Superman
I remember thinking some of the poems I wrote in the notebooks were pretty good, and some I thought were not very good. I remember thinking the good ones were inspired.
Also though, I believe I got better at it after becoming bored with writing the not so good lyrics and eventually strove to make the lyrics more interesting and heartfelt, trying to get at the root of what I was feeling.
I also thought it was strange that I had to sign some kind of licensing agreement to get a minimum wage job when I was hired to do work study at the BCC Activities and Recreation Department. Was I set up ?
We were supposed to keep a journal of our daily activities for Ms Aronson's creative writing class in 1983.
My daily activities seemed boring at the time. In retrospect, they weren't. There was always someone or something interesting happening in our lives when we were young.
But fortunately for me, I grew bored writing itineraries and began drawing wildflowers I wanted to learn for becoming a landscape architect. I always liked to listen to the radio and enjoyed many popular songs, and I found some of the songs helped me maintain my faith at a subsistence level with little shots of 'churchin'' zapped into the secular lyrics—possibly as an homage by the artists to rock's gospel roots.
Matsuo Basho Wiki
Lallafa from 'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy':
There were 2 Joannes who worked in the Activities and Recreation office.
One of the Joannes' husbands worked at GE, and she was very conservative when I worked at the BCC Activities office back, I guess, in 1985. I think the other lady who worked there was named Joanne, too, and she was pregnant, then took a leave of absence to have her baby. One of them had a radio that would play the news. I don't remember what station it was.
One day, though, the news said DC was going to stop publishing Superman comics as readership had declined. Up until then, I never really liked Superman. He had no character traits to his personality. He was just the strongest, smartest superhero and acted like the ideal astronaut—boring, with no flaws or moral dilemmas. I thought him impersonal, but he was an integral part of our American culture, you know?
As I remember it, I thought I had to do something to give Superman some personality—something to make him relatable, humanistic. I believe I wrote Five for Fighting's 'Superman' lyrics at the BCC Activities office shortly after hearing that news report.
I walked the pregnant Joanne to her car on her last day there, and I wanted to give her a hug as she left because she was really nice to me. But I was afraid I might want to "f**k" her if I did, so we just looked at each other and said goodbye. Much later, like about two years ago, I realized I maybe could have slept with all of these amazingly lovely ladies because I was a character in a group of people's science fiction story, and the lead character in the story could sleep with any woman he wanted—and they had to sleep with whoever that character really was!
As I said earlier, there are things people have posted online that tell me other people see the same story and characters I see in my head, and one of the characters we call 'Lucy' because that was what she said she would like to be called when we asked her name. 'Lucy' was the lead writer of the science fiction story, and the being able to sleep with any woman was her plot mechanic—a fascinating premise for a sci-fi story!
But recently, it came to me where I had seen a number of these people who seem very real to me in my imagination: they had been images of characters in some of our favorite stories I've read. And 'Lucy' had been Freddy Arbuthnot, the female journalist in the Fletch novels.
But she was a real girl, too. I've seen her a number of times. Once, I pulled up on my bike in front of the laundromat on 4th Street North in St. Pete, and she walked up to me from the laundry and said, 'Do you wanna do me?' Only I was really crazy then—she had written the lead character as crazy. My eyes were literally wobbling and spinning when she approached me, and I guess it bothered her, so she turned and left. Because of another time I had run into her and talked with her years earlier at the Kash and Karry by the Kmart on 9th Street, I had really, really wanted to sleep with her!
When we talked on the bench in front of the old Kash n' Karry by the old Kmart on 9th Street in St. Pete, a blimp was passing to the north from Demens Landing, where they were moored in St. Pete. She had said, 'I hope it doesn't catch fire and explode!'
I knew I should keep my mouth shut because we were just starting to get along, and in case some of you have not noticed, I often appear to be a 'know-it-all.' I could sense I was going to lose her interest if I told her that they didn't use hydrogen in blimps anymore; they use helium. But I told her anyway, and I could see her openness fold back up like an orange lily at sunset. Now, though, since I found out she was writing what was the beginning of perhaps 'the greatest science fiction story ever written,' it may be important that she be accurately informed!
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