Hey, I didn't realize that Mike Waugh still aspires to be a writer of fiction. I figured you'd switched over to aspiring to write songs. Should of known, since so many of your songs are really fiction set music.

Maybe you should expand the Story of Bob into a full story, although I think I may have already adapted it myself... The White Squirrel. There's a copy of it in my college lit mag from 2000. I think it's packed up in one of those boxes in your shed.

Basically, there's this blogger who is obsessed with capturing a white squirrel that she saw in a park. Sort of an Ahab for the modern age. It's got a girl... it's got a squirrel. No Bob, but the essential elements are all there. All except an ending.

Oops, but this is supposed to be About You, not me -- which is why, I suppose, you failed to mention your wife's name, eh? Or did she specifically request to not be associated with you?

I wrote the following in response to a friend's concerns about Michael Moore's film after she read articles saying it misrepresents situations to unfairly malign Bush.

"I saw Michael Moore interviewed on the Charlie Rose show last night. He freely admitted that although the facts had been checked by fact checkers, the opinions were his and the film was skewed to express his opinions.

And isn't that really what democracy and the US Constitution's First Amendment (my personal favourite) are fundamentally about -- we each are given the freedom to voice our own opinions, skewed by our own experiences, beliefs and thoughts. (So we are back to the message of my poem, politics*.)

In my opinion the film was cogent, powerful and artistically effective. I believe it makes the impression it was intended to make."

I have since then been thinking about social order, politics, the means of people expressing and meeting their needs together or developing power bases to take what they want.

I am a natural idealist, and had incorporated the requisite patriotism, pride in my country and our values of freedom, equality and human rights when I was young. Then, during the Vietnam era, I became cognizant of the disconnect between what we citizens were being told to keep us in line and the reality of the situation. Over time I have become more and more convinced that the primary means of people having more control over our individual lives, and the possibilities of our collective futures, has to do with sincere communication, based on reflective thought and an understanding of the win-win principle that accepts that we are all in this together. Unfortunately, it seems that the greatest tool for social control is a pernicious kind of thought control -- undermining any but the sanctioned thoughts/beliefs/world views through the kinds of ridicule and mythology that can convince the sanest that they must be mad. We are essentially taught not to think, not to see beyond the advertiser's glitz or the soundbite's inanity. We develop a bilateral world view: us and them. And the "us" is we who think right and follow the rules (written and unwritten) and the "them" are those purveyors of evil who hate our freedom and want to put constraints on our wealth, or who don't pay proper obeisance to our gods and family values, or who want to embarrass us and our leaders by pointing out that they are naked in their quest for power.

So I come around again to the position that the only way I can discover to counteract this mindset is to unsettle minds with communication, with powerful art that evokes emotion and thought, with sincere and cogent argument and compassionate voicings of the more life-embracing truths. It never seems like enough, but what more is there?




* politics

infinite regression of change and resistance
multi-rhythmed rhyme
singing into the winds of change
to move their vector more in line
with where we wish to arrive

Laurie Corzett - http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Parthenon/8401/

Things are slow, slow, slow...so I took some time to look at your site. Tell your brother, You are what you say you are and you need not give credit to anyone but yourself for who you are. Because, who you are to us is not what you are to yourself. So you need not mention the names of your wife, brother, mother, step-father or any one else that consist of what you call family, friends or aquaintences when you are writing about yourself. However, I should get some credit because when I held my first born against my chest shortly after he entered the world. I resisted the urge to give him back and say...That's not what I ordered! I did not have the constitution to resist with my second born. I did say "Well, put him back...I ordered a girl.
But if you remember any of MY stories, I was high on laughing gas when both of you came into this world. But, I knew enough to stop at two.