I'm a scene away from plot point two in my script. God, I've been dreading writing this all weekend. Talk about fear of the unknown. This is the scene where my character has the big blow out with his dad and has to get through years of anger and make peace with him before I kill the father character off the next day. God, this is the conversation I wish I had in 1992 with my dad and I don't know how to write because I never had it.

I'm afraid it will turn into one big emotional crapshoot with me as the victim. This is the part of art that scares me, when you have to lay your soul bare and out there for others to see. It's what stopped me from acting. I just couldn't get to the point where I could reveal myself on stage like that. I got past this point in my collage artwork but it took alot out of me to do that. I don't know if I can do this in my writing. I know I've done it before, but each time I've had to face this point, I freak.

I keep telling myself it's not too bad and that once you're through it, your through it. And that it's not even me speaking, it's some baseball player character guy I made up, so it's not even my story, it's really his story.

I feel like that character in Shakespeare in Love, who keeps saying "it all works out, it always does, not quite sure how, but it always works out."

I added two extra scenes and I was upset because I over my scene limit, but then I remembered and I had made four scenes out of two when they could really be condensed into two. Actually, there could two more scenes that I could combine into two, but I think I'll wait unitl I really need to do it. I was so paniced, but it all worked out. It always does. Never mind that my script is turning into a bad lifetime movie of the week and that my screenwriting classmates will just hate the shit out of it. This is the hardest project I've ever done in my life. It's so close to home, too close.

Well, I guess the only to the other side is through it, I guess. I normally would say to go around it, but in writing, you have to go through it, you can't go around. At least, I haven't found a way to do that yet. Maybe someday.

Meanwhile that Vertical Horizon song keeps playing on my computer to give me inspiration to write this emotional plot point two. It's fiction though, I have to remember it's fiction and I can lie as much as I want. It's fiction.

I went to the new age expo yesterday just to see if I was up on all the latest developments in health, skin care and of course new age woo woo. There was nothing there I didn't already know about except a japanese massage technique called Shindo. I'll have to research shindo and find out what it is. They even had a booth for thai massage, a technique that I've been interested in exploring.

I went with a friend of mine and we even snuck into a John Gray lecture. John Gray of Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus fame. We would have to pay $20 to see him but we snuck in at the last minute and participated in an angel healing with him.

It was so funny to see John Gray and other notable new age bookwriters walking around the fair talking to people. They look so different in person than they do in their TV specials or in their headshots for their books.

John Gray is a trip. He's definitely your typical new age guy woo woo guy with the way he talks and even his body shape. He's very short and thin. He was wearing a dark pink silk shirt and white pants; definitely the new age guy uniform.

There wasn't as much free stuff this year as there was last year and there were alot of groups that were at prvevious fairs in the past, but weren't there this year. There was a whole row upstair for people giving massages and healing and fortune telling. Their presence was new. I don't remember them from last year. They all seemed to have brisk business though, so there must be a need for them.

The new age expo was like a carnival for adults, where if you had lots of money you had a good time. For $15, you get a picture of your auras via some kind of polaroid camera, which you can proudly wear pinned to you for all the world to see. You can get your face painted, your palsm red, you chakras healed, your fortune told over and over again, in case you didn't like what one said, you can always get a second opinion, a third and a fourth, however many you like, because you know somewhere out there, there's the right fortune, the right future for you.

The food booth wasn't that that interesting except they had a raw food place and puerto rican place. They had fried bananas and I love fried b'nans so I had to eat Puerto Rican food. I haven't had good puerto rican food since my vacation to Miami and South Beach. I almost want to go back to South Beach so I can go eat puerto rican and cuban food. They serve you fried bananas at every meal. South Beach is more european than american. The girls sunbathe topless at the beach. The beaches at South Beach are really nice. It's all white sand and you can walk a long way and look at the South Beach skyline with it hotels and art deco feel.

My friend and I were suppose to go to the new age hoe down at 9 pm, but we decided we'd had enough. Besides, we didn't see many guys we'd even want to talk to, let alone dance with there.

But it's nice to know, we both thought on the way home, that we haven't missed anything and we have everything we need at home.

God, I've been thinking when did my Holocaust fascination start and I have to blame those ultra progressive hippie people who taught at my high school. We learned everything about the mass murder and torture of people. First how the American indians were wiped out, then how the Hawaiian people got wiped out, then slavery before the civil war, then how the Japanese were interned during World War 2, then the civil rights movement and Jim Crow laws in the South, then the Holocaust, then the killings happening in South America and my last high school memory, those pits of bodies they discovered in Rwanda, I think or some african country and then of course apartheid in South Africa. Oh yeah, how could I forget, of course the biggest hippie issue of them all, The Vietnam War.

I read my first holocaust book at age 16 and there were no jewish people in my high school. It was what we had to read in history or was it English class. Then I went to hippie liberal college and it was more of the same except this time I was going to school with kids whose grandparents or relatives had numbers tatooed on their skin and were survivors of the Jewish death camps. And I got to hear all about that. I even took courses on the Holocaust because my college offered them at the time and even consider taking Yiddish just to feed my holocaust obsession. Alas, no yiddish but 2 years of russian just in case I wanted to discuss the russian jewish pogroms with someone.

What strange paths your life takes you on sometimes. I guess all this knowledge will come in handy when I write my Elf Girl Chronicles, but who knew at the time.

I'm in a melancholy mood tonight so I'm listening to a Bobby Caldwell cd, which has got sickie love songs like Heart of Mine and Next Time (I Fall). I heard a song of his on the way to work this morning and now I have to play his music.

I wouldn't have known about him at all, except I saw at one of those Embarcadero concerts and much to my surprise, I sort of fell in love with his music. He's a blondie guy who sounds like's black, but he's not as disgusting as Michael Bolton and that fuzzy icky hair of his. Boz Scaggs covered a lot of Caldwell's song and I like him too.

Can you believe this is the kind of music I listened to in high school? Mellow smooth R&B. For some reason, this kind of music fits very well when you live in the tropics. It's lazy and mellow and dreamy and the kind of music you want to hear when you're staring out at the ocean late at night over one too many cocktails. I guess the girl can move away from the Islands but you can never quite get the island stuff out of the girl.

I've been making notes on the Elf People curse and the only thing I can relate it to is the Jewish Holocaust. No wonder I was so fasicnated by the Holocaust and all the stories. The Nazis tried to destroy the jewish people and their culture, enslaving them, separating the children from the adults and sending them to separate camps, separating them from their families, taking away first their right to own property and then to have jobs and then in the end, in their "Final Solution" killing them and burning away their bodies as evidence.

Just when I write this, it makes me cry, and I'm not even jewish. Maybe as someone who had an incarnation where my people were completely destroyed, I totally relate. I don't know.

I think I will model the destruction of the elf people with what happened during the Holocaust. I guess I should be glad that I've read a ton of books on the Holocaust and even went through a period where I wrote nothing by Holocaust poetry. I haven't looked at those poems in years. I think I was in my dark period when I wrote them, when thoughts of slashing my wrists or overdosing on those 40 hits of pharmaceutical speed I carried with me whereever I went used to flood my brain regulary like the river in a tropical country during the rainy season, only my rainy season was never ending.

I should be writing my screenplay tonight. I have 24 pages due on Monday, but I have been incredibly lazy all week. Actually I was out Tuesday, but I could have written on Wednesday or Thursday. Instead I read, farted around, indulged in my sick obsession with playing solitaire. It's like I'm into the frustration of never winning. It mirrors my life right now.

I don't know if I can go back and read my holocaust poetry, nor do I know if I can reread the holocaust literature. I end up crying as I read and it takes forever to read anything.

I have been thinking alot about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, but it is hard to think rationally about it when I spent years of my life reading about the jewish holocaust. It makes me wonder if it's happening all over again, except in a very subtle way. There are already reports of anti-semitic attacks in Europe. The press, who can believe them. Chris Matthews from Hard Ball said that Ehud Barak told him that Arafat has lights but he doesn't turn them on because he wants the press and world sympathy. How you can believe in the Palestinian cause when its leader has to resort to trickery like that? If what the Palestinians say is true, then why do they resort to scuh tactics? Where are the hundreds of body in Jenin? I don't believe they even exist. I believe the press is being fooled or more cynically, they are letting themselves be fooled.

And when I hear about this sort of stuff going on, the holocaust pictures and stories flood through my mind and it freaks me out and I cannot help but support the Israeli cause. Those who forget the past are bound to exprerience or repeat it. And I cannot forget the Holocaust. Nor do I suspect can many of the Israelis. Most of the people who survived the Holocaust are dead now but their stories and their memories live on and they do not let us forget.