Going to Reseda to Die*

In 1962, I was in the third grade.  We lived in south Denver.  With the advent of the Cuban Missile Crisis, we started having Civil Defense Drills as well as the usual Fire Drills at school.  The headquarters of the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) was 80 miles south of my house/school.  This was the first time I thought about dying.

At the age of seventeen, I decided I wouldn't live to be thirty.  That sooner or later, a full scale nuclear exchange between the Soviet Union and the United States would occur.  When hadn't a weapon been used by one side or the other.  I planned to go up on the roof and watch.

I lived in Austin in 1976 and I was "going" to the University of Texas.  (I say "going" because what I was actually doing was writing, playing bridge, and smoking pot.)  I started writing a screenplay about "The Bomb."  It was my second attempt at a screenplay.  The first was a western about the sheriff who investigated and caught Alferd (not a typo) Packer.

I struggled with this second screenplay.  The plot was about a family who goes into their bomb shelter and a nuclear war happens.  The war opens a hole in the side of their shelter and through the hole steps what appear to be cave humans.  A family who had survived the war and were living in the world after.

Seemed a little artificial.

I got married and my wife got pregnant, and being a pothead with no skills and no degree, I joined the Air Force.

In the Air Force, I was in charge of an aerospace vehicle (jet airplane) that was part of our great nations nuclear triad.  At the end of every exercise (read war games,) we loaded my aircraft and all the other aircraft in my squadron that could still fly, with a dummy nuclear bomb and flew a mission to drop that bomb.

In a concrete revetment in Germany, during an exercise, we loaded a live nuclear bomb on my aircraft...

And in 2016, despite the Iranians and the North Koreans, all that seemed far in the past.

I'm still writing that screenplay, now a play.

But I am struggling to get a grip on it.  Every start seems a little artificial.

Once more unto the breach, dear friends.

*Screenwriters Blues - Soul Coughing