Writing, cause that's the case

Writing, cause that's the case. Hours spent in the chase. Found God in my pocket. Third pocket in the dungarees. Used to be a spot for the watch. When time hung on a chain. Now it clings to my wrist. Tryst betwixt divinity and the everyday. Funny how the daily obligation pushes the everyday writing. Writing, cause that's the case. A formerly locked case. What discipline, asks the disciple.  Is that how you spell it? Billy shakes. Had it easier. It didn't matter in the days of the Globe Theatre. The man invented more idioms than I know can be attributed to a single nom. Strange thing the writing. Strange thing the story. What story can save the world? No tome seems like the book being written in The Lady In The Water.

The ultimate question of this, and any, endeavor is how can this save the world. Question: what's wrong with the world? Hunger, Pollution, War, Death, basically the four horseman. (Aside, I'm almost done with Good Omens by Pratchett and Gaiman. Fun stuff, like a Catholic ride through Hitchhiker's Guide and some Beyond The Fringe.)  The problem is human success paired with finite space in which to groove, expand, grow. So we split, diversify, come up with separate gods, and land, and borders. We start defending what we got. Because what we got is threatened. That's the gist.

The answer: a perfect system. That goal has plagued us for millennia. Plagued, because these perfect systems have fucked up. Crashed and burned. Deity worship. Plain and simple. Whether that object of worship has been a man, personality cult, economic system, ideal, ritual of morals, etcetera. To name a few: Rah, Jesus, Yahweh, Mohammed, science, communism, capitalism, progress, socialism, Gaia, anarchy...  

The childish answer is to remove human fear and human greed. But I think that would drain all color from our faces. We need irrational passions. We can't go around making perfect sense. We can't solve the problems of the world with love. How boring, how droll, how much a zombified society that would be. Like the lamest episode of Star Trek, where the hour's highlight was when they fixed the replicator just in time to serve non-alcohol at the party in 10 Forward. Leave such mental perfections  to our robot children. Let them assume control and later study how we were so flawed yet so fulfilled.

And yet, I want to try the fix. I want to game the solution. I want to work the problem. And have some fun along the way. So we study means of failure. This is the essence of science fiction, the most moralistic art form of man.

If the problem isn't solving our moral failings, then the problem is surviving them. Rule One! Avoid extinction. Live to fuck up another day. That's the motto of life. Survival of our species is survival on more worlds that this one Earth. So then, the solar system. Colonies. Solar economies. With all the usual social stratification of the rich and the poor, the over represented and the under served, the deceits of politics, the salvation of human mercy, love, humor, forgiveness and joy.  I like the future era of solar expansion. There's way too much room between stars to suddenly jump to galactic civilization. We'll need greater means of transportation than that. Yada Yada.  The details.

The details of the story. How to construct the story. Where to begin?  At the end, at the beginning? At the weird glimpse of odd sensation that grips your head when you consider a single fun part of a story's setting or concept... and then follow that sensation, see where it leads.  Just like the other guy did in the previous post.  Aye man.

The Other Guy.  *waves

Maybe the twinge in Keller is the deep play. The generations long sleeper cell. The vendetta writ across the elliptic. And why such hatred. Why the vast need to pay back.

It sounds like only the working class gets shuffled from Jupiter to Earth to Mars and back again. Are the rich and powerful allowed to stay in one place. Or is the entire system run by AI caretakers who force the totality of humankind to do the solar dance? Did we do this to ourselves. Out of desperation? After some heinous crime against humanity perpetrated on a solar scale. Is this large human swirl the debris field, the splatter pattern of something buried in the past. Does some secret sect endeavor to uncover that secret crime.

We set up the time, and reveal the crime.  There’s a plot.  Conspiracy of self discovery. How slow it must be to piece together the ancient puzzle when the knowledge must be continually passed from generation to generation, verification of evidence coming only when the right people finally transition to the correct stop in the dance.

Let’s write history yet found.

Secrets exchanged when the travel cycles happen. Messages left for the next arrivals. Dead drops in coded graffiti, coded tampering in robot servants left behind, coded tampering in utilities systems left behind, coded tampering in food recipes, coded messages in all kinds of supra steam punk ways, tattooed body sacrifices, ….   A growing oral history, discovering more with each line. A revelation, a solution, a breaking of the cycles. To escape eternity, to escape the solar system, to escape self imposed limbo.

How to tell it short. How to tell it long. What manner of characters. The Other Guy hints at systems of security, espionage, veterans of a war. Unmoored from home being a place, what replaces the definition of home. What new social conventions. What language, what facial expression, what handshakes of human nature in such a strange setting. Who are they, what is their name. Who is the enemy, who the hero.

Where to start. Start at the moment of transition. Start with an explanation to a child. Teach the child just what world it has been born into. How the days will proceed. How the future is described. What goals are dreamed of. What subjects or actions are taboo.

And on to you, Other Guy.