smwghb

Poem 1/99

Music has to win for me
Against my mother's fear
I tried so hard to save the world
And now there's no one here
I picked a single blossom
I blew it to the wind
The tree it came from so much older
Than my mother's sin

I took a harder look inside
What did I really see?
I gazed at the shrink and he gazed back
He looked just like me
I went over to the gypsy
She gave a song to me
But I lost every last word by the time
I got home to my family.

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Story: Saving Her Life [an outline]

I went to the meeting. My friend Mike was secretary. He came up to me and said, "The speaker cancelled in the last minute, do you think you could speak?"

I felt like I did a pretty good job. Afterward, as people were coming up to me to shake my hand and thank me for speaking, this beautiful girl, who seemed very disturbed, speaking in halting sort of half sentences, ask if she could barely communicate. She was wearing all black: boots, levis, a tee shirt. She wore no make up or jewelry. Her hair was dyed black. Her skin was very pale.

I agreed to talk with her. We went to a nearby coffe house and she told me this uncle who had abused her as a child had just died. She had written an inventory on him, and she had brought the inventory to ths meeting to read to her sponsor afterward, but someone at the meting had told her that her sponsor had just gone out and goeetn drunk, so she wanted to read the inventory to me instead. I got the impression that part of her emotional difficulties were coming from the fact that her sponsor had just abanndoned her, and part was from the uncle having died. I said of course, it was fine for her to read her inventory to me now. I wanted to help her, so she seemed to be in a lot of suffering, but I also found her fascinatinly attractive. She went on for about half a hour, and then we talked about being sober and then she kind of sheepishly added that she had another favour to ask of me. I said it was okay, she could say anything she wanted. She told me that she was apparently mentioned in the uncle's will, or something, and she didn't think she was together enough to go over to this attorney's office today and hear this will read. Would I accompany her to the probate reading? It was to take place in about an hour. She said it wasn't far away and wouldn't take long.

I told her I would. We got in my car and drove down into Los Angeles and I followed her directions and when we got there, I found a place to park on the street. As we were getting out of the car, the attorney was just walking into his office, unlocking it with his key.

She pulled me up to him and introduced us. We were just about to go into his office when I realized I'd forgotten to put money in the parking meter for the car. The girl and the attorney turned away from the street to go into the office, and I turned toward the street, feeling in my pocket for some parking meter change, and that's when I noticed it. It was a big black car with tinted windows pulling slowely down the street. A rear window on the side was rolling part way out and a gun barrel came out of the window and the gun barrel was aimed at me!

I spun around on my heel and threw myself on top of the girl and the attorney. We hit the ground as the bullets started flying around us. Gunfire like an explosion, people screaming; the sound of squealling tires. Then I was lying on the sidewalk with these two people under me and I was listening to their breathing, breathing very hard, and I was listening to some siren off in the distance and trying to figure out if it was getting louder. Then I was watching this little red streak on the side walk under us and it suddenly turned into a raging red torrent and the last thing I remember was I was suddenly thinking, "That's my blood."

When I woke up, it was in a hospital bed. I tried to figure out what was going on when a nurse came in, looked at the bottle that was supplying nourishment into my arm, and realized I was awake. She said, "Well, you had a close one, didn't you? Here. I'm supposed to give you this as soon as you wake up". She handed me a business card. It had an attorney's name and number on it. As far as I could tell, it was the attorney the girl had introduced me to just before the drive-by shooting.

There was an old black phone on the nightstand next to me. I rang the number and the attorney's secretary answered. I left a message and he called me back. He came down in twenty minutes. He said, "Well, here's the deal. The girl decided to give you part of the money she inherited. She said you saved her live twice in one day. Once by sitting and listening to her when she needed to talk, and again by jumping on her when the bullets started flying. Her total estate came to 97 million dollars. She's decided to give you 20 million. She told me to tell you, don't bother trying to say 'thanks', you've already thanked her. This is her way of thanking you."

I was blown away!!! Who would've thought, when I woke up that day [which was now three days away, since I had been in a coma that long] that my actions would have led to such a result?

[to be continued]

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another [outline for a ] story -

Sid's Psychie

Sid was a bi-sexual heroin addict. He was also a transvestite. He was heading back from one of his dealers late one night, down a small dirt road in Topanga Canyon, when he had suddenly developed the irrisistable urge to pull over to the side of the road. He got out of his car, as if being called by something beyond rational understanding, and came to small, grey rubbery creature lying in a pool of grey rubbery substance. The creature reached up with something like a paw, and Sid felt an irrisistable urge to take hold, so he did. There was an instant lighting flash, and Sid realized that in a second, this creature had merged it's mind with Syd's and transferred all of it's knowledge into Sid's psychie.

Then, behind them in the woods, a silver ship emerged, as if out of nothing. Sid contained all of the knowedge of this alien and so he understood that the alien was the pilot of this ship, that the alien was about to die in just a moment, and that the alien had called out to Sid telepathically because it didn't have the strength to get back in the ship, which was mandatory in the religion of that planet. Sid quickly picked up the creature, and entered into the ship with it. Sid saw the small chamber that the alien wanted to be put into, and Sid placed it very carefully into the metal lined box, almost like a kind of casket. Sid closed the lid, and there was a flash, and the alien disintegrated. Since Sid contained all of the knowledge of this creature, Sid knew that this was the only appropriate way for an alien from this planet to die - to be assimiliated into his spacecraft, much as a ship's Captain on our world would retain a sense of herosim by "going down with the ship".

Since Sid now contained all of the knowledge of the alien, he also knew that he had to communicate with the ship immediately, in order to initialize it. His placed his fingers on the correct indentation on the ship's console, and there was another flash. In that instant he had bonded forever with the ship, thus becoming it's new captain. He had initialized the ship to his identity and brain waves.

This ship contained everything necessary to sustain life, and had no trouble adapting it's resources to it's new master. It was also trans-dimensional, which is to say it could move through dimensions as easily as through space. It was only about twenty feet long, twelve feet high and eight feet wide, kind of like a camper van, but it had a sort of holo-deck quality that meant it's inside could be adapted to give it the appearance of any environment.

So Sid went about turning it into a den of iniquity. The ship could conjour forth any kind of libation or sustanance imaginable, and could also provide any combination of companionship. So Sid invented all kinds of bizarre and fascinating drugs and lovers, wrangling to all hours in endless, limitless orgy binges.

Of course Sid knew that the primary purpose of the ship was to learn about life on other planets, and that everything that was going on in his mind and his life was being signaled back to the ship's home planet, for cataloguing and referencing Earth's ways.

At one point, the creatures back on Tora (that was what they called their world) issued a subliminal question back to Sid, asking him if he was typical of creatures on Earth. He quickly ascertained that if he were to say no, the ship might dump him, wanting information from more mainstream humans. He told them that indeed, he was the most perfectly typical of human creatures. He didn't want to lose his excellent, new-found life style.

Imagine his surprize when, exactly one year later, a space ship landed outside his window, filled with bi-sexual transvestite heroin addicts from the planet Tora!

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(possible Screenplay):

Working Title: The Gus Williamson Memoirs

(This could be either a play, a screenplay or a novel)

Characters -
(all of these names will probably change)
the three main characters are brothers -
Carl Williamson- main character
Gus Williamson - Carl's older brother, his best friend and constant
companion, who writes this story - it is seen through his eyes.
Allen Williamson - oldest brother
Ruth Williamson - their mother (father is dead)
Holly Jones - black girl friend
Linda Pillach- nazi girl friend
James Rattan - nazi sidekick.
George Manthey - racist kingpin in the town
Jack Richards- owner of the radio station


The narrator, Gus is at the moment, transparent, but he will make his feelings and actions known in further treatments, etc. The whoe narrative should be presented as "Brother of a Famous Man Tells His Story" Type of thing.

Our story takes place in the small town of Amythist, Illinois, near the Wisconsin border The time is the present.

A very high pressured guy, young, ambitious, naive, (named Carl) idolizes talk radio and talk TV stars. He wants to try to make it big in radio and eventually TV by being really nervy and bold. He lives in a small town. He manages to fast-talk himself into getting a talk radio show at the local radio station. His oldest brother (Allen) moves back into town after graduating from college. Allen wants to be a journalist. He is angry about how journalism seems to have turned into sensationalism. Allen has a girlfriend who is black (Holly). Allen met Holly in college in Chicago. They are having dinner and they get into an argument over integration, social responsibility, etc. Carl has a slight, very immature, selfish kind of resentment, maybe even an envy, against his brother for having gotten involved with a black girl. Later, while doing his talk radio show, in an attempt to say something controversial that will get people to notice him, Carl makes a racist statement, putting down blacks (black girls in particular). He gets fired. Allen is desgusted by his actions and very angry. At first Carl is angry about having been fired. He is befriended by a young man named James, who is very much an outcast; a sniveling, pimply, adoscent sort of guy who doesn't know how to relate to people, especially girls. James is very racist as a way of compensating for his great feelings of inadequacy. James introduces Carl to his friends, and Carl eventually begins to realize that he is becoming a great hero to racists, and that he could become rich and famous from this; that his getting fired could turn out to be a really good thing if he plays his cards right. He embarks on a journey through a kind of socio-political underworld, and becomes a public speaker in that world. His following gets larger and larger. He meets a young nazi girl (Linda) who falls for him, and they have a fling. He speaks at many racist gatherings. Holly (Allen's black girl friend) experiences a great deal of prejudice from the small town, and is eventually killed by angry white racists. This cathartic event (the senseless death of a young black girl by racism) brings Carl to his senses, and he realizes he never really was a racist to begin with, he was just trying to get rich and famous, and he had a resentment against Allen because his brother turned out to be different from what he had wanted him to be. This is a painful experience, which develops him into a more mature, compassionate person. He then tries to use his power to speak out against racism. At the climax of the story, Carl is assassinated by James, who is then punished as a kind of Judas. The last scene(s) show how Carl's martyredom is furthering the cause of racial hatred, and he is becoming an even bigger figure in death.

The whole story should be written in the first person of the brother, Gus, as a kind of narrative, as if Carl had become really famous, and his brother was writing his memoirs (I was the brother of the famous person type of thing).

* * *