So I am feeling in an unaccustomedly creative mood-- unaccustomed because who has felt inspired with what has been going on with our manipulated and potentially disastrous politics-- when I open this week's New Yorker, and there is an article about writer-director Mike Mills, and his film, 20th Century Women. He looks exactly, from the angle they have him, like Ken Kesey who was a great friend of mine when I went for my Master's Degree in Creative Writing at Stanford under the allegedly great writer Wallace Stegner, except he was on sabbatical but they didn't tell me that till after I had paid my tuition, which they wouldn't give back. It was a dedicated and hilarious, if less than greatly productive time, and I probably wrote a book or two about it that I don't remember, as I am don't remembering many things at this point, but I am still ahead of Kesey, though he is better known and loved, since I am alive. I think.
I had what I hope is a really good idea for a comedy, and if I can remember, I may indeed write it, and if there is a comedy god, Susan Sarandon will play the lead, who is, indeed, based on me, as a gifted Goy. I can say that it begins with an older woman strolling the beach, telling a much younger woman of her great love, who died early on, not that long after the relationship had just begun to mature. The rest I can't tell because that is what makes it clever and fresh and ripe for theft. Not that anyone necessarily reads these things, but you never know, especially with the accessibility of the Internet, and Donald Trump coming to office.
What a time. It is not easy to be an American who loves and prizes her country, and, when she was much younger, believed in reincarnation. I used to think I had been friends in a previous life with Benjamin Franklin who really did. But I hope for his sake, and that of probably the rest of us, that I was wrong. To have been as smart, wise and creative as he was, and have to come back for this shit would be indefensible.
How will it all turn out? Will anyone be alive to know? What will she wear to his funeral?
