The old memories of something not finished in my past. They are like crew members on an old ship I once captained. Only now, this old ship from the past is like a ghost ship with lonely figures waiting on its decks. For just me to arrive back? Me, the artist of this whole thing? Or, was I conceited enough thinking there was only one artist in the creation of this particular story? What an interesting idea. The thought and idea that something new might manifest in a few creations of the group.
(Notes: What more can one really say of the plan right now but a book promotion idea. Suggested by us of course. Based on sponsoring a contest to reward the best interpretation of the author’s non-fictional work on symbolism. An award for the best application of his theories about symbolism. It is a way for taking the principles and ideas of the author’s NF book into a fictional genre. The email to a good friend which has as attachments the below. The laying out of the dramatic context and the reader asked to join within this context. The plea for participation in a cool type of new media in creating a story about the below.)
Eric,
Sent below to my old literary agent Mike. Had lunch with Mike at the Cliff House on a beautiful day at a table next to the window looking out at the wavds that day pounding against Seal Rock a few hundred yards out from us. On the horizon, the block dot of a cargo ship moved slowly into view. But he is out of the business so just an email to him for I guess advice. Mike and I have just talked after I arrived in the Bay Area and Mike tells me that I have emails him more than any of his authors in history. I feel honored in some ways that I have bugged him so much. Yet, on the other hand, I know that my days of sending Mike a few emails a day are over. Anyway, here is an innovative literary concept. Sponsor a contest for the best interpretation of the author’s non-fiction book. It is similar to offering a large prize to the scriptwriter who best translates an artist’s ideas from one grand gender/gendre to another. But, alway as a way to collect my thoughts on an incredible week in the Bay Area to visit my sons. Note the whole concept (medium) if you will. A reunion of a father with his two sons and, new grandson. The spiritaulism of families reconnecting. The meaning of love. The media of love. I was able to compare my two sets of children for the first time, And, come to a new revelation in my life about things. Like mediums in life, it was always there. All around me. Yet, I refused to see it. The below, perhaps proposal for someone who sees it and tells the world about this.
John
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Mike,
Understand you don’t want me emailing you so tried calling but you couldn’t understand my cell so below.
An idea for a story based on seeing his two sons and new grandson in the Bay Area. The boys were born in the Bay Area and it is a return for the father and his oldest son who lives in Germany. His other son lives in Oakland.
Idea for a story.
And, a story contest based around the best interpretation of a non-fiction theory/book of the author.
Here, interesting. A contest to promote the best fiction interpretation of the author’s non-fiction book.
I really do think it is a pretty interesting literary idea, mystery puzzle, modern Hunter Thompsonesque adventures. The question is always how much does this fictional work apply the non-fictional work of the author. Asking others to execute a producdt proposed by the author, and offering to sponsor the winner, seems a way to bring the authors ideas to the forefront today in a new type of story-making.
Take a look at below if you can.
Always know it was so great seeing you last week.
So much enjoyed our great lunch at the beach and venture into the Haight.
And so good you met the two boys.
Below, somewhat of a continuation of my NF piece Script Symbology. At about 75,000 words. The below proposed sponsorship of a prize to the fictional work best chaninging ideas and principles of Script Symboloby into a powerful, dramatic story. The first real use of the principles of Script Symbology to script structure.
John
The Script Symbology Screenwriting Competition
A Literary Project
_________________________
Sponsorship
John Fraim
Midnight Oil Studios
Award for the most effective fictional interpretation of the principles and ideas of Script Symbology by John Fraim. This includes novels, novellas, short stories, YouTube and Vimeo videos. Political narratives. Most any narrative media form today. Drama. Documentary. Memoirs. Biographies. Autobiographies. There were many possibilities.
The award goes to the one fictional entry that is based on the principles and ideas expressed in the book Script Symbology.
The award should go to really using the two principles of symbolism discussed in Script Symbology to create a new story. In any media. We argue that a new type of screenwriting is the most important across the entire story, narrative field of consciousness. It is a new type of “script” in this new form that we propose in Script Symbology. The below premise narrative below for a story idea.
* * *
A Bay Area Week
A Modern Week in Bay Area with Two Sons
Told Via Symbolism Of Ulysses
By John Fraim
A father returns to San Francisco to visit his two sons from his first marriage. One son lives in Germany and he sees his four-year old grandson for the second time in life. They are staying with his first wife, their mother, up in the Oakland Hills in a place called Montclair. My son and his wife and my grandson. My son, a native San Franciscan, now living in the Bohemian part of Germany with his own yoga studio. My other younger son driving for one of those Uber type companies but not Uber.
My wife in Ohio has cancer and I am able to line up the weekly trip to chemo for her and head out to the Bay Area.
I had booked a place in the Berkeley Marina at the Hilton Doubletree Hotel. I called and confirmed the reservation at the hotel as I waited for my rental car. An employee of the car company came up to me and said they didn’t have the economy car I ordered and would have to give me this Mustang convertible for the same price. What could I say but yes? There was a roar in the rental car lot of the Oakland airport as they brought the Mustang convertible up to the front lot for me. The guy showed me how to put the top up and down. Great, I thought. A convertible in Berkeley, San Francisco and the Sonoma wine country.
The Mustang was a 2017 with devices on it that came close to things like artificial intelligence. The car seemed to have such a mind of its own. And, it seemed to be inherent on me to realize that I was riding on top of a best friend.
The drive north from the Oakland airport on 880 is relatively without incident. As usual, the early evening traffic of the East Bay on a Sunday is flowing fairly heavy. All five lanes heading north. I want to go north for Berkeley for sure and not for the bridge. I felt sorry for all the tourists that end up in San Francisco rather than Oakland or Berkeley because they simply made the wrong turn decision on 880 North.
I had stayed there many times over the years during my residency in Berkeley. But now, everything seemed more run down than the usual run down state it was always in. Something different. The end of University Avenue asphalt road out over the land-fill of the Berkeley Marina was bumpy like some Army training course. Landfill has its own schedule of things different from man’s. I finally arrived at the entrance of the hotel through a mile of ups and downs on the road out over the landfill of the Marina. I checked into the hotel I have been staying at for maybe thirty years or so. It hasn’t really changed much. It was still really the “only game in town” if one had the crazy idea of staying in the Berkeley Marina. Like me.
It was nine at night and my youngest son by first marriage wanted to maybe have dinner with me or see me for a drink. He was all over the Bay Area as a driver for that rising Uber competitor called Lyft that was gaining market share on Uber in the middle of a campaign of bad publicity. I called him after checking into the Doubletree at the Berkeley Marina and told him I’d meet him in the bar of the hotel.
I walked through a few areas of the hotel to the rooms that faced the Berkeley Marina. I looked out over the tops of all the sailing boats docked in the marina. Far off, ten miles away, the grand new skyscraper in San Francisco dominated the other buildings of the city. In the evening darkness and light it was obvious of the new skyline for San Francisco. The entire building, financed and based around the greatest salesman of the new tech generation. Certainly, an appropriate candidate for the great building considering the past of this man. Inventor of new sales methods and of course it’s translation into software and code and posting to the Internet as services for grand sales organizations. Why run a sales organization from the inside when it could be run from the outside? Questions of the times.
The bar was the same bar I had been at more than thirty years ago when I was the Marketing Director of the Berkeley Chamber of Commerce. Yes, I realize this is a strange-sounding title. But it’s true. I remember organizing an event with the chamber using this bar maybe thirty years ago. The place still had that attempt at a New England design look somewhat terribly out of place out here in Berkeley, California. I ordered a Pilsner from a local brewery and sipped on it as I looked out the grand windows of the bar over the harbor and the distant lights of San Francisco.
It was good to be back in the Bay Area. A place I have considered my home for so many years. What feeling would the area leave me with this time round? It was a question that seemed to maintain a low power buzz at a deep level of consciousness. How much did I miss this old “mistress” in many ways, to me and my life at a certain time?
——————- (Idea for Continuation of Story) ——————–
The father who has just arrived in his old stomping grounds of the Bay Area to visit his sons and his grandson. He spends a week with them and understands something new about love. And also, he understands something new about his old romance with the Bay Area. It has all changed so much. The areas he knew so well in the mid-70s when he first moved up to the Bay Area from Los Angeles, now all pretty much the same but having a run-down appearance to it. It seemed that things were simply deteriorating all over for the father as he returns to the Bay Area where he has lived for many years.
After getting married and living in Los Angeles until he finished law school, he and his first wife lived in Westwood. It was a return to the city he was born in and was nice in this respect. But after two years finishing UCLA and three years of law school at Loyola they headed north to San Francisco in the mid-70s.
He got a job with a small law firm down town and worked on some assignment based around the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. ASP as it was always referred to at the time. I was working for another rugby player like me. A person a mutual friend had introduced me to as we attempted to make the move to the Bay Area.
We got a flat right on the most famous park in the city, Mountain Lake Park. Where the Spanish first encamped in the entire city sometime around the late 1770s I think. We moved from the top of the hill in Westwood, near the UCLA campus, to this flat on a magical little lake bordering the Presidio in San Francisco.
I couldn’t believe the contrast between our place in LA and in San Francisco. We had moved to an amazing little area in the Avenues of San Francisco, a few miles west of downtown, miles of two story flats going west to the Pacific and then south all the way down to the big lake by Stones Town. We looked out from the living room window onto the park. I was into Chick Corea (early stuff of Return to Forever) at the time so his music was heard much against the window in the flat I looked out at the park through.
I think I felt a part of these emotions seeping into my present thoughts and mindset. I couldn’t help but think that coming out here to see my sons from my Midwestern state, to see them where they were born and I raised them, was such a good idea. Through all the marriages and divorces, they were always my first two children. I realized that week I felt something very special towards them
As everything in life. It was always there for me (him) to see. The changing nature of life. Yet I never tried facing it down. Looking at it directly. It always seemed a force too powerful to look at directly. Too powerful to confront one-on-one and or in some trickster form.
Always close, in front of one. Always visible. But nothing is really visible until one decides to truly see it. And see if in fact it even is an it.