/Urbana up north, I think? I was dancing with some girl and she asked me what I did. She was in college. I said I was at the tech school at the airbase. And she just turned around and walked off the dance floor. That  happened one other time, after my divorce (okay A divorce, one of them), when my son was like four years old, I was at a bar in Pioneer Square, Seattle dancing with some girl and I’m not really a dancer. But if I like you enough, well… anyway. I was always very (too) upfront about my situation. I always have been. I’ve blown many dates that way. After the Air Force, I was in debt for a while (we divorced, I took all the bills) and I would share that with a woman and needless to say, I didn’t get the date. So I told this girl I have a four-year-old although he lives with his mom and...she just turned around and walked off the dance floor. That was the end of that. So when I met my next wife to be, who had asked to use my darts to play darts with me and with her girlfriend, at the Pioneer Square Saloon one night, she offered that she had an infant. And I lit up. I said, Well I have a little kid too, but he lives with his mom. And that bonded us. Because in talking about it a long time later after we were married, we both realized that having a young kid pretty much made no one want to date you. But I thought she was so cute that she could’ve had a baby elephant I wouldn’t have cared. But that infant was amazing and I ended up adopting and saw their first step and the first word was "Dad" and we’ve always had a great relationship. Not so much with the mom anymore, which is pretty much how her entire family feels about her now, so… there is that.

Now the podcast is talking about drinking when they were younger, and one of the women says, Yeah, they drank a lot in the military. Which reminded me when I was in college  at Western, Washington University, Playboy that year came out with a rating of all the universities around the country about drinking. They made the comment. I think they chose the UDub, University of Washington, as the drinking school in Washington, because they didn’t consider Wazoo, Washington State University, in Pullman Washington for consideration because they considered them a professional drinking school. Fair, partly because just over the Idaho border the drinking age was lower and in fact, that girlfriend of mine from Bellarmine Prep went there for a year, got in trouble on that stretch of well monitored road, twice and joined me for our next three years of college/university. I was at a party at Western and we were talking about that Playboy piece. Everybody was pretty offended and somebody asked me if I wasn’t offended as I didn't seem so. I said no, not really, remember. I am a STRATA student (STudent Returning After Time Away, or something like that, it means I had time between graduating high school and college, mostly military types), someone who’s been away from school for a while and returned. I had been through the military in between. And as they had said about Wazzu, I’ve already been at a professional partying organization, in the military.

Cheers! Sláinte!

Education and Sorrow

When I graduated high school, I swore off school. But not education. I continued on my own, as I'd always been a voracious reader. I was "grounded" to my room a lot as a kid and books saved me. Locked in my room, I was out in the universe having adventures, or learning occult knowledge. Things unknown to my contemporaries and my family.

My K-12 years were a misery, getting easier toward the end in high school, even though I worked nights since tenth grade. My ADD certainly made my first nine years of school difficult. Though, in my own way, at my own pace, I could excel. That seldom was allowed to happen. Not unusual for any child, to be sure.

But that had little to do with how our national cookie-cutter, 19th century industrial age school system worked. One that we mostly still have today.

"Assembly line them out to get factory jobs!" Time and resources and not enough teachers meant you do it how you are asked, or you walk. More accurately? You're tossed out. I'm sure ethnic minorities had it worse. I was lucky. I was white, lower middle class. But the lower your economic class was, the worse you had it. Ethnic distinctions or not.

I never knew there was a method. Not until I took "Study Skills" in college. Then things got a bit easier. I saw it listed and thought what a great idea! Why did n't they teach us this in K-12? Apparently, you're just supposed to learn it through osmosis. Well? Some of us didn't. Couldn't.

After the Air Force at twenty-five, I floundered for a while. Until I sunk into being nothing. Though I started to acquire a greater love of life. Shrooms, weed, and LSD aided that sojourn.

One day my older brother talked to me in his backyard, where I was living for a year in his outbuilding, in a loft I had refurbished. I was a minimalist then, but it was a freeing, enjoyable experience. Knowing all the while that I was not living to my potential and had effectively lost all I had gained while in the Service. At least materially. Well, I lost a marriage too. But that was on me, in marrying too young.

My brother convinced me to use my VA benefits. And so I started college. For the fourth time. Though this time being my only real effort toward a degree.

“Sorrow is knowledge: they who know the most must mourn the deepest o’er the fatal truth, the Tree of Knowledge is not that of Life.” Lord Byron

But before I made my decision to start college and get an actual degree of some kind, I decided to take two weeks to ruminate and consider my situation, and my future.

I felt life had been somewhat painful up to that point. Though, I was making the best of it. At least, emotionally. Which was overshadowing my existence at the time. I had trouble finding a job after years in the military where I had great respect and responsibility. People's lives actually depended on me.

Now? No one seemed to want to trust me at all. Other than a few shady jobs I'd had. More than one of which had taken great advantage of me.

Over those two weeks, I considered what a degree, what higher education would offer me. More knowledge? Sure. A sharper mind. Hopefully. A greater understanding of both the world around me and the universe? To be sure.

I was quite aware of how, with greater knowledge, comes greater pain. I was very focused on that for that first week or so, not much interested in renewing my experience of being abused by a school system once again. But there was something I did not know yet about the difference between college and K-12.

During that second week, however, I started to consider how, with greater knowledge, also comes a greater appreciation of things. A better understanding of art, cinema, science, people, and living in general. There was an upside to it.

In the end, I decided I would give education one last try. After all, if I could survive the nonsense the military put me through, I could certainly deal with school of my peers. Though I would be older now, and returning to school after time away. I would have to get back to where I had been nine years ago when I graduated at seventeen. And that was a little unnerving.

Still, there would surely be wine, women, and song. This was not K-12, but an assemblage of adults. Or near adults anyway.

Once I got into college, took the study skills class along with my other first-quarter classes that first year. I settled in. People, other students this time, were different. People were there because... for a change, they actually wanted to be there. They paid to be there. Not like before where most of us wanted to be elsewhere and were working out issues about authority and our parents. Though, to bs sure some still were. But my K-12 years? Or parents did that to us. The government did that to us.

As one prof put it, he loved teaching college because the kids actually wanted to be there. They had made a choice. Most of them, A choice to be there. They wanted to learn.

And that was what I saw in my fellow classmates. It was addictive and invigorating. A bit shocking at first. Others in my classes would join in. It wasn't just the smart girl, speaking up, or the wise-ass clever guy joining in, all as the rest of us just sat there ignorant or annoyed. Or worse, bored.

People joined in the discussions. The learning invoked great attitudes and we all wanted to be there. I too wanted to be there. It was kind of amazing and rewarding, and after a quarter or two of classes, I was fully invested. The more I learned, the more I wanted to learn more. But also, the more I learned, the less I knew I knew of the ever-expanding awareness of the vastness of all knowledge. 

This was better than partying all the time or doing drugs. It was also giving me something back for my efforts. Something that would remain with me for the rest of my life.

However, there was indeed a downside. 

Deep into the last part of the Fall quarter in my final year, I wandered into the Career Center at Western Washington University. I thought, maybe they could offer me some help, as soon, I would graduate. And...then what?

I sat with a counselor and explained my situation. She looked at me shocked and said, "You're late." I asked what she meant. I had months until I graduated. I believe, about three left. "See these other students in here?" She said. I looked around. A few students were studiously reading various things and filling out forms. "Yes?" What she said next disturbed and shocked me.

"They've been coming here for months, some for a year already. You should have been here sooner."

And sure enough, she was right. I never did find a job for after graduation. I graduated and moved back home, to Tacoma. And... ended up at the same job I had when I started college, and at the same hourly rate. I was crushed. Happy to have a job. But despondent. 

It was a letdown to be sure. Why didn't ANYONE tell me to prepare for leaving college? Eventually, I transferred up to Seattle to another store with the same company, MTS Incorporated. Tower Records. It was a fun place to work, not much money, and not the potential for advancement.

IF you weren't interested in getting your own store to manage. Which I wasn't. Reason there being, I'd been in retail sales since tenth grade at the Drive-In Theater where I worked nights all through high school. I'd started there cleaning the field the night after shows played. It was back-breaking work for a ninth-grader.

Someone once told me that to make money in life, you can't be the employee who physically touches any of the money made. You have to get away from that. Which surely managing the store would do. But I wanted more, yet.

I tried to get a job in Seattle as a starting psychologist and got hit with the hard reality that I was already getting paid more where I was. I was stunned. It wasn't much more but after money, time, blood, sweat, and tears to get a university degree, I'd make the same money? 

I had found before graduating at the career center at WWU that many students were already volunteering for unpaid jobs. Then later after graduation, many got hired. I couldn't afford to do that any longer now that I was working for a living. I'd blown that opportunity.

When I found that out while still in college, I asked a friend and fellow psych student about that and she said, oh yeah, sure. I've been volunteering with special needs kids for a while now. Years later she was a counselor at a K-12 school. 

And so, I found myself stuck in my job for a while longer.

Eventually, I was able to find my first computer job which began my life in IT work. Which eventually paid very well as I worked my way up. I shocked coworkers on my IT team, all of who had computer science degrees. While I had a degree in psychology. 

Regarding that. You'd be surprised how many skills are similar between understanding people as a psychologist and debugging computers, systems, networks, and programs. I did quite well at it.

But I've gotten off track here.

My original point remains. With greater knowledge comes greater awareness...and greater responsibility.

The same is true in the opposite direction for those who remain uneducated and bluster their way through, wanting to be treated as if they deserve the respect some of us have put so much time and effort into achieving. 

Then they start to talk authoritatively about sophisticated issues. Like medicine, or sociological issues. Or politics. Some to be sure are self-educated and deserve our respect. But they are the few.

Certainly, few, who can do it properly. Which is why higher education and structured learning was developed in the first place. Without it, it's too easier to miss entire areas of relevancy.

Too many think they can and have achieved that proper coverage of knowledge on their own, and surely, as most of us have seen...that is simply not the case. And we all have to suffer them and their ignorance as wisdom. There's one at least on every job in every career who thinks they know more than they do. It is a costly thing for them to be employed, until they are found out, and removed. 

In ending, I'll just say this.

More education is almost always better than less. To assume the opposite is dangerous... and abusive. Abusive to the country, to our fellow citizens and to ourselves, our family, friends, and our loved ones.

Whenever you are faced with a problem, an issue, a concern? Take the time to learn more about it. But also and just as importantly, about the surrounding issues. Even some that seem completely unrelated. Because too often, they are related in unseen, and unforeseen ways. 

Because everything is connected and should be seen that way.

Otherwise one day you find yourself poor in so many ways. You find an unnecessary global pandemic staring you down as you die and you wonder... "How did this happen?"

How? It is because with great knowledge comes greater responsibility and greater sorrow. And if you allow it, greater joy too.

But if you don't handle it properly, you will suffer. And others will suffer. We, will suffer. And we do not appreciate it. Especially if WE did do the work.

  

Just as we're all seeing happen today. All around us. All the internet armchair quarterbacks. Political pundits, not worth their weight in...swamp mud. 

Yet, it does not have to be like this. We CAN handle things right. To see our responsibilities. To act to address them properly. To find our job in life that will give you the best life. 

It doesn't have to be this way. We can do better. It just takes effort. It just doesn't have to be like this. 

It really doesn't. 

We Need to be Smarter in America

First of, let me say I hope everyone is doing well during this global pandemic. Leadership in something like this, something somewhat unprecedented for this generation, is always going to be difficult.

Some do better than others, some countires having a tough time of it than others. But being smart about it, learning, going to your best minds and information, will ALWAYS win out over the opposite end of the spectrum.

All the best to all of you and everyone, everywhere! Moving on...

First up, this just in...today, after this blog went live, I did a Kelly Hughes podcast. Now also on Apple. It ended up being about the production of my new film, "Gumdrop", a short horror. He has others that are all actually pretty interesting. He has two, a podcast on cult figures and indie filmmaking. Our last podcast together was a fun with about one of our favorite actors, Steve Buscemi.

So, if you're looking for something different and especially if you're into indie filmmaking...well, there you go!

Also, if you're into ebooks, all my ebooks on Smashwords are free for the next couple of weeks in their sale, asked for by the authors because of the coronavirus situation. Many good authors on there besides myself are offering their books at a discount, or free.

Moving along now...

I graduated from Western Washington University in 1984 with my second degree, one in Psychology in the Awareness and Reasoning Division of that department. Realizing I could have gotten yet another degree, I went instead with just getting a minor in creative writing. That ended up going into fiction writing, screenplays and team scriptwriting (an amazing series of classes I was chosen for along with seven incredible other theatre department students, from our Playwriting 101 class).

Western Washington University, Bellingham, WA

I learned there that what I had been doing all my life and in college was pursuing life as an "intellectual". ALL that really means is that my focus in life was to exercise my mind in the most effective and efficient ways possible and seeking the best available information, updating it always.

Please bear with me, because this is not going to end up where you may think it is, from where it is starting. I'm trying to lay down a very important point. And you may find something useful unrelated to the primary reason for this blog today.

Once I found the label for what I was, I owned it. I was proud of it. And rightly so. As anyone like that should. Do you see football players going around hiding their chosen orientation or professional in life? No. Typically they are praised for it. Not always the same for those in the Arts or intellectual fields.

I've come to learn there isn't a lot of awareness and reasoning in America. Our current president Donald Trump is a case in point. But this is not a new thing. I was surprised while at my university, to discover just how much that was true in those outside of higher education. Also, just how many viewed an educated mind with suspicion. I was at times, stunned by it.

I knew that was true of my family as my parents, who weren't highly educated. I was the first to get a college degree. My mother had a sharp mind, but it was unfocused and to be sure she had some emotional issues.

Although a few after I graduated had great respect for someone with a higher education, I was very surprised at how many people (or any, as I saw it) outside that protected life at university, looked down on those who had a higher education and could think to an exceptional degree and depth.

And I literally have a degree in that.

After decades of considering all that, I began to say that "Ignorance, is noble."

We are all ignorant of something. Stupidity however has no nobility in itt. "Selective ignorance", as I understand stupidity, is not noble and should be seen as anathema. That seems to be a central tenet however of some political parties. Of the conservative GOP for one, or at least some of their more easily swayed, and apparently ignorant, believers. I tend to lean as many do, to a more enlightened party. Inclusive. Aware of exigencies in life, repercussions, and the future. These things do not seem to be of great consideration with Republicans. Here, now, profit does.

If you take offense to that, I suppose you may be one. That's fine. We're all people. Here, we're all Americans and that earns you something. By birth, or choice. I don't have anything against Republicans anymore than I'm not really a Democrat. I'm for the best idea, the best action, being better. I just don't see that much with Republicans. They can't seem to see the forest for the trees too often.

Look. I'm not offended by being called, ignorant. IF I am actually ignorant about something. I would then review to find if either they are the ignorant one and merely lashing out at me, ignorantly and immaturely (which I see a lot of anymore). Or I have to change my condition, my orientation, my view on whatever the topic at hand, is.

I don't have a problem when I met someone smarter than me, more educated. I actually find it kind of an honor to be allowed around them. Unless they are jerks about it, or just jerks period. Either way, I gleam from them whatever I can. And if they are decent people I offer them whatever I have to offer. I try to understand or learn the way they think. Is it better than mine? Cool! Awesome! Do they know things I don't? Even better.

Sometimes they already know most of what I know. Or they are so much smarter than me I can't really learn that much from them. It's another level beyond me. And that is also awesome. Because I met that person. Any action you have like that, betters you. But it's you doing the bettering.

I have some sayings I like. Even a village idiot has his story. Meaning you can learn from anyone. You can learn sitting in front of a blank wall. You can learn talking to your self. Try carrying on a debate or conversation with your self. Play both parts. I first tried that in junior high and was shocked to learn, I learned something.

Life is amazing, if you let it be. Be positive. Try to be around people better than you think you are. Don't let it increase your lack of self-esteem. Allow it to build it to reasonable and accurate levels. We have resources surrounding us daily. Most people don't' see or use most of them.

Can I think like a genius? Maybe not but then, good for them and I wish I could do what they can do. I sure as hell don't hold it against them, or feel bad because of them. It's a gift to meet a Van Gogh, an Einstein, an Aristotle, a Michio Kaku. But you don't have to meet a genius to be impressed or feel you've elevated yourself. It could be anyone, even people you know now.

I have repeatedly felt awed by my children, even when they were four years old. I learned from them. All it takes to self educate yourself is to start doing it. Pay attention, think of the connections, the relative issues and things involved with whatever you are thinking about. Stretch yourself. Expand your mind.

That's what that means. It's what being "Enlightened" is. When you eat an apple, you "see" the seeds inside, the store or tree you got it from. The box it was transported to the store in or perhaps the tree it came off half way around the planet.The people who picked it, the ground it grew in, the sun above it, that is the same sun now above you. And so on.

You don't have to see everything, you just have to try to. And when you hit a wall, find the next connection, the next associated route or pathway or thing, Strive, enhance, build, rebuild, add, synthesize, repeat. Alter. Combine. Invent.

When you are around a muscle builder, or a professional athlete, you may be able to learn knowledge from them, but you cannot gain their body and form through osmosis. The wondering things about thinking, how one things, methods or even tricks to increase brain horsepower...ANYONE can gain that through osmosis. That's how learning works. ,

Yet oddly enough, many people take a negative orientation to smarter people, the more educated.My grandmother had a lot to do with how I am today. She was self educated. Read the dictionary. Always said to try to be around people smarter than you, professionals.And I have, and I've been around a lot of them.

I would learn to end my ignorance. It's NOT that hard to do. Though apparently it is for some, for too many. For too many today, in this era of instant communication and a vast wealth of knowledge at our fingertips. It's a truly curious phenomenon. Apparently, on a daily basis we survey much, but only to a shallow degree.

I've discussed all this before. I used to say and to be proud of it, that I was an intellectual. I still ama and always will be, it's merely a definition I fit. Just as I am caucasian. Something I used to adamantly disagree with. "White"? Sure. Caucasian? No. My father was Irish, as were his parents, my grandparents, and so I am. I lean more to the Irish side of my heritage going back to my first months in high school

My mother was Czechoslovakian, as were her parents, and so I am. But :"Caucasian: means, from the Caucus Mountains, which are in eastern Europe. So one day I looked it up and to my surprise, yes indeed, I am Caucasian. The map dictated my reality. So I changed my long time orientation.And that is what an intellectual would do. So if you've done such a thing, you too many be an intellectual. However you have to live in that way, make that you life. Update.

What I see in the world around me today are people who retain their beliefs over and against realty. They would see the map and say, "I don't care, I'm not Caucasian!" They would rationalize around it so they could believe whatever it is they wish to believe.

That seems apparent and rampant in the Republican party of Donald Trump today. Trump isn't presidential material and they believe he is. Many were climate change deniers, then climate change by human means deniers. See how that progresses and rationalized as they find necessary?

Friends finally warned me years ago to stop saying I was an "intellectual". I rally was surprised by it. I was proud of it. I had worked really, really hard in college at it. I had earned the title, not even considering I had simply led me life like that since childhood. How would you like to be a football player with all the bangs and bruises and workouts and games only to be told you are being looked down on for it. It's a shock to the system. Violence is rewarded. Intellectuality, like sexuality in many cases, is not.

It's why historically we have seen so much violence in films but not sex to the same degree. And why there are more war films than films about intellectuals and artists.

That the basis of my entire life was taken wrong...I was shocked, frankly. I thought everyone should be an intellectual, at least to some degree. Doesn't that just make sense? But that was not the case and some are proud of being just the opposite.

So I stopped using that world. I saw it as merely saying, I'm into sports, or into movies and so I was cinephile. What's the big deal? Yet, some, too many, were offended by it? Weird. Right?

Look at it as a bodybuilder who exercises their body with all the same oriented at their physical form and health. It's no different, only for the mind. I wasn't elitist about it, I wasn't being superior, or lording over others with it. It was just my orientation and seemed to be the best way for me to exist.

But then, people do look down on bodybuilders, I guess and some on sports types, there there are a lot of sports types in this country. Following sports teams. Betting on games. Fantasy Football leagues. But I came to realize that in just exercising one's mind among others, they took it as lording over them. In sharing knowledge, it was seen as being superior, even when going to great lengths to avoid that.

I was very proud of what I had learned. NOT that I WAS learned. But that I had had, had taken, the opportunity to learn and achieve the level I had. And it took me four years in the USAF to get college paid for so I could get a four year degree in eight years, essentially. It was hard, and long work. To be sure the military work was physically demanding for me in my career field. I earned my position in life! As much as or more so than many.

I had believed it was a human being's highest goal, to be as smart and educated as possible. So pushing the limits with the most accurate, cutting edge info/knowledge made even more sense. Right? To achieve, Wisdom. Intellect combined with experience and knowledge. I worked hard at that, and for that.

Late nights at the library, studying not partying, talking to my professors after classes. Even getting to know them outside of school. Finally being told by my department advisor, my main professor that I was in the top 10% of the top 10% of all psychology students nationwide.

Something to be proud of, right/ Although, I found I had to hide that, keep it to myself. I honestly cannot remember if he said 2% or 10%. It feels like he said 2 but it seems like he might have said 10. So, best to err on the side of discretion and not eqo. Now, consider by comparison, if I were Donald Trump. Then I would have said the top 1%.. Or more accurately, "the number one student!" And then gone on more about it.

Then after I gradated, it did me little good in finding a job. Though eventually it paid off rather well.

After receiving my university degree, I discovered in public there was a trend against education. Maybe it had always been there, but I was now acutely aware of it. I heard terms, I now realize from conservatives, people I was not aware of yet back then, who "joked" about things that don't exist. Like how college graduates are "college stupid". An obvious contradiction in terms and oxymoron.

Here now, today,decades later, we hear things spoken aloud, like, "Fake News". A natural extension of all that animosity toward knowledge. And ever more so, those who actually buy wholeheartedly into it, and believe it, with a degree of glee, some of them.

They now have a US president in Donald Trump, a failed TV reality star and businessman, a self proclaimed "King of debt" (a warning sign for one who wishes to be POTUS, President of the United States), who perpetuates that mindset. A man who relies on it, who avoids responsibilities and honesty through it, in order to free himself up to achieve even further power, while diluting our democracy all for the purposes of more wealth and autonomy to fo even further. This does not bode well for the future of the presidency in America.

There is even an entire news network in Fox News who are dedicated to it. Russia has also pushed it. They developed the covert paradigm of REAL fake news as disinformation. Using their word for it, dezinformatsiya. Which took the UK to teach American intelligence agencies about during WWII. We're new to it. But eventually it seeped into our right wing political party and they have now made it mainstream. Much to our, all of our, detriment.

Donald Trump supports it. As does the conservative right-wing. Their, "MSM", Fox News, their mainstream media, their Trump State TV, also supports it. Fox News has become the American version of Russian Pravda newspaper, or Sputnik or RT (Russian TV), all State branches of the Russian government, the Kremlin, all run remotely by Vladimir Putin.

In dealing with Russia over the years, their criminality has seeped into America. The Soviet Union was massively corrupt. Russia today is also. They have fake democracy. Putin is situating himself as President for life now. The Russian government, their intelligence services, the Russian mafia and crime syndicates, are all dynamically joined. But America remains ignorant of it all. Even while our intelligence agencies try to warn us. And our POTUS denies it, trusts Putin over our own intelligence people.

There is really no way to avoid it. Trump has had massive dealings with Russian in business, in enriching himself.

But his supporters are incapable of seeing it. The harden themselves against believing it.

It's amazing really. Truly amazing.

We have a subculture who have bought into this old Chinese belief during their "Cultural Revolution" that had set THEM back 50 years. They murdered their intellectuals, their scientists, their doctors.

The Chinese Comrades looked down on their educated because most of them were not. And because it served the purpose of their new Communist Party. When all it really serviced was those in power. The ignorant are far easier to manipulate. To control. To abuse.

And here we are today, in America. We elevate not the old, not the wise, but the young. We elevate not the intellectual but in many cases the very dumbest among us. Those who know how to pander, to divide, to separate and weaken for their own strength.

And so we see...Donald Trump as POTUS. Finally now, during a global pandemic everyone is beginning to see his weakness, his ignorance and how he has gathered his power. Trump's lies now, kill. And it is becoming quite clear to all.

To be sure, we need to be "America Strong".But strong should no longer also mean dumb. Or uneducated. Selectively ignorant. Stupid.

We now need no longer to be, "America the Stupid".

Because in the end? All our lives depend upon it.

Popsicle Death - A Short Horror Screenplay

Too much fun. I do love this story. Short screenplay, really.

Popsicle Death

I guess I'm kind of known for my titles. Colorado Lobsters is another. I have some simple ones like my novella Death of heaven is based in part upon, or Andrew and Sarah. But my most notorious title is my medieval surreal tale of horror: "Poor Lord Ritchie's Answer to a Question he Knever Knew on the Knight that the Knight Lost All. [Music: Henry Purcell's music for the Funeral of Queen Mary]"

Now that's a hell of a title. But then, it's a hell of a story that I've expanded forward and back. It's a short story and a short screenplay. Actor Rutger Hauer chose it once as a winner in a short story contest he held. It's also a short screenplay now. I also wrote a prequel to it called, Breaking on Cave Island that was in an anthology. But? I digress...

I worked on a poster for the screenplay of Popsicle Death with Marvin Hayes, a great artist who has done some of my book covers. You can tell his, they're not just all black with a graphic in the center. I had seen another artist's concept and ran with it, solving the longtime problem I'd had about a cover or poster for it.

I originally wrote this short screenplay in a scriptwriting theatre class at Western Washington University in my last and senior year. I was in a class with seven very talented and funny people. At least one of them, Dave Skubinna, is no longer with us.

I was sad to hear that as Dave was always enjoyable company. I remember him taping away on his "notepad" device in class. The only one I'd ever seen and never saw another before I graduated. I'm still in contact with another friend in that class, Mike Rainey.

A few years after I graduated they, along with a few others started the Annex Theatre (originally on Bainbridge Island), still running in Seattle. Their most famous alum perhaps is one of my favorite actors, Paul Giamatti. I went into more detail in a previous blog post in 2011.

I had felt honored to be studying and working with those other students in that class and to be accepted by them. Even though I was older as I'd been in the service before starting college. My university and college years are some of my best memories and that series of classes under Bob Schelonka some of my favorite. Writing in a team environment, producing scripts of all many and short screenplays. It was a kind of magic.

When the idea came up for Popsicle Death, we were each to write a short paragraph and pass it to the one next to you around the table, I got mine from Chris Brooks who was a dancer in the theatre dept. He reminded me of David Bowie in some ways.

I immediately loved what he wrote. I came back to the next class and after reading what I'd come up with, they were all over it. I tried to say it was all Chris but he looked at me surprised and said, "No, I didn't take it where you did. That was all you." Still, the initial idea and I think the name were his.

The story is about a boy who buys a popsicle, goes in to get the money from his widowed mother and gets in trouble. He never returns. The vendor is in dire straights, having a bad time of life. He leaves, goes home and kills himself. The non-payment was his last straw. In retribution, Death Himself comes to reap payment. From the boy. And from there, everything goes to Hell.

I was loving this story idea. And my time working on a team of other creatives. While my girlfriend, whom I lived with, seemed to hate it all. Possibly because I was breaking off from my intense focus in psychology by getting a minor in creative writing through my senior year. We had been up to that point, side by side as psych students and quite well known in the psych department.

Actually, she did kind of start it, as she had taken a class in programming FORTRAN. Maybe there were other issues she had. I never knew. But once I started hanging in the theatre department, around those intensely creative, talented and possibly certifiably insane students, I was taken. Smitten with the creative arts. Always had been really, just never brave enough to invest myself in overt creativity with others. Like in theatre in high school. As my cousin had done. In fact she got a degree in costume design or something and went on to be a costume mistress on a big production in Seattle.

As for programming, I'd first taught myself BASIC the year I met my girlfriend in college (we ended up as lab partners in a chem/physics class my first quarter out of the military one summer, and the rest is history).

Before I got out of the service, I had sold my guns and bought a Radio Shack Tandy TRS-80 (the so-called and notorious, trash80). I taught myself to program in BASIC and wrote my first batch command files and had some fun with it in writing a fake AI.

When I got into that first college class with her, we were tasked with learning the entire periodic table which intimidated me (all of us really). I had an idea. I wrote a couple of programs that taught it to me. It worked. I was the only one in that class to get 100% on the period table test.

After three years of our studying psychology together, a great deal of that under the amazing Dr. Rod Rees, she started programming on the side and I started to hang with theatre types. In high school, I'd always loved hanging around my cousin's theatre friends with her. They were just... fun. We'd had different high schools and though she was a year behind me, she's only three months younger than me. All because MY birthday is near the end of August.

Anyway, I couldn't figure out back when why my girlfriend seemed so negative about my theatre classmates. She was actually kind of rude about it when they visited. We were working on a script and she came in from school one afternoon and she was so dour, they took the hint and left.

Anyway, Popsicle Death.

I think Chris just wrote that Death was a popsicle vendor and something about a kid. I went off the deep end and got very dark and added in his mother and a dead father, an Uncle priest and other surreal elements of horror.

Even though Chris had started it all as a tossed off joke, it turned into not a joke at all but rather... "Mom, help! No, no, you can't! Stop, let her go! Stop, no, no, no..."
"I am Death, little boy, back off!"
"But I didn't mean to it wasn't my fault! HONEST! Please! Don't!"

And the rest, as I'd said...is history.

#screenplay #PopsicleDeath