You have heard the expression: "When life gives you lemons, make lemonade." I did not understand that phrase entirely until this past year. When you are hit by a car you tend to have lemonade epiphanies. You have them when you are lying on your back on the warm asphalt of a mini-mall, your scratched glasses somewhere beyond reach, near your now dirty San Francisco 49ers cap. A white Toyota sedan rests near the front tire of your mangled bike, the driver mysteriously doing nothing. Like getting out to see if I am breathing, or to say, "I'm sorry." Dare I ask too much?
It is as if God is smiling down at you while the sirens come closer. God's face is like a sunflower on a blue sky May day. You smile back at God, your first thought, "Why me?" replaced by the answer, "Why not you?" I have never been one to argue with God. Random, unjust, and just things happen daily. God's finger pushed the Toyota into me.
I will not tell you all the details of the accident now. I will tell you some of what I've learned. Let's pretend this is a message to you from the surface of the moon, or the surface of a diamond encrusted white dwarf star. It is a flare gun round shot from a leaky lifeboat, which is being circled by sharks on a sultry, listless sea. You are aboard a passing tanker, or yacht, or cruise ship. You have spotted me with binoculars. You are saying to your companions, "I think there's someone out there." You and they are clutching the rails of the ship, squinting in the noonday sun. Most remark, "I don't see anything," but you remain at the rails. I am counting on you. Keep looking. The camera would be panning across the sky at this point in the story. It drops down, finds my face, and zooms in. It records my parched lips as I whisper hoarsely, "Freed-ommmm." Freed-om is the name of my new yoga instructor. I have her card in my wallet. Yoga is the latest methodology I'm using to heal me. I think I have bicycle PTSD.
It may be due to the accident, or the moon is doing a high tide thing to my brain, but I am forgetting if I have mentioned my accident. I have. It's titled: "Everybody was Karate Chop Fighting." You might want to read that one too. It's shorter than this post. Some people might think it is foolish to mention being hit by a car. They reason that if I am sending people to this blog, and they are considering hiring me, the last thing they want to read is that I might be the lemon. But, ironically, most love an underdog. And, I am at least 95% well. I've yet to hit a tennis serve, though, which will be the acid test, because the tendons and muscles that were affected are the same ones I'll use for serving. But, as a writer, the only important muscle is between my ears. That muscle is fine. My drawing muscles are A-OK too. I may even be more loose than before. I cheated death.
We are a culture built on the backs of strong male figures. We are brainwashed of course. Not every man is John Wayne. Allow me to tell you what it's like for a creative writer who has been hit by a car. It's voyeuristic, for one. This is what writers do: they observe. The thing I have concluded is I apparently fall pretty well. It is due to my athleticism. I might have a future as a stuntman. But listen, if you happened to land here because you Googled "lemons," or "lemonade," let me appease you. http://allrecipes.com/recipe/grandmas-lemon-meringue-pie/ This is the lemon meringue recipe your grandmother, or mother might have made. I've not made it, but it's March, and soon it will be May, and then June, and freshly baked pies will sit on wire racks cooling in American kitchens.
Let me get to the bones of writing: It's generally not a quick way to riches. But it has its perks. Some days you hit it out of the park. I mention this because, like old lemon meringue recipes, writers tend to get better the older they get. Maybe not as flashy. But, speaking for myself, I have become looser. I find it easy to write 500 word essays. I could do it blindfolded. This is why I'm as confident as I am. Yes, I can draw like Michelangelo. I don't even have to think about it. Now I'm at that same level with my writing talent. It feels good. Not even cars can stop me from my appointed rounds.
The guy who hit me, sat in his car and let the engine idle after he hit me. Apparently he wasn't aware that idling cars dump a lot of bad things into the air. Apparently he didn't know he was gassing me to death as I lay on the asphalt, or he did know, which would make him Satan. I have no problem with older driver driving cars, but Satan is just too old to drive. We should take his license away forever. Or suspend it; in Limbo.
Oregon gets the lion's share of its gasoline from Alaska. We used to have the highest benzene levels in the nation. That's not such a great honor. Benzene is a known carcinogen. People living near freeways, and highly trafficked streets, have higher rates of leukemia. Benzene has no odor. You could be breathing it now, as you're reading this blog. Is your arm falling off? Might be the benzene you've been breathing during your morning commute. Am I scaring you? I hope so. Wear a scuba tank to work. Pretend you're doing an old episode of "Sea Hunt," and you're Lloyd Bridges. If you don't know who Lloyd Bridges was you obviously don't watch enough television. He's the guy who also became Jerry Seinfeld's trainer, Izzy Mandelbaum. The father of a couple of good actors, too. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcFSOnumgZA
But seriously, all kidding aside, you should read what benzene does to people. If reading this hasn't already bummed you out. Nothing like reading how dangerous the world is to make you wear a bike helmet. I have a very hard head. I know this to be true. I fell down a flight of stairs as a four-year-old. I received a broken collarbone for that Oscar winning performance. My Mother never took me to the doctor, so it healed on its own. But I didn't get cancer, which you may or may not want to read about. Sorry, here it is anyway. http://www.cancer.org/cancer/cancercauses/othercarcinogens/intheworkplace/benzene
You may be wondering where I'm going with this. Me too. But let's talk about the moon for a minute. The potential to make lots of money is why petroleum companies are hoping to mine the moon's H3. This is going to happen. But until then, oil companies are raping the northlands. Caribou be damned! http://www.ibtimes.com/keystone-xl-alaska-pipeline-environmentalists-vs-oil-industry-what-obama-can-learn-nixon-1401601
Space happy corporations with a Wild West modus operandi are getting ready for this next new frontier to exploit. Yes, the moon. Did you forget there's a dark side of the moon? Yes sir. I wrote a song about the moon once. If anyone did a reading of my sign they'd exclaim, "My god, man, you're a moon child." Listen: the moon's future was decided a long time ago. And you thought the moon was desolate. Nope. As it turns out, this will be where new Wild West towns will spring up. The film 'Moon' where H3 is mined and shot back to Earth by human clones (who have three year warranties) will come to fruition. Okay, maybe not with clones. Maybe. H3 (Helium 3) is useful if you are building a fusion reactor. And why would anyone do that? Well, to make sure we have energy for the next thousand or so years. http://www.rocketcityspacepioneers.com/space/mining-the-moon-for-helium-3
But why, oh why, am I mentioning all this? Because a large percentage of wars have had to do with something of value. Legal wars too. Like when an old guy runs down a guy on a bicycle. Insurance companies are all about the money. Most people are. The people with brain damage from automobile encounters aren't so much. Look, when they get the Helium 3 reactors going, the universe will be our oyster. Humanity will be primed for interstellar travel. We will devastate the universe like a field of grain beset by locusts. Watch out, Alpha Centauri. In 2080 a lucky, ambitious company will lasso a dwarf star whose core is made of diamond. Billionaires will be made overnight. A fat cat billionaire on Moon Station 12 to his harem: "Girls, I own a white dwarf star. How big of diamonds can you all wear around your necks? I done wrangled me a three billion carat star today." The girls will giggle, because diamonds will always be a girl's best friend. http://www.spacetoday.org/DeepSpace/Stars/WhiteDwarfs/LucyDiamondStarWhiteDwarf.html
It has taken eight months to recover. Safeco, those devils, have decided to play a waiting game. They have thousands of lawyers, and I have one, and mine is going soft on me. Safeco offered a ridiculously low settlement figure. Five dollars or something. If this goes much further I will be paying them for having been hit by a car. "Thank you!" I will write in my appeal letter. My lawyer told me the bad news a couple of weeks ago. Safeco is not new to this game. I was warned by a man, who was rear-ended while at a stop sign. His lawyers battled Safeco for almost three years. They went so far as to infer the accident did not happen. It was all in his head, not in his damaged vertebrae. But he won in the end. If you want to get a true portrait of what is going on in America, and most of the world, there is no more truer depiction. Money is our God.
What does this have to do with the search for sources of fuel? Everything. And nothing. I am suggesting that in this world there are people who will let nothing stand in their way to achieve profit. Not caribou, nor red fox, nor lupin, or Moon People, (if such a thing exists). I knew this of course before I was hit by a car, while riding my bicycle in the bike lane. I just had never had a firsthand experience. Yoichi, the driver of the car that hit me, never reported the accident. He didn't even show up to pay his fine. The City of Beaverton had to threaten to prosecute him. Then Yoichi's second rate lawyer, appropriately with the last name of Roach, admitted wrongdoing, and paid the fine. Did they take his license away? No. Why? Maybe he knew a thirty-second degree Mason handshake. Who knows? The last time I was in a major accident was in San Francisco. A big blue Volvo with six teenage girl tennis players plowed into the back of my car at the corner of Haight and Asbury Streets. The driver was the daughter of the Circuit Court Judge of San Francisco. My lawyer said, "Uh, I don't feel like ruining my career by asking for the max settlement here." This is the way business is done in America.
Now you are wondering, what else happened after this latest accident. I will tell you. I lost the house I was renting, due to having to lie around for a month, (in pain) before Safeco okayed the medical treatments (PIP), and because my crazy landlord was easing out of his third marriage. Here's one of the first things I learned, from a medical point of view, after the accident. The VA is full of doctors who have no ears to hear, nor eyes to see. Their PT people gave me thick rubber bands to get me well. I tried to use them, but they were just water balloon launchers, and I had long been graduated from the University of California at Santa Barbara. I am among the little people of this planet. As the boss in the film, Blade Runner, said to Harrison Ford: "If you ain't cop, you're little people." And I ain't cop.
The Veterans and Family Center, for a comedy writer, is the Alaskan/Canadian oil fields, a white dwarf star, and H3 on the moon. It would be months before I saw it that way. It felt like a federal prison with much worse food. But now I understand. 'One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest' has nothing over this cast of characters. Often I have wondered, how I will tell this story. I have gone undercover. I have lost my way like the Tribes of Israel in the desert after they left Egypt. I am Moses without a burning bush. It may take some time to congeal in my hemispheres. I guess that also makes me Jack Nicholson, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DuyXTZuGPAs and Ken Kesey. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Kesey
In the meantime, I am writing video scripts, screenplays, doing a bit of freelance, and having a few epiphanies about the future.
I don't feel like telling you all the things I've seen, the people I've met. Not yet. I feel like Richard Brautigan today. Sometimes I feel like Ken Kesey. Yesterday I felt like Jack Nicholson. I expect a big Indian will stuff a pillow over my face in a while. But it's for the best. Lobotomies aren't fun. But I am kidding again. Sort of. The people here are the weirdest, most ruined, and emotionally crushed cross-section of America I would never have met if not for the accident. They are some of the most beautiful people I've met. Some of them are crazy. But not me; I'm stone-cold-sober, like always. I've been doing work for an entertainment company in Los Angeles. One day I'm going to get in a convertible and drive to Bolinas to see where Brautigan shot himself. I will go down the California coast, stop in at my favorite places, and maybe end up in Bel Air to drink something cool in the California summer. And write of course, because that's what I do. I'm finishing my seventh screenplay. It's titled, "A Love Down Under." Yeah, Australia. I'll tell you about that later.
Look, if any government official, or any news media suggests that America is in great shape, and joblessness and the economy is on the upswing, they are lying to you. But you knew this already. Stay young forever, if you can. It is your only hope for gainful employment. There is an age bias in the workplace. If you don't know someone, you won't get the job. If you didn't know that already, you will one day. We all have known older workers; now many of us are older workers. Buy a cane, you may need it.
I have landed on the diamond encrusted surface of a white dwarf star. I have landed on the moon. It is one small step for my writing career, and one great leap for me as a writer. I just don't know it yet. So hire me already.
