just a little MORE TO COME - THANKS FOR YOUR PATIENCE
...about three dozen hungry faces staring back at her. Hunger for many things was on their guarded
young faces. They ranged in age from eleven to about seventeen years of age. None of them had
ever been in this room or even this building before. It only made them more ravenous.
…………………………………………………………………………………………………..
Feuilleton 9 of 20
Daleo reached the double doors of the meeting room, shutting down that part of her mind filled
with budgets, fiscal targets, expanding wealth flow, and the generation of profit. She spoke to
the assembly of young ones.
“Pages, thank you for coming.....it is 7 in the evening now, and we will begin.” she said,
noticing two empty seats at the far right end.
“Those who are late will miss things they’d wished they hadn’t.” she said in a clean,
clear City American White dialect. Not too stuffy, not snobbish or bullying, but forceful enough to stop one of them from chewing his gum. He rolled it and attached it to the flip side overhang of his customized blue-liner holster.
“We needed you here tonight to learn from you. That’s right, we want to learn from you.
You are a representation of all of the Pages from the entire town, from each gang in each
area. Your gangs and families trust you and make use of you for many tasks, both
routine and important.” she said, causing several of them to swell up, puff out, strike new
poses in their seats. She made a mental note of those for later consideration or elimination.
“We have now, over the last few years succeeded in corporate partnerships with most of the
successful top-tier global corporations.” She paused as she walked one side of the room.
Their young heads, necks, and bodies twisted to track her. Only one of them did not twist to see. That one
had her head bowed slightly forward, with both arms resting on the table top. That one did the tracking
with the eyes only, head rigid. When Daleo reached the midpoint of the side wall of the meeting room, she stopped and unpalmed the small laser pointer. She ignited the thin red beam and pointed it to the camera module in the center of the room, mounted at the ceiling. When the beam contacted the correct receiver panel a pressure hiss was heard and a full length wall mirror descended from the room ceiling, tight up against the side wall where she was standing. She was transforming the wall behind her into a complete mirror, reflecting everything in the long conference room.
“ These are the leaders of those corporations we are currently dealing with.” she gestured with her
hand toward the space in front of the reflected image of the young Pages, each in their own self-identifying posture in their chairs at the table. She spun the laser back out of her palm again, pointing back to the control module in the high center ceiling area. She loosed one precise burst of beam. It triggered a series of hologrammatic images to be projected in space, over the table. Each of the dozen or so images contained the head and body of a man or a woman, dressed in expensive business clothing. Each projected floating person was smiling, floating over the table, reflecting in the mirror wall behind.
“These are the people who are currently leading these corporations today.” she said
“They are all smiling because we are making them more wealth and profit than ever before.”
“And they can still attend their religious services on their holy days with their smiling faces
because we do all the despicable but necessary difficult work to attain those new levels of wealth
and purest profit.’ she said as she pulsed the laser again and the holograms vanished.
She walked to the far side of the room, around the far end of the table, and along the other wall until she
again reached the midpoint.
“The very large public population of civilians has tolerated a measure of lawlessness for many
years. The same public has grown cynical about the upright honesty proclaimed by their business
leaders. They have watched as most previously banned and prohibited behaviors have been
“legitimized”. They have become used to all forms of commerce, the tasteful and the tasteless,
coexisting in their world. Not only do they not care, they have become addicted in more ways than
one to the products and services being offered.” she said as she approached the table, coming
between two of the young Pages seated at the table, who had been watching her speak by looking at
her reflected in the mirror wall.
“We have asked you here this evening to recognize your future, and to clearly identify the
risks of that future for you.” she said as she leaned into the table and swept her fine haired head
from extreme left to extreme right in order to see them all.
“But what about.....” began one young man as she cut him off…..
“Stop - I did not ask for comments or questions yet.” She said it so evenly, so quietly but
firmly that several of them had to lean in toward her to hear her.
“ All of the things we will identify here tonight will happen with or without you. The only
choice you have in this matter is whether or not you will take the chance.”
Daleo’s voice modulated slightly, but seemed to grow even quieter now. Her young audience was hooked,
even the rigid one that tracked her with her eyes. The young man who had tried to ask a question was a
big young man, very much fully grown for his young age. He had been mortified when she cut him off
and he was still seething because of it. The street did not allow for disrespect without retaliation, but she
was THE BOSS. He did not know what to do. Seeing his continued frustration, she resolved it for him.
“Please leave.” she said quietly to him, not moving from her leaning-in position at the table.
“But I....” he half pleaded, half snarled.
“Now.” she stated calmly.
“I came here to....” he started.
Daleo spun her laser pointer back out of the palm of her hand, rotated the head of it with two of her
fingers, and swept a blue beam across him at table level with a hissing, sizzling, slightly smoking result.
His mouth tried to work, then stopped. He just sat there, until his eyes closed, and his head fell forward
with its own weight bringing the top of his torso to lean off center and split right off from the rest of his
body, tumbling heavily over the edge of his seat toward the page sitting next to him. The entire top half of
him hit the synthwood floor just beneath the edge of the table.
The page sitting next to him shifted to her right slightly and never lost eye contact with Daleo across the
table from her. Daleo came out of her leaning position and stood upright.
“ All of the things we will identify tonight will happen with or without you. The only choice you
have in this matter is whether or not you will take the chance.” Daleo’s voice remained quiet and level.
The rest of the meeting proceeded without incident.
…………………………………………………………………
MID-80’S TO FUTURE PRESENT - FAMILIES IN PARALLEL
In Detroit the Folsom family grew older, larger. They would read in the Detroit News how the 80’s had been the “ME” decade. They read how some people achieved higher heights, but how most lost money, how theylost more earnings each year. Alongside radio music that was fracturing into groups causing more and more Gangster Wrap and Hispanic music to play in the rooms and earphones of the members of the Folsom family, other new pop techno sounds accompanied the rise of the YUPPIES and the DINKS, those young urban professionals and those double income no kids couples, mostly coming from and staying in the suburbs outside a decaying Detroit.
As P.T. Folsom and Mary Lynn shunted their way through chutes of Motown life, Jackson Kelley was being firmly replanted in Canada now, way outside of his Detroit roots. Jackson was still trying to live out what he thought his dream was or was supposed to be. Even though he was replanted across the border in Canada, Jackson had really always thought his dream was to be in a real life with a wife and two kids and a home and a career. The 1950’s indoctrinating dream from Jackson’s USA seemed to have stuck in his now slightly graying red haired head. Jackson and the increasingly sadder Mrs. Kelley sank different roots into different soils. Mrs. Kelley joined her community through their young sons; she even became a leader for the Beavers organization which preceded the Boy Scouts. Jackson would drive from his always more important work down in the city to his sons’ baseball games in the summers, but he would always arrive after they had begun. He would always join the crowd of parents who were cheering on the next generation of human children on the ball field. Even then his mind was full of his work as it always seemed to take hours for it to leave the front of his mind in those days.
Jackson would join his Mrs. Kelley in the spectator section, many times into an awaiting unfolded lawn chair. Gone were the days when she would look at him playfully with any form of love at all. At times like these he would watch his sons play on fields of summer while his mind rolled back to before they were born, back when this woman did show love for him. Back to silly remembrances of living in a cheap simple apartment in the Italian section of Ottawa when she would tease him about one funny thing or another. Back in Ottawa before they had any money at all, he would satirize the behavior of their ancient landlord. He would write about the old man in long-hand-written letters on real paper in real envelopes that had real postage stamps destined for their American relatives thousands of miles and a whole country away.
They would write together about funny observations and goings on. One of these had been the
physical presence of this old landlord who lived right next door to them. Jackson had described
the sounds and walking movements of the old man as the knuckle dragging of an old furry ape.
He had made her laugh then. But now as they watched their young sons play ball, she had started
telling him, telling Jackson, that he, Jackson Kelley, walked like a gorilla.
Is this what she thought of him now? Probably so, he thought. He watched the young baseball
batter pop one up into the infield just as three scroungy older kids in the parking lot behind the
field threw a heavy rough cinder block onto the hood of his shiny new Honda Prelude, the first
decent vehicle he had owned in many years. The gritty abraded gouges from the cinder block
were almost as deep as the hurt from her lack of love toward him in these years. While Jackson Kelley thought about how to lick his wounds in Canada, the Folsom family in old Detroit grew and changed too. As Mary Lynn was growing up in the newer world of increasing poverty and decreasing upward mobility she herself was headed toward early motherhood of the next generation of the Folsom family, now headed by an older P.T. himself.
There was more tagging and mark making in Detroit than in Toronto at that time. More and meaner too. Sigtags and throwups spat back. Scratchitti and etching cut deep. Giraffiti climbed higher and higher. Boundaries, roll calls, memorials, and death threats all blossomed in the shit smelling fertilizer of crime in the city.
Mary Lynn fell in love but was cheated by a gang killing. She fell in love with an Arab. It ended with her putting flowers and love trinkets on the bloodied spot where he had been quickly slain so young. Her young Romeo, named Amun Faraj, had been killed by one of many oppoising gangs vying for turf. They all wanted the same drug profits. Mary Lynn rebounded into fast quick relationships with the other Latin and Arab boys, all of them from gangs in constant conflict. That seemed to excite her now, and offer neighborhood status among her peers, although not among the older white people on the block.
All this living and loving and dying continued in Detroit for the Folsoms. Just a short world away Jackson Kelley stayed in Canada, where he learned about drinking a whole bottle of inexpensive red wine as he sat down to do the monthly bills 12 times a year. He now grudgingly recognized that his “NO-SEX-ALL-BILLS” stage of life had arrived. He wondered at the worth and value of the situation. What it would lead to next. The company he had gone to work for, the place he was building the next promised strata of his unexpected career upon, was foundering. Jackson was involved in both the costing and producing of the work there and he knew that this company, much like all the other digital visual effects or animation studios he had heard about, this one that he was building and working for was not making money. In fact, it consistently lost money. The work always cost more to do than the market prices were allowed to pay for it. This company, there in the vanguard of computer animated imagery based in Toronto, Canada, was
beginning to shudder and rattle and not so gently disassemble itself.
The company kept borrowing more and more money because there always seemed to be never ending
source of investors who wanted to believe that the company WOULD make money, someday very soon.
But no, it did not. The company was collapsing, slowly one frame at a time, inside the tall business building it was housed in on the busy street corner in Toronto. Like a collapsing skyscraper exhaling clouds of bankrupt dust and smoke and lives and dreams with each successive collapsing floor of the financial structure. Jackson had this clear image in his mind and feeling in his heart long before he and everyone else saw this kind of thing actually physically happen on television, all day long, over and over again, to those damned doomed overly proud and tall WORLD TRADE TOWERS in New York many years later – that one single event on that one single day - that one day that would change almost everything – that event that loosed the fast financing of the mechanized intelligent dogs of war, loosed them onto the people, onto the citizens themselves, as well as onto enemies.
But before all that, back when you did not need three to six extra hours to board a flight to anywhere, Jackson began to sleep badly. He worried about how he was going to pay for the wife and the two kids and the house and the car ( and the dog ). In this early innocent time he struggled for solutions as he pursued other work in the same or related (or any) field. As he did this he began to play a little game with himself. His pride and fear stopped him from talking to anyone else about this impending serious problem. In his mortgaged house he would walk into his do-it-your-self-rebuilt washroom each morning and vigorously shake his colorful cylindrical metal can of shaving cream immediately after his shower.
He would shoot a small quantity of the aerosol shaving cream into his palm and apply it to his
neck and face already pre-wet with hot water, and then scrape it off with his shaving razor. Later in life he no longer even used any shaving cream. When he thought about it Jackson always thought he quit using it because of this stressful period of his life. During this earlier neurotic time he would still use the shaving cream products and he would tell himself that he had a certain amount of time allotted in which to find new work to pay all of his continuing and growing bills. When the shaving cream in the pressurized aerosol can ran out {he told himself} he would be inhis new job, perhaps in a new city, and all would be well again. He felt that if only he could get another job with another company … BEFORE that aerosol foam in his new can of shaving cream ran out … then all would be fine.
The days and weeks went by and offers came and formed and shook and wavered, then vanished.
The shaving cream was coming to an end. So, he cheated on his own fantasy-construct,
to extend the amount of time he needed to find other work. Every other day he would shave with just the bare blade and no shaving cream. This was, Jackson thought later, how he discovered that he did not really need any shaving cream at all. That this shaving cream had been yet another one of those totally unrequired products that he should stop using. But that did not help the impending unemployment crisis. He wondered just how he got himself this far into a skewed version of whatever he thought his dream should be. The skinny, nervous, insecure young kid with bad skin and unruly thick red hair had now become a thick-in-the-middle, uncertain older man with a shining bald spot in the back of his rapidly graying hair. But he was desperately determined. With all fine rationality Jackson assembled and distributed his resume, set up interview appointments, and actually seemed to have secured himself another, new and very good job. The new job was located near the home of Mrs. Kelley’s parents back in good old Middle America Ohio, U.S. of A. Even that seemed to bode well for all of them. Even with the newly spaced shaving cream schedule, as the days went by he felt the weight of the shaving cream grow less in the can with each shaving of his face and neck. Then the troubles in securing the new job began. Immigration problems with moving back to the United States from Canada, hiring problems due to him being in Canada, and worst of all, it now seemed there might be financial problems with this new company back in Ohio too. As the shaving cream can lost its weight, he began to cheat more. Jackson would skip more days of shaving with the cream. On the days he did shave, he would use even less shaving cream. Jackson would do anything to prolong the canned shaving cream supply that still held the promise of new and good employment. He had a wife and children. He must be able to support them. The shaving cream had to last.
But, it did not. The job dissolved away like rippled mirage images of distant buildings on a baked and crumbling desert highway. And then it was gone, just gone.
Jackson and his young family survived though. In the next many irresponsible days, weeks, months, even years to follow, all of life’s lessons were dredged up in order to get the money, to give money to the mama bird and her young fledglings who chirped with a sweet innocence that should never could never be betrayed even when they grew into large, voracious teenaged humans later in life. And, of course, the actual role of the man - the man in relation to the wife - the man in relation to the family - to the society in general, was changing. He used to like to think he was changing with it.
………………………………………………………….
Economic Misfortunes – CANADA?
Out of work. With the world going through another recession. Another way to say that no one
was really in control, but there were just a few that knew enough to gamble and benefit from the
economic misfortunes of all the others during those times. What had he learned?
What had Jackson Kelley come to know? A few things maybe.
DO NOT COVET THY NEIGHBOUR’S HOUSE,
DO NOT COVET THY NEIGHBOUR’S WIFE,
DO NOT COVET THY NEIGHBOUR’S SERVANTS,
DO NOT COVET THY NEIGHBOUR’S OX,
DO NOT COVET THY NEIGHBOUR’S DONKEY,
DO NOT COVET THY NEIGHBOUR’S . . . .
WELL, ANYTHING THAT IS YOUR NEIGHBOUR’S!
These were the things Jackson had learned as a boy. But they did not serve him well now.
Jackson did not exactly covet his neighbour’s house, but he did envy the neighbour’s ability to
work and make money to cover the monthly payments on his house. Not many of Jackson’s
neighbours had servants or donkeys or oxen out back, but the wife . . . well, that was probably a
different story. He probably did covet the neighbour’s wife; several of them most probably. Not
so much because they were better or prettier. They were just different. These wives with their
occasional warm eyes and looks and moves – who seemed more hungry and less sad than his
own wife. Now there’s an expression gone the way of the Do-Do . . . “his own wife”.
But although these women, particularly the ones that paraded their faithfulness loudly and publicly while covertly flashing long lashed hot eyes and curved warm hips and pointed breast tips under thinner fabrics than other wives wore . . . while some of these were available, all Jackson could really think of was the danger he was in. Jackson Kelley was in danger of losing it all. HOME, FAMILY, and everything with it, losing it all. And so he proceeded to look for and take *anything* that could make some money to try to pay the mounting bills. Jackson took temporary work, day-jobs dispatched at a temp labour office. He found odd jobs this way. None lasted very long, and all of them would be embarrassing if any of his clients were to meet up with him - as he installed computer equipment on new desks after helping to move the contents of the new offices off the old banged up rental moving trucks. One time Jackson did see someone he had done business with further south in the city. Jackson had to jump and hide behind some new tall filing cabinets. He apologized for this disappearing act, but his temp co-worker understood. The co-worker had been doing this throughout the whole of the recession and knew the shame and feeling of inadequacy that came with these situations. While Jackson did this temp-work whenever he could find it, he divided the rest of his time between seeking real jobs, fixing up some things around the house that needed repairs, and building a portfolio for client work to use when the opportunities arose or were rooted out. It was a tense and uneven anxious time. After too long a lean time it ended one day with what they used to call a double header. He had just received some big budget tv commercial work to do. He hated tv commercials but he loved getting some work. The very next day, as they used to say: “then the phone rang” (phones don’t ring anymore . . . phones don’t ring, and clocks don’t tick).
This phone was downstairs. It sat on the bar counter in the semi-finished basement that had been there
when he bought the house. The house he had just barely managed to hold onto through this unemployed recession. The phone sat right next to the expensive hulk of fax machine plastic he had bought for use in his freelance commercial work. This phone rang. Jackson picked it up. He had a very level and balanced exchange of words with the other person on the line. The other person was calling about Jackson’s availability to work at one of the biggest animation studios in California. After the pleasant and informative phone call finished Jackson Kelley put down the heavy old receiver on its big heavy telephone cradle. Jackson looked out the small basement window at the big water tower across the way bearing the name of the town in Canada they lived in and said with certainty
“YES!”
Not suspecting a thing, not bothering to do any reasonable research that may have revealed the vicious power struggles and the giant 70 millimeter egotistical political in-fighting between the nervous insecure heads of company, studio, and movies that were being made in that studio, Jackson was about to enter a series of indelible adventures in the proverbial
HOLLYWOOD JUNGLE GOSSIP HELL.
…………………………………………………………………
FUTURE PRESENT - peering at him above the lenses
Late morning sun was high now, almost noon. Shadows were short, stubby, and puddled at the base of everything that stood up to the sun as bright midday arrived. The old man strained and thought he could see her eyes peering at him above the lenses she wore; dark and hard eyes that might be beautiful with small changes of the tiny muscles beneath the skin around them.
She in turn watched her younger sidekick push back deeper into safer shadow. The old white man was
down on the hot cement. He was down hard and still felt the cold, even in this warm summer of Los Angeles.
“Too cold, it shouldn’t be this cold.” he said again to his son.
( WHAT? Wait A Minute! You are doing it again with these short-ass chapters.
Who DO you think you are kidding? )
…………………………………………………………………..
1990’s again- DETROIT - crime expanded to eat what was left
Snake’s son’s daughter …Mary Lynn… had her first child in Detroit. A boy. She named him Amun after his father. The Folsom family slid slowly downward in old Motor City, with Mary Lynn and her son down into increased poverty. She was struggling in early motherhood with the next generation of their Folsom family, now being badly headed by an older P.T., the senior surviving oldest person in the family. Mary Lynn cried, wailed on the dry bloodied spot near the brightly lit convenience store run by the Pakistani family. The no-where nothing location where her young Arabic Romeo, named Amun, had been abruptly taken out. She grieved. There were no witnesses, never were. Mary Lynn needed more time for mourning but was instead pushed, fell, dove deeper head first into quick relationships with more of the neighborhood boys, all in gangs and all in constant conflict. As Detroit and other rust-belt cities declined, crime itself expanded and organized to eat what was left. Crime was maturing and helping to define the look and feel of life in the old big cities. HATE TAGGING merged and distorted the FOLK EPIGRAPHY. LATRINALIA pulled in POLITICAL as STENCIL grew stronger screaming out many hard to understand images, bordering on SATANIC.
Mary Lynn began to waste away as her own baby boy Amun grew up and learned of AIDS, HIV, and the hollow humans created by rivers of drugs running through Detroit. Her son heard about the brave new Extra Legal New World being built by local lords that were more and more under the spreading lethal canopy of Daleo and her bosses. The United States was in decline and rotting even as its exterior empire spread further and further with less and less challenge by other powers. Thousands of miles away - in California - in his new American studio job, Jackson Kelley could feet it too. The blind follow-the-leader idiocy of the Gulf War and all of its associated mean spirited and overly macho postured attitudes. Kelley thought he knew it, thought he had seen it all before, and was amazed that everyone forgot everything that had happened before. Jackson hid in his work in this new place. Work - the one complete and reliable escape that worked for him. And it was legal too. So Jackson had gone to the big old studio in Los Angeles California. Only for three months on a short consulting contract. That’s what they said at first. That grew and lengthened to work on many movies over long years that passed invisibly with no physical season changes on the west coast telling of the passing time. This caused it to be easier for him to forget, to not see the realities of the world while enjoying his old fantasy of working in Hollywood.
Jackson Kelley had moved out there to Los Angeles on his own at first. Bringing the family out from Canada after negotiating relocation and resettlement down in sunny warm Southern California. Also, most of the worst of the nationalistic saber-rattling and manifest destiny war-mongering was over by the time his wife and two sons and dog moved out there with him.
Also back east, in old Detroit, Mary Lynn’s young Amun grew up into a strong risk taking criminal. And oddly, in spite of some of the last of upward mobility, Jackson’s own two sons in LA began to emulate the West Coast glorified criminals that they heard about in music and saw in movies, if not on the real streets of their almost all white neighborhood just outside of the real streets of Los Angeles. Jackson began to regret taking his sons from Canada to California. Even as he, and sometimes his wife Shari, rubbed shoulders with these Hollywood studio people at their cultivated garden and crystal clear pool wine-tasting parties Jackson began to sense the change in his two kids. He started to want to get them out of there. The ever increasing awareness of how brutally corporate this supposedly artistic studio was also pushed him to think about elsewhere again. How much was the old drifter wanderlust and how much was pragmatic recognition of a need for change, not sure. Between ridiculous business meetings he sat in, listening to people who knew nothing about what really could be done, or not – all the way right up to everyone seeing the dinosaurs of the JURASSIC PARK movie. Those computer animated monsters lumbered through their thick-as-a-brick west coast L.A. consciousness and its lack of pursuit of real knowledge about what was next. These things bothered him. These and the observation of insane hysterics and emotional bad behavior that defined the hiring and firing climate of the sunny California movie studio, all too much. The luxury jet plane behavior of these people who professed to like to make cartoon movies was wearing on him. Their lack of humanity throughout the Gulf War, and their increasingly gated residential world of paid-for privilege was grating on him. This was not what he had traveled all that way for. Jackson learned that the Hollywood he went to find had vanished decades before, if it had ever really existed at all. And now his teen aged sons were showing all the signs of hormonal defiance that Jackson had shown to his own parents back in Detroit all those years ago. The crazy maniacal looks Jackson made posing with his coworkers during some movie crew photographs at the end of one of their movie making times at the big studio convinced Jackson that he had reached some sort of breaking point and it was time to go.
There may have been other symptoms of unease. At home in California over this period of time Jackson Kelley had also become the kind of person who clipped or saved little scraps of paper. There were “sayings” on some of the scraps. There were drawings or photo reproductions on others. There were tourist discount scraps of paper. Shiny, colorful scraps that seemed to find him, seemed to seek him out; small yellow ones from The Medieval Times that declared him a card-carrying Knight worthy of a 15% discount upon admission to the Dinner and Tournament.
There was the multicolored Catalina Cruises Card (*Where All The Real Fun Really Begins*) at 1-800-CATALINA. Not all of them were in color. The black and white scrap for saving up to $5.00 at fun filled PACIFIC PARK on the Santa Monica Pier contrasted with the outrageously red, orange, yellow and black WILD BILL’S WILD WEST DINNER EXTRAVAGANZA, complete with a leg-raising saloon hall girl printed right next to the $5 Off Adults And $3 Off Children.
Jackson liked to think that he kept these amongst all the rest of the scraps of paper because he
would actually use them someday. But he never or almost never did. In the beginning, when he
was still a young man he thought he was being practical and that he would be able to entertain his
young family and not have to pay full price for things. But they never wanted to go to any of the
places the colorful little scraps of paper proclaimed well worth visiting. But that was just how Jackson was. He liked to go places. He liked to visit and see things. One of the most pure enjoyment filled days he had in those times in Southern California was the day he stumbled onto the site housing the historic San Gabriel Mission. Built in the 1770’s and fronting the main roads that evolved from the old Spanish Camino Real that linked all the Spanish missions in California, the building was located within a block of an art gallery he had originally been searching for. He felt the joy of an explorer discovering the rare and beautiful. It did not even bother him that the mission was currently filled with the wedding party of a young Hispanic couple and their large families concerned with privacy for their event. The older Hispanic father of the bride looked at him warily, but Jackson just smiled back.
Not all of the paper scraps were tied to physical places or locations. Some of the other scraps
contained sayings and proverb-like text. One of Jackson’s favorites for a few years was:
“ YOU NEVER REALLY FINISH, YOU JUST RUN OUT OF TIME.”
He recalled first seeing sayings and slogans on walls when he was a young boy traveling with his
family in the young and prosperous times that were the 1950’s in America. In the restaurants, in
ice cream parlors, in kitchens, and even in the “bars” inside the homes of relatives and friends of
the family one would see such things. One of his uncles had some that were printed on cardboard
made to look like carved wood. These artificial carved wood sayings read :
“THE HARDER I WORK, THE BEHINDER I GET”…and “PLAN AHEAd”
with the last “d” being crowded almost right off the sign, because the sign painter did not do as
he advised others to do. Aside from the Serenity Prayer that his wife Shari now had on display,
most of the sayings he displayed now were not widely seen or known.
Things like :
“RID YOURSELF OF THE TYRANNY OF THE OBJECT AS IT APPEARS”
….and
“MAN, WOMAN, HUman”
…and that one that rang so true when he still used to draw and paint:
“YOU MUST PAINT TO BE HAPPY WITH THE REST OF YOUR WORLD”,
Or the one that years ago he laid out on wood, painted, then “antiqued” it by beating it with
chains and burying it in dirt for months, that read (over the entrance to the kitchen) :
BE IT EVER SO HUMBLE,
THERE’S NO PLACE LIKE
HOME
ONCE
YOU’VE FOUND IT
Different things meant different things to Jackson Kelley. This probably should have been one of
those sayings that he pinned to the walls or taped to yet other scraps of paper that were already
pinned to the walls. But it wasn’t. Little did Jackson know that more sayings would stick to
him as he lived, here and there.
“ I FEAR NO MAN, ONLY GOD “
and
“ HOME is where you hang your @ “
Both became more true than he would have wished. Jackson recalled the old stories he had heard
from others in the past about his own destiny. About a gypsy speaking of SHAMANS and his
very own strange dreams where heavy giant ocean ships moved slowly through the trees of the
flat lands of the Midwest with no cracking or damage. There was the info-page passed around
that woke Jackson up to the personal dangers that were growing up around them. It read :
If someone is in the car with a gun to your head DO NOT DRIVE OFF,
repeat: DO NOT DRIVE OFF!
Instead gun the engine and speed into anything, wrecking the car.
Your Air Bag will save you. If the person is in the back seat they will get the worst of it.
As soon as the car crashes bail out and run.
It is better than having them find your body in a remote location.”
All of these sayings and slogans and advisements were a readable layer on top of the now completely unreadable base of graffiti and marks on walls. The profusion and mystery of all the
sigtags, throwups, slaptags, scratchitti, hitup boundaries, roll calls, memorials, and death threats became ubiquitous. TheSATANIC was still there to hold rituals for the crazy sick bastards. It was just as obscure and had more homeless dying in the midst of all of it. Jackson did not know what to make of it.
He took it all to mean he should go back. Go back to Canada, again. But little did Jackson
Kelley know that in doing this, in going back again to a safer country, that he’d end up feeling
the payback pain of his wild young teen aged sons steeped in LA_Intro_101, with their drugs in his basement – with Jackson afraid to go to sleep at night without a blade in the bedside table, afraid of his own family creations.
The time in Canada - the better country - in the place where life was to be more civilized living, in the Ford Motor executive neighbourhood next to Queen Elizabeth’s CORONATION PARK in Oakville on the Lake. All of this time in this place turned horrendous for he and his family. Even as the world continued along its CURVE-0-CHANGE path, he was sadly occupied with wrestling his one son to the floor to stop him from jumping out the second floor window in pursuit of drugs and the Good Life. Jackson was trying to find a way to connect with the other son, bigger and stronger than all of them put together now.
Jackson Kelley had relocated his family to somewhere much safer than the drive-by gang-
banging streets of Los Angeles only to find his two tall sons tearing at each other, angrily
physically fighting with each other as they tumbled down the staircase in their new home,
crashing hard and violently against gleaming wood floor planks below. Jackson had moved his family back to civilization, out of L.A. Now he found drugs and worse, remnants of drugs, in their suburban basement and every nook and cranny discoverable. He continued to be afraid to go to sleep without self-defense.
In evenings and on weekends Jackson took up walking – alone - by the great Lake Ontario very near the house. Seeking out and picking up a few wave-eroded bricks lying along the shore. His wife Shari no longer loved him. She spent all of her anxious time chasing after her younger son as he degraded his life further and further on local Canadian streets now. Shari was angry with Jackson, with the son, with Canada, with the Canadian police constables that dragged her son home each night and as they parked their police cruiser in his driveway she was angry with God.
On top of all of this, the work that Jackson traveled back to Canada for was now being curve-of-changed to cause him to now be the newest Eliminator of Jobs, hundreds of jobs. As Jackson was trying to make the new life work there appeared a - wait - no, could it be?
A brand new distant shiny Hollywood studio being born way out west. The news of it was everywhere. It was even on the cover of the weekly news magazine he used to read before the world wide web came along. The founders of the new studio boldly said this would be different this time. This would be a good company, not like that bad old company he left behind already once. He really did not know what to do or which way to turn. As the world pulsed forward he spent his more of his time in Canada forcing packaged retirements onto others, laying off even more from their work. He was a part of what was happening but he did not like it. He wanted to BUILD something, not take it apart. He wanted to create, not destroy. He had been hired to build, but things had changed.
It was on a Wednesday he remembered. He got up on the Wednesday. Showered, dressed, caught the very punctual train into Toronto – and he knew. Jackson Kelley was going back to Hollywood again, breaking his wife’s heart again, but the fool was certain it was the right thing to do.
He arrived there and set up camp again, seeing old familiar faces and sights. Many had moved
from the old big studio to this hopeful new dream of a new studio. Technology was leaping and
bounding. There were digitrails being blazed. But there were also warning signs that Jackson
ignored. On one business trip from LA to New Orleans the entire airport limo-van full of studio
executives and aspiring semi-executives simultaneously flashed out their early model cell phones
and all were jabbering away as he looked from one to another. Most of these same executives
and creative people had all bantered stylishly cool while aboard the head man’s private jet that
had the large mirrored bathroom on board. Jackson knew the times were changing and he felt
that people were not adapting too well to the rate of that change. It seemed to Jackson that a
large shiny smooth shell containing unmitigated fear was being constructed around all of them.
It did not feel good.
In that same year he attended an industry conference in Monaco where the main speaker talked of
a conspiratorial government effort to use computer graphics effects supervisors for their own
governmental purposes. It was presented with tongue in cheek as the black and white silver
robot from the old film METROPOLIS was looped over and over again on the screen behind the
speaker in the background on the main stage. The European audience reaction that Jackson
could see was mixed fear, elation, disgust, and enthusiasm. Jackson wondered why all these events struck so many people so differently. Still trying to digest and understand all that was going on around him, Jackson flew back home to L.A. Back to a wife that had once again relocated with her sons – again. Right now she resented Jackson for not taking her with him to the exotic locations he was sent to by the new studio. The same wife that never wanted to spend any time with him, and that had spent all the money they had as quickly as he earned it so he really could not afford a ticket for her anyway. He went home to his family who were all asleep.
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