About Escape!

 

I want to talk about it, because Escape! has a slam bang finish. Not easy to do. Almost impossible to render properly to sustain suspension of disbelief without addressing technical issues that arise in every paragraph. The scenes are compressed in a crush of parallel action with numerous people to recognize and remember, because we encountered all of them intimately four or five times in the course of 240 previous pages. A slam bang finish cannot be slowed to help confused readers.

 

If you read it with the sort of thrall that flows from catharsis and actual worry about the fate of men and women we like and care about, the finish is a nail biter that ratchets tighter and explodes, almost certain doom — which triples the risk of a flopped soufflé, unless the rescue makes sense and plays correctly in every detail and shade of expression through dénouement and a punchline. It's a high wire tightrope back flip without a net. Why I attempt such insanely risky literary stunts is inexplicable, yet required by my structural plotline of the story and foreshadowed in a dozen clues. Gadant can lose his temper, feel empathy, tell jokes, and suffer heartache, but he's steady and strong enough to assess a life and death situation and reveal nothing to an opponent. He has bold bronze eyes for a reason.

 

Hmph. If I keep raising the bar, how the hell am I supposed to conceive a new story? Writing is not a difficult problem. What to write is a distant hush. I have to be completely alone to hear it, a slow half mile walk to the country store.

 

 

Immigration

 

Well. That's awkward. I solved the immigration crisis. I previously advanced the argument that liberty trumps property, and there have to be public roads to get from A to B, which is a leaky boat of political philosophy that adds to our difficulties, instead of fixing things. Don't fret. I have another brick in the border wall. It was implicit that no newcomer or stranger can cross fenced property lines, which exist in profusion on both sides of the public road, aside from churches, hospitals, schools, police stations, and other institutions that talk to paupers routinely and extensively. Everything takes several hours in an E.R. or days in a jail cell. Religious institutions are notorious slow. But strangers are welcome to witness head scratching and low energy among those who engage in public assistance. I did some of that when I was younger and more generous with my time. Young people do it to gain experience.

 

So should penniless immigrants. We solved their plight during the earliest stage of colonial America's development, and I think it was a halfway fair procedure. Few were forced into it. After six or seven years of indentured servitude, a contract was satisfied and the signatory became a free citizen of the state. Georgia was almost exclusively populated by indentured servants. Not good public policy to go overboard on this particular arrangement. Formerly enslaved indentured servants thought nothing of owning African slaves. The indolence and cruelty of antebellum abuse of African slaves was mostly the low moral superiority of former indentured servants somewhere in the family tree. In modern America, both of my grandfathers worked for no money during the Depression and succeeded in amassing an extensive network of property interests, in collaboration with farmers, bankers, and regional bigwigs. Both grandfathers belonged to relatively similar Protestant church congregations that extended their reputation for circumspection and honesty, which takes a lifetime to cement. Marriage is a merger of the economic strength in two families. Most parents are suspicious of suitors and glib smiles. One thinks of vacuum cleaner salesmen and door to door supplicants for a fake charity, children recruited to beg with simple innocence. Oh, well, free market shenanigans. Best to see the humor in it. As a youngster I sold magazines, seeds, and greeting cards door to door, a future Maxwell Smart in spirit, learned a lot by knocking on doors, especially the magic carpet of knocking on the doors of commercial enterprises. Two outcomes I was surprised to win by knocking on doors: I encountered men and women of considerable prominence nationally and worldwide, and I was given exciting opportunities.

 

All children begin their lives as indentured servants of their parents, with little choice in the matter, paupers at birth, unable to produce much during the first few years of life. Not such a bad deal in most cases, do what mom and dad say, try to be helpful on the farm or the family home. There are always chores to do, from frame house to urban penthouse. Kids are student workers, and the implicit deal between generations is reciprocal, when parents become grandparents and need help in dealing with a society that they scarcely understand, so unlike their experience as young adults 50 or 60 years ago. I made the remark yesterday to a woman of my generation that I missed the Bell Telephone desk set with a nice heavy receiver and Touch Tone dialing. Our telephones existed at the office, which made offices active and purposeful. We didn't carry telephones around all day. Offices kept business hours, usually a trusted secretary in charge. My grandfathers went to see people and discussed matters in person.

 

Donald Trump did it, and he baffled his White House staff and thoughtful observers by working long hours in the Oval Office and elsewhere, entrepreneurial discipline that required a lifetime of effort and learning to achieve. Amusingly, the thing to be learned is independence and alert individual assessment of opportunity. For instance, when I made a movie it was preceded and made possible by a whole lot of personal assessment of potential opportunities and communities. Golly. It boggles my mind how far I traveled to get a movie off the ground, frequently broke, willing to take an indentured service gig again. I got room and board in exchange for devoting my full time skills and abilities when I was a handsome youngster. Youngsters of all races are attractive and usually willing to devote their loyalty if you feed and shelter them and show them how to do stuff. I was offered apprenticeships and did a few for no money, gaining knowledge that propelled my career as a filmmaker. How I directed the course of that career might have been handled differently by another sort of person. I aimed at art.

 

That's how to handle immigration. Address them as children or indentured servants who can earn their place in society. Some will make better decisions than others. Crime should be punished summarily by private parties who are threatened by it, basic Second Amendment preparedness, augmented by living in a secure community where neighbors know each other and attend church together, or in somewhat similar Protestant congregations, Catholic parishes, or a synagogue. Islam was never an important force in American society, and Sharia law is unconstitutional on its face. England, France, Germany, Belgium, and Scandinavia have been profoundly burdened and bloodied by Islamic immigrants. America is toying with explosive tinder by sheltering Islamic migrants from Afghanistan, Syria, and the Horn of Africa.

 

Governments always do the wrong thing. What matters most is private choice with a decent regard for reason, security, and adult responsibilities. I've traveled a great deal and met some hundreds of people of all ages everywhere. A few were dangerous. I was ready to kill or be killed, a self defense policy that all peoples and all nations have understood since the dawn of man and is likewise understood by most sentient animals. If you're nice to a dog, feed and shelter him, he will follow you loyally and defend you. Children require more effort, and it's uncertain if children will behave reasonably past age 16. The rule of thumb is no. At age 16, their indentured servitude is completed and they're free to sell their labor. Contract labor and personal service agreements are limited by California law to seven years.

 

All work constrains liberty to some extent. I had to fill out beaucoup forms, make representations, and submit to drug tests for certain jobs, with tons of passport, visa, and insurance hurdles. I know what it means to be poor, sick, and humbled. I experienced all of them, falling from great heights of privilege to crash on Skid Row several times. At some point, you have to stand up straight and tall, get cleaned up, and start over as a matter of devotion to the tremendous gift of life, not to be forsaken. I don't diss the huddled masses yearning to breathe free. I was no different.

 

A contract of servitude, whether private or military, is an appropriate opportunity for paupers age 16 and older. In recent decades, 150,000 noncitizens have earned U.S. citizenship via active duty combat military service, obedient to cruel officers. They had to learn English pronto.

 

Boys should be directed by honest, dignified men, the girls employed and guided by women. The free market is not always so nicely organized. Smart kids will learn to escape perverts and bullies. Others will be aided by public institutions if child abuse is detected. Many immigrants are young men in their 20s, a difficult cohort to wrangle. The key to their success is contract employment. Construction, landscaping, factory work, and the ugly business of meat processing become benevolent and instructive institutions by welcoming illegal immigrants. We have to reform our laws to relax the rules of private sector contract employment regardless of a worker's immigration status. Union stewards are stubborn and maddening. I rolled my eyes at union fussiness and got yelled at when it was break time, both as a union worker and later on as an employer. Workplace regulations are good policy. Employers are usually eager to promote safety for liability reasons. Injuries are legally actionable.

 

Four million Americans quit their jobs in August, another 4.4 million in September. U.S. employers are frantically seeking to hire 11 million people and can't fill those jobs. Put wetbacks to work on long term contracts as indentured servants with room and board, pocket money, health care, and union safety rules, to earn state citizenship in six or seven years, thus eligible to sit a U.S. naturalization exam.

 

 

Mountain climbing

 

I don't want to do this. I'm old and tired, don't get enough sleep. There's nothing left to prove. Nobody reads me anyway, so what difference at this point does it make, to quote a profoundly corrupt Secretary of State. Great model for a villain, ne c'est pas? I don't want another villain or a hero or anything simple. Been there, done that multiple times. I need to conceive a traditional long form novel, 1000 pages in hardcover, a heavy weapon in close quarters if you have to clunk somebody over the head with it.

 

I'm not going to self-publish it. Agents and publishers get a veto on serious literature. Ups the ante in a lifelong poker game, me against the world. I need to envision four aces and a joker. It will take years to write and more years to shop. I might not live to see it in print, which is fine, published posthumously for promotional oomph. Maybe it will prompt bookish people to read some of my adventure novels and frown at the old fashioned formula, boy meets girl.

 

Huge mountain to climb. An epic novel that's not about boy meets girl.

 

 

Dear royal dumbshit

 

HRH Prince William and other interested persons,

It is my uncomfortable duty to suggest that liquid fuel refined from oil is a vital component of world trade, mechanized farming, heavy goods transport, plus rapid deployment of military, technical, and humanitarian personnel and high value cargo by air. We are ill advised to abandon oil production or to mandate conversion to alternative motor fuels. Bio diesel is not clean tech. All efforts to produce fuel from blue green algae proved to be prohibitively costly. Gas-to-liquid processes are likewise wasteful, and in the modern context it is foolish to divert natural gas necessary for all-weather generation of electricity and low cost heating. Fuel cells are weak and heavy. Oil powers 95% of transport.

Electrification of transport is not a full solution. I will attach a research document on critical elements, the compelling message of which is resource nationalism and soaring consumption of rare earth metals required in modern electric vehicles, wind turbines, and solar panels. Formerly abundant supply of tin, lead, zinc, cadmium, platinum group metals, dysprosium, and silver are becoming geologically scarce.

I am particularly concerned about oil production. All of the easy plays have been exploited, produced, refined, and consumed. Horizontal fracturing of oily shales is costly and dirty. Tar sands are infinitely worse, an environmental disaster at Fort McMurray. Remaining crude oil potential is mainly offshore in deepwater plays that are too far from markets to justify pipe laying for transport of associated natural gas which always occurs in oil production. I raise this matter to discuss "flaring" of gas and highly volatile natural gas liquids, which is wasteful and a direct contribution to global warming that the World Bank has endeavored to halt. I developed a simple method of converting flared gas to sea ice, briefly sketched in another attachment hereto. Flared gas in Nigeria could be converted to electricity by substituting a generator instead of a compressor. The strategic goal is to husband energy instead of wasting it.

Thank you for encouraging novel solutions. In the distant future, hydrogen motors and liquid fluoride thorium nuclear power are promising technologies that deserve your support. My efforts are short term, easily deployed improvements to make offshore oil platforms net contributors to oceanic cooling.

Respectfully submitted

 

--------------------

The royal imbecile handed out £5 million in prizes for bullshit, futzing with land use in Costa Rica and a bleached coral reef in Oz. Prize contest closed.

 

 

Odd as heck

 

bolt spinner Gadant

Bruno Heckmeier

Chris Cable, P.I.

Kyle Marshall and Jimmy Becker

Judge Harry Faraday

Dr. Archie Kellogg (an alias)

Gerry Ralston, Hugh Whitehorse, Morton Disley

elderly poet Blane Ballard

Jake, God, and Lucifer

Max Turpentine

Mollusk P. Molever

 

The women were wonderful, but my main character was always a leading man who had to suffer and triumph. Some went out with a bang.

I wrote a lot of personal memoir, never triumphant, never heroic, too easily seduced. That's why I liked fictional heroes, especially the supporting cast of bravehearts. Malik, Springer, and Jimmy Blue. Lt. Col. Terry Beane and industrialist Ralph Smugg. Asshole Lyle Mefford. Gunnery Sgt. Art Flores. Private banker Phillip Argonne and Lance Corporal Tom Hoffman. Admiral 'Skip' Williamson and Col. Gerry Green, MI-5. Nick Narcourt, Barry Mintz, Ben Bryer. Black ops director Mr. Brown, Billy Crane, and cousin Orville. No two alike, every man individual and distinct. The villains were heartless and clever. Gerhardt Arbuster. Clinton Spurls and Big John Corrigan. 'Binky' Balfour. Danny Stephanopolis. Colonel Bauer.

The job of creative writing is odd as heck. I don't know where characters come from, no idea how stories seem to evolve by themselves. The women were always difficult to control, too many moving parts in the feminine psyche. Female readers are impossible to please. I don't care what LGBT thinks.

Unhappily, I've painted myself into a corner, socially shunned for who I am, what I know about life, and my willingness to talk about it publicly. Erik has been almost unique in supporting me, a literary lifeline thrown by a very capable author. I don't know what my future will be, whether a new idea will emerge with enough clarity to write another story — another year of sweat equity, bad food, coffee, cigarettes, and progressive decline, to do signature art for art's sake, in celebration of heroic men and hot babes drawn to each other by irresistible natural right.