Something new to say

 

I don't mind what others have achieved, however historic and liberating, monumental, holy, influential, and far superior to my simple ideas. Spinoza, Grotius, Jefferson, Ayn Rand. Titans of human genius.

 

I wouldn't have made much progress as an author without Raymond Chandler's republished magazine article that explained story, situation, and character. The rest was easy. I kept writing until I had a breakthrough with Partners — clearly drawn characters in razor sharp situations. I'm likewise proud of Escape as a work of world building with believable people that we come to care about.

 

The problem before me is simple. Apply what I've won.

 

Maddeningly, it means competing with the titans, to devise something new that supersedes the gifts bestowed by sainted exponents of reason and justice, quiet libraries of dusty literature, modernity in full flower with broadband meta immersion and hypersonic cruise missiles. It's unimportant if people have ceased to read. I don't blame them. The thing at issue is novelty in the whole of human history, original work to blow their post modern yoga pants and Crocs off. Win or lose, I have to try.

 

Rampaging savages in Walnut Creek, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Waukesha have blinded me with rage. I don't want to write about the undeclared but obvious race war. I want to write something to uplift people. Fake Biden kabuki doesn't matter. Evil is not original.

 

Everything depends on conceiving a positive statement of human potential, something to bequeath to my daughter's generation. Not that it matters, has nothing to do with me, but Feodor Dostoevsky was a pauper, sickly, exiled to Siberia. I have nothing to complain about except a lack of talent.

 

Rereading Escape, it was satisfying to see that I put Chekov's gun on page 2, as Gadant mentally recalls his experience of seeing a robocop in action, firing steel balls. The final climax is foreshadowed on page 11, when Gadant punches a defenseless man without warning. Jimmy was introduced to 3-D spaceflight simulation on page 14, and Lefler worries about an asteroid on page 16. Escape unfolds with plenty of moral crossroads, value conflicts, and calm, death defying resolve. Encourages me as a novelist.

 

At this moment, an important story seems distant.

 

I could stand pat on Partners and Escape, with Chiseltown and A Better World for amusement value, four solid Chris & Peachy adventures in the bank. I'm tempted to print a copy of each, send them to the British Library or the Philadelphia Free Library founded by Franklin, a final gesture, over and out.

 

A serious literary novel haunts me daily. I make cheap baloney sandwiches and pots of coffee, empty a bucket latrine once a week, and rub salicylic acid on flaky psoriasis. My knees are weakened and sore. Ashtrays are filled and dumped in a flimsy Walmart bag with baloney rinds and crumpled Kleenex. If I hear Elton John on the radio, it turns my stomach, stab a button to suffer creepy talk radio bullshit or squeaky basketball, push another button for Christmas carols or crap jazz. I don't know which is worse. At midnight, BBC will set a new benchmark for trivial pursuit, effusive praise for the lame.

 

As long as I breathe, each morning that I awake, the stupendous job of divining a new 1000 page novel gets dressed in winter jacket and rubber boots to escort an elderly shihtzu on the county road, so he can pee and poop without getting run over by a FedEx van. Oh, shit. Springsteen on the radio. Push a button to hear a Viagra commercial, expensive vitamins for dogs, a sushi restaurant menu in Mountain Home.

 

Something new to say, beyond boy meets girl.

 

Edwin Starr on the Arkansas Rocks radio network, belting his Top Ten hit "War" that played a significant role in ending the Vietnam War. Humbled and honored that I filmed him in 1990, performing another great original song, "I'm A Devil," a few years before he died. Chalk one mark to the good. Last night it bothered me for a sleepless hour in bed, unable to let it go that I blew an investor presentation in 2012, should have had Dianne explain the invention. $30,000 down the drain because I was tongue tied and too vain to see how vulnerable I was, a terrible pitch man. Crystal clear last night that I'm dying. I wrote a letter to my firstborn, now age 53. Haven't visited him or written to him for twenty years because he became a pious Mormon convert, finances home improvement and million dollar mortgages in D.C.

 

Oh, shit, Jesse Colin Young on the radio, crooning his insipid hit: "Come on people now, smile on your brother, everybody get together, try to love one another right now." I know his wife and son. Jesse was a total asshole, promoted by David Geffen, the pervert queen of pop crap, partnered with Katzenberg and Spielberg to make disgusting drek that killed all hope of making progress as a film director, another career I bungled, snubbed Spielberg twice, in a Lucas editing room and a Stone Canyon house party.

 

Is preposterously sexy Escape my last novel?

 

I'm willing to wait until a big story emerges, if it does. I wrote a letter to my youngest brother, asking if he had any photos of me as a child, because he scanned all the slides and snapshots my father took. The purpose? Consider the private life of a kid. There should be a clue in the photographic evidence beyond my defective recollection, fragments of memorable discoveries, age 5, age 6. What was Mick Jaggar like as a little kid? I don't want to know what swaggering Springsteen did as a child. I should flip the radio to talk. Who's on at noon? Bon Gino. The laughing cancer survivor, ex-NYPD and Secret Service agent.

 

Interviewing another Catholic, Matt Walsh, author of Johnny The Walrus. Flip to Dennis Prager, laughing about vaccines and press coverage of a Penn transgender swimmer. West Plains junk rock playlist FM: "Christmas is a time of reflection." Ava country & western: "We wish you a Merry Christmas." Local NPR affiliate playing a jaunty orchestral medley of English carols. Back to Prager: "Feminists don't care about women. They hate men. If you tweet that women need men, you'll get canceled."

 

I got up to investigate scratching noises at my door, little birds. Every time I open the door, my sleeping dog wakes up, sprawled on my bed. I patted his head, told him he was a good dog. Not good enough. He jumped to the floor and snorted at me, wants to go outside in his tartan dog sweater. Sunny, breezy and cold, snow forecast tonight and tomorrow, three feet deep in Minnesota and northern Wisconsin. John Fogerty on the radio, rubbish from the 60s recorded in a single take. Oh, god, an entire set of his fake catfish and bullfrog bullshit. Fogerty grew up in San Francisco. Then airhead Steve Winwood, the English muffin pretending to be a man, "Dear Mister Fantasy" from his Low Spark of High Heeled Boys LP.

 

Big surprise, the dog wants to come back in. He's a rational animal, unlike African academics. Shell hired a seismic survey vessel to shoot a deepwater block off South Africa because the communist thug nation is starved of oil supplies, making stinky diesel from wax. Zulus went crazy, accused Shell of killing marine animals. "Lack of evidence doesn't mean there isn't damage," a black professor of ecology sneered.

 

Meanwhile in Nigeria, 5000 convicts escaped this year in jailbreak attacks by heavily armed gangs. Fire killed three dozen more, because they strung thin electrical wire to charge their cell phones. A hundred were injured. Nigerian officials said that they would pay for medical care. One wonders what constitutes medical care in a corrupt nation of illiterate idiots, where fires, kidnapping, and murder are endemic. A friend of mine worked on an offshore Shell platform in the Niger delta, had to fire his AK-47 at pirates.

 

In a related development, Royal Dutch Shell is closing its Dutch headquarters and moving to London. It's only a matter of time before they auction and abandon their Gulf of Mexico assets, thanks to Biden and Black Lives Matter. You can't operate an oil company with affirmative action. That's how BP's Deepwater Horizon exploded and sank, an unskilled black rig hand responsible for the blowout preventer. No joke. I monitored the Coast Guard hearings. Shell had nothing to do with the BP disaster that killed 11 men on the drilling floor and spilled 2.6 million barrels of oil, but Obama shut down Shell's offshore exploration operations for nine months. Biden's embargo on deepwater Federal leases was the final straw.

 

Something new to say, a positive statement of human potential.

 

I don't want to leap into the distant future again or retreat to the benevolent 50s. It has to be believable in the context of endless masking and MRNA poison and fake ballots, tens of millions quitting their jobs, hundreds of thousands of backordered Peterbilts and Freightliners, Putin and Xi threatening war.

 

I feel like Mister Rick in Casablanca. Of all the gin joints in the world, why did she have to show up here? — the harrier of modern history darkening a toothless hippie's tin barn.

 

The days tick by and the notes pile up. I might be a weakling but I'm not a chicken. Procreation is our most important product. Women know that they are at war for survival. The Sons of Liberty did not hold elections. Seven-eighths of happiness is fallow fields. A single man, vastly outnumbered, succeeds by being loved. I don't like being absurd. A first class KLM stew told me that Van Morrison was the ugliest man she had ever encountered.