Pilot's Log

LINKED because getting EMBED is so rude sometimes.

Cyndi Lauper, "Boy Blue"

This song inspired a character in my (now in suspended animation) story Rayome. In the first storyline, the title character, a pre-teen girl, has to house-sit a space station that generations before had been a thriving city, but is now abandoned. Boy Blue is a ghost who haunts the station...but Rayome finds that not only is he NOT the monster everybody had claimed he was, but they had the power to grant each other a wish--a wish they SHARED.

Hey.

Led Zepplin's "Stairway to Heaven". Yes, if you're a regular listener to a classic rock radio station, you hear it every day. If you collect MP3 files you might even have it more than one place.

I heard it yesterday in my car while I was driving into town. And that brought to mind an episode of my story Rayome which the song inspired. Let me tell you about it...

Rayome is mainly set aboard a starship in a far future resembling Star Trek and/or Babylon 5. In the episode in question, the ship just made a jump into hyperspace--and the Captain has been hit with a psychlogical hazard called "space lace", while she's cybernetically plugged into the ship's navigation hardware! The usual fail-safes have come undone, and so almost everybody on the whole ship has just been knocked unconscious...and they all begin sharing a wondrous dream. This dream slowly becomes a nightmare by the time the song gets to "your stairway lies on the whispering winds"--the May Queen (the Captain) is about to be burned at the stake, the torches set the funeral pyre alight--

And back at reality, the only person who is AWAKE (Rayome's boyfriend Camr) frantically finds out what's happening and realizes the ship is a runaway. He gets to the Bridge...but since he's never been there before he doesn't know what to do to stop the ship. But he has an idea--he wires an electric guitar into the Captain's circuits! By playing a few choice riffs, he wakes her up--and then she wakes everybody else up--and they succeed in bringing the ship back under control in the nick of time.

I'd come up with the idea a dozen years ago, but this is the first time I've shared it with anybody. So there it is.

FP (who acknowledges his debt to Page and Plant)

Hey.

I caught the tail-end of POV tonight...
http://www.pbs.org/pov/pov2005/intherealms
...about the life of Henry Darger, who spend the vast majority of his life creating a huge allegorical supernovel--which only one man got a chance to read in Henry's lifetime.

My dad saw the whole program and the first word he used to describe it was "weird". But from what I had seen of the program and from my own experiences, I fear becoming another Darger.

You see, I had been working on something of a similar vein...a science-fiction story named after its heroine: Rayome. ( Read more... ) I hope I don't have to wait the rest of my own life...or die before she lives.

FP