CONTEST DEADLINE LOOMING AHEAD

This entry will be brief and to the point. I'm rewriting a screenplay in order to submit it to a contest recommended to the screenwriters at the NW Film Center by the Center. Deadline is May 31st. I'm hoping the Film Center's recommendation makes the contest authentic and safe. There is one big prize and several smaller ones. The size of the prizes suggest that many scripts will be sent in with fees. Thus I have to keep at the rewriting task and keep this short. At least Ghoul World is done for now. The screenplay is still untitled. Excuse me as I've got a script to tinker with. PS: Also notice alterations to my bucket list.

BEATNIK BEATEN BLACK AND BLUE

PICTURE FOUND HERE!

This Beatnik Boomer is bushed and beaten and bumbed out. My age is showing. On Friday last, I had stones removed from my bladder. In the afternoon, I took pain pills that caused constipation, then a laxative on Saturday to cure the constipation. I had good reason for the pain pills. The diameter of my urethra was undersized and my urologist had to insert a tool and expand it. Yep, she had to tear open the "narrow fibromuscular tube that conducts urine and semen from the bladder and ejaculatory ducts, respectively, to the exterior of the body." My poor Willy was bruised black and blue for many days afterward and peeing was more than uncomfortable. Then the laxative kicked in and all day Sunday I trekked to the bathroom on a regular basis on demand of both terminuses of the path from my mouth back into the world. I did little from Friday afternoon till this Tuesday morning but lie around the house and visit the bathroom. I ate little because of the constipation. Thus I awoke this morning aching all over, and when I tried to fold a couple of tee shirts and bundle one pair of socks and hang up a shirt, I was literally exhausted by the simple tasks, and my brain absolutely fails to operate creatively. This simple listing of details is all it can do. A man my age should never be inactive for as many days as I was. Move even if it hurts.

SILENT BOOMR FINISHED ZILLIONTH REWRITE OF GHOUL WORLD

Seventy-eight people looked in on The Silent Boomer yesterday. Hi, howdy and thank you. As for my bucket list item, I came across the news yesterday that Hollywood is snapping up sci fi novels like a snarling dog takes to a bone just as I'm just finishing my current rewrite of my sci fi novel, Ghoul World. In fact, today I finished it. Of course, Hollywood is looking for serialized novels. I set Ghoul World up so that it might be serialized, but I'm awfully far away from writing number two. Don' t know that I have the least interest in taking the serialization on. I'll know more later when I finish the screenwriting course on June 6th.
 
Grey skies above today. I'm tired of looking at grey skies above. It was 49 degrees and rainy in downtown Portland yesterday and the traffic hellish. Maybe it's all the new people pouring into town. Don't know, but they blocked cross streets like crazy. Very selfish drivers  when all along I've noticed how cooperative drivers have been Portland. It's got to be the Californians flooding up here to escape the selfish drivers in California? OK. I know. Vast generalization. Sunny days ahead on Thursday. That's tomorrow. Can't wait. 

BEATNICK BREATHING THE WAFTING AIRS OF SUCCESS

Wouldn't it be nice?

Nothing is more mysterious than our emotional apparatus. Mine included. I've been experiencing continuous days of happiness, sometimes punctuated with ecstatic joy. I'm not spending thousands of dollars on stuff I don't need, not flying off to exotic vacations on Caribbean islands. It's not the manic phase of a bipolar swing. Maybe it's the screenwriting course I'm enjoying extravagantly. Maybe it's the increasing number of readers of this blog. Maybe it's the recognition and publication of my poem Legacy in WA129 [Sage Hill Press] and the concurrent invitation by Poet Laureate Tod Marshal to join him and Clark County Poet Laureate Chris Luna and his wife Toni Luna for a joint reading sponsored by the Washougal Library two weeks back. Very good to be included among them. Perhaps it's Tod's warm appreciation of other of my poems as well. Part of my joy has to be the steady sunshine of my wife's love for me that warms and nourishes me, and the love I feel for her that opposes the constant goads of ego that we all experience. I'm blossoming like a petunia in the corner of a rarely visited garden of the literary arts. Maybe it's Portland itself. Whatever it is, I'm standing at the window of World Cup Coffee at the corner of 18th and Glisan in Portland on a powerfully sunlit day and feeling as successful and rewarded as if I'd just won the Nobel Prize for literature. Can something be awaiting my lifelong efforts? Feels like it, but, then, the emotional apparatus of the human species is mysterious as hell. Isn't it? And as far as I can see, no actual gold laden Spanish galleon rides the horizon.

THIS OL' BEATNIK POET WILL BE READING...

I'm honored! I've been invited by Poet Laureate of Washington State Tod Marshall to share my poetry at Washougal High School in Southwest Washington this coming Wednesday, the  26th at 7:00pm. Chris Luna, Clark County Poet Laureate, will also be reading and his wife, the accomplished poet Toni Luna. I'll be reading my poem "Legacy" from the anthology  Washington 129  as well as older work and perhaps one or two from the collection of poetry I wrote while dealing with prostate cancer last year. Washington 129 is a collection of poetry all by Washington State poets. Here's a chance to support poetry in Washington State by going to the Sage Hill Press internet site and purchasing a copy from the publisher.

Randall Jahnson

I'm elated and surprised. My second short film script is done and emailed in PDF form to Randall Jahnson. I am enjoying this process all to hell, and I fear I'm learning that I ought to have taken to screenwriting as my first choice in writing. I enjoy it so much and my imagination seems to flower more completely. When I think about my misspent writing life, I realize that when a book became a movie, I always referred to the movie in my head when I talked about the book. Another interesting thing to me has come up because of screenwriting. Except for my science fiction novel, I have a hard time not writing about myself. I'm the main character in much of my poetry and fiction. Not all, but a great deal of it. However, my first two short film scripts are completely imaginary affairs. I'm not in them at all except as writer. I'm floored by this realization, and hope it doesn't turn into depression based on lost opportunities. What the hell! It's fun now, and I'm still alive and writing. Who knows how it'll turn out?

BEATNIK BOOMER REVELS IN SCREENWRITING CLASS

Belmont Theater—home away from home

Ninety people checked in on this blog this morning. Thank you. Rewriting of Ghoul World continues apace, and the screenwriting class was a smashing success as far as my mood went and goes. I particularly enjoyed the time we spent during which each of us shared our favorite movies. I had so many come to mind that I feared I would take up too much time so I rushed through, a freight train of words ending in a blushing gush of "I just love movies". Fears behind me, I'm excited to be in the class. Being the oldest among them, I also realized my youthful classmates might enjoy the fact they are sharing a screenwriting class with an old duffer who'd actually seen "Sands of Iwo Jima", "Fort Apache" and "She Wore A Yellow Ribbon" when they were first run in an old fashioned single picture neighborhood theater. Mine were the Belmont and  Dabel theaters.

Tomorrow I do plan to ride the Max into Portland. When I first entered the NW Film Center last Tuesday, I ran into a youthful very attractive woman and asked her how safe it was to be riding the Max late at night. She said she regularly rode the trains and buses of Portland late at night. Well...I thought to myself...if she can do it, so can I. Our teacher was part of the writing teams that produced "The Doors" and "Mask of Zorro". He's also written scripts for HBO's "Tales from the Crypt". He mentioned the fact that screenwriting can be streaky—you can be "hot" and "not" by turns. In the back of my mind, I have an intention to show him my novel Ghoul World with the object of co-writing a script for it. I began the novel with clear intentions for it to become a movie. I'll wait to see if we hit it off before I make the suggestion.

SWEATING MY WAY TO ANOTHER PORTLAND ADVENTURE

Tonight, my Tuesday night 6:30 - 9:30 screenwriting course begins at NW Film Center in downtown Portland. Teacher will be Randall Jahnson. If you've been following my bucket list quest, you'll recall that I took time off from rewriting novels to write a science fiction film two summers [or so?] back. I enjoyed the process and thought I might be able to do that in my declining memory years. One-hundred pages of film script is easier to keep in mind than a 500 page novel. Two of my novels are open to turning into film scripts. 

For the past week, I've been full of fear about the course, telling myself I have nothing more to say, telling myself I'll be out of place among young writers, imagining they'll laugh at this 79 year old codger trying to turn out film scripts. I questioned myself violently, doubting everything about myself and hit myself over the noggin with my financially unsuccessful writing career. I experienced moments of fear that reminded me of the fears I felt when I put the bottle down 40-some years ago, i.e. how will I be funny and pick up girls...I'll be so alone, etcetera. One fear was about the expense of parking in Portland, then I looked into taking the Max line in from PDX but was deterred from that by my fear of standing at 9:30 pm in downtown Portland waiting for the Max line to show. They run the last two runs to PDX at 9:55 and 10:30. I truly want to learn to take the Max line into Portland, so I'm compromising tonight. I drove in to park expensively in a garage near the school, then I'll look around as I leave the school at 9:30 to see how scary it might feel at the stop I'd need to wait at.