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Star Wars Over San Fran

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It came to me last night during those brief moments between wake and sleep, not as an idea, but as an entire story.  Beginning to end, you understand, with characters all fleshed out and plenty of lovely descriptive imagery of both local and emotional content.  The story imprinted itself into my awareness like a fresh memory, then went back to the beginning and provided massive amounts of back-story to explain the psychological needs and dependencies of the characters … then played the entire story out once more, this time from a new perspective, in order to better explain the linear development.

It even had a punch line!  The final scene, which tied all the various and seemingly random plot lines into one superb whole and brought the story to a brilliant conclusion, ended with a total stranger, a simple beat policeman, delivering a stunning pun.  Best of all, he obviously had no idea what had happened, so - to him and all those hearing it - it was just a standard thing a cop would say at the scene of the crime.  Get it?  One line that caps a brief roller-coaster of emotion and action and humanity striving for survival, sums it up and explains it all, and it’s totally meaningless to those who hear it.  What a statement of reality!

I immediately leaped from bed and, snapping on a desk light, wrote down all I could remember of this marvelous story.  I knew that every passing second would leech more of it from my consciousness, so I wrote it down in shorthand, which I studied in my youth to make myself a better yeoman.  As the last of the story faded, leaving only an awareness of having dreamt a fantastic tale, I wrote the punch line down.  In long hand, to emphasize it’s brilliance:

“Don’t let it get to you, Rookie … God knows they didn’t.”

I glanced at the clock and, realizing that I had to work today, went back to bed, secure in the knowledge that I’d preserved the story and could now write it at my leisure.  I fell asleep smiling, thinking that this story would finally get me into mainstream print and introduce the general public to Sailor Jim; Storyteller.

I woke up around an hour ago and, after a shower and getting a cup of coffee, I remembered the story and dashed to my desk.  Thank God, it hadn’t been a dream!  There were the shorthand notes and the longhand punch line.  The notes hadn’t been destroyed by a demented cat and I hadn’t dreamt it all and I had taken the time to write down nearly four pages of shorthand notes that I could …

Um … shorthand?

I don’t know shorthand!  Oh, I always meant to learn it back in the military, to make me a better yeoman, but had never gotten around to … every sphincter in my body seized up at once.  After a few moments where my continued existence as solid matter was somewhat at question, I dropped the useless and meaningless scribbles into the trash and went back to my coffee … then walked back and rescued the one thing I had written long hand, “Don’t let it get to you, Rookie … God knows they didn’t.”

I don’t know if it’s possible, but I have to try.  I’m going to sit here and stare at that stupid line until I’ve completely reverse engineered the damn story!

Is this news?  Perhaps not, but it sure as shit beat rehashing all the various tacky rumors about politicians, huh?

Second thoughts:  Had a great night sleep, no trees down, power never went off, and  Gustav was a non-problem.  (Hell, around here, power goes off if someone sneezes funny, so Gustav must have crept by in little slippers during the night.)  To the thousands of Texans currently sitting in shelters and motels up north, I can only say “Neener, neener, neener; told ya so!”

Third thoughts:  I really don’t care if a hurricane is coming though or what, next time the damn cats wait it out in a storage room or something, not in the house!  (Little shits had cabin fever something fierce after 24 hours and were doing their level best to destroy rooms.)

Fourth thoughts:  Well … okay.  I retract the “Neener, neener, neener.”

Fifth thoughts:  Palin?  Really?  I mean, couldn’t they find someone with a little less experience, a couple more kids, a few more personal problems, and at least one other major career impediments?  They are the Republicans, after all … the “do as I say, not as I do” party of America.

Sixth thoughts:  The Sears guy showed up on time this morning to repair the in-law’s refrigerator.  Impressive, even if he did have to call five times for directions.

Final thoughts:  I guess it was better to be safe than sorry, but is that really the sort of attitude that made America the great nation it is?  What sort of place would this have been if our forbears had evacuated at the hint of a natural disaster?  My forbears came from around here … well, at least three of them did (and they had the damnest time dealing with this little pushy bitch who kept breaking into their cottage to eat their porridge) … and I know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that they never evacuated from any stinking hurricane!  (We found pieces of two of them that proved this conclusively, y’know!)

Summing up thoughts:  It’s wet, the cats are insane, the Sear’s guy just left (having established within seconds what the problem was and fixing it), and my wife is about to kill me for sneezing too loud while she’s trying to sleep.  I’m going back to bed.

After thought:  Screw it … “NEENER, NEENER, NEENER!!”

Wait!  The good news is that she’s going to have the baby and marry the baby’s father!  The former is good, because momma’s pro-life and it fits with her political and moral ideology and the later fact is good, because marriage (as long as it’s between a man and a woman … even an underage pregnant woman) is a true Republican value!  So let’s all pretend that the girl actually wants to keep the kid and marry the guy, just out of simple good taste and respect!

(Oh, wait … what’s her daughter’s birthday, anyway?  I mean, she’s five months pregnant, so if she was born before April, she was having unprotected sex out of wedlock as a sixteen year old … which sounds much worse, in all honesty.  Naw, better to assume that the kid only humped her boyfriend the one time, that they truly love each other, and that it isn’t any sort of indication that she’s been screwing around as a child for awhile, huh?)

Of course, this all still means that the highly moral nominee’s daughter was having unprotected sex out of wedlock as a minor, but - hey - that just sort of makes the mother’s parenting skills seem all the more human, doesn’t it?  Sorta?  I mean, Bush couldn’t keep his under-aged daughters out of bars, right?  And everyone loves Bush, because they reelected him in spite of being a total waste as a president, right?  Sooooooo .. if Sarah Palin can’t keep her own jail bait daughter from screwing around, it’s not really all that bad, is it?  I mean, at least the girl was probably stone sober at the time, right?  And it wasn’t same sex, right?

It’s a Republican win/win sort of situation … kinda.

Are you fucking kidding me?!  We’re going to get fifty mile an hour winds when Gustav comes by!?

OH MY GAWD!!  Sweet Jesus, what will fifty mile an hour winds do to the … wait!  Here’s a description!

“MINOR DAMAGE MAY OCCUR IN OLDER MOBILE HOME PARKS. NEWLY PLANTED TREES AND SHRUBS MAY BE UPROOTED IF NOT SECURED PROPERLY. SOME SMALL TWIGS WILL SEPARATE FROM TREES.”

oh … um, well … okay.  “Honey?  Stop nailing the plywood onto the side of the house. We have secure the shrubs before the storm comes. Sorry.”

(Can you imagine the expression on the faces of the people who evacuated from our area when they read this alert?  “Are you telling me that I drove my entire family a couple of hundred miles in ten mile an hour traffic just so that we wouldn’t have to be exposed to the danger of small twigs separating from trees?!?  D’Oh!”)

I was stationed in New Orleans for several years, shipmates.  Did my twilight tour there (my final duty before retirement) at the district offices.  It wasn’t the best place I’ve ever lived, but it was far from the worse and one of the single most fascinating places I’ve ever seen.  So much history and beauty, side by side with squalor and indifference … there ain’t nothing easy about the Big Easy, friends.

I fear if Gustav shift much more east, it’s going to be the death knel for poor New Orleans and - in all honesty - the city doesn’t deserve it.  (Nor do the vast majority of it’s population, but at least they’re being sensible about evacuation this time.)  Even if Gustav comes ashore at Houma, the estimated storm surge is going to swamp the area.

Keep a prayer in your heart for the city, shipmates, and hope that Mother Nature doesn’t try too hard to reclaim her own.

Everyone over there is thinking, “WEST, DAMN IT, WEST!”

Everyone over here is thinking, just as hard, “EAST, YOU ROTATING BITCH FROM HELL, EAST!!”  (Well, most of us are, even if some of the more hard-line Republicans are interfering with, “WHO THE HELL IS PALIN?!?”)

All indications are, at this time (around ten at night on Saturday), that we won’t get more than some nasty thunderstorms for a couple of days.  Maximum winds of around forty miles per hour and a lot of rain … nothing that we haven’t weathered (excuse the pun) plenty of times before and no reason to join the panic-driven lemmings as they slowly crawl northward.  Of course, that might all change by tomorrow at this time; all it would take is Mahler’s namesake to shift its aim a couple hundred miles west and the silly thing would end up right in our laps.

(Damn, there’s a thought, huh?  A lap dance from a category five hurricane … if they still named them all after women, it would be a better mental image, but what can one do, eh?)

At the moment, the plan is to ride this out and concentrate on “GO EAST.”  Well, technically, the plan is to watch the NOAA projected path of the storm carefully, concentrate on “GO EAST,” and, if it stays aimed at Houma, Louisiana, to ride it out.  If those bastards in Louisiana manage to push the friggin’ thing much further west, then the plan is to re-plan the plans … and see if we can all start concentrating on “MORE WEST, DAMN IT!!”

(Houston hasn’t had a turn lately and I’d hate to selfishly deny my fellow Texans the joy of forced evacuation … )

Would that all warning signs were so explicit, huh?