This morning I dreamt I was hopping freight trains across the US with a group of people which included my high school English teacher, for some reason. The one who taught us about gerunds and things like that. Yesterday found me at an event sponsored by Toyota, in which half of the highway servicing Baltimore City was shut down for part of the day so people could ride bikes or longboards or razr scooters or rollerblades on it. Many people walked. Some ran. We imagined the whole time that “this was the way things are” and that gas prices - or similar - had forced most people but the super rich to abandon cars, completely shifting the paradigm of what a city is and how it works. Riding our bikes down there, we got to see such Baltimore landmarks up close and personal such as our very own tent city, down by St. Vincent’s Church (I think), and the ridiculous-looking Baltimore City Jail with oodles of barbed wire, and a giant sign advertising to all comers on the highway: “PUT DOWN THE GUN OR PICK A ROOM.”
I finished the first draft of part 1 of a graphic novel I’m working on with the Strategist. It takes place in the same futuristic post-apocalyptic police state world which I’ve been dreaming of for years, which is beginning to look as though it were coming true. The story is also set in basically the same universe as my novel, REPERMANENT, one in which giant AI’s vie for control of locked down surviving cities and pirates and privateers abound in a landscape riddled with despair and magic. Think Gandalf on a bicycle. I watched Johnny Mnemonic last night to be sure I wasn’t unconsciously ripping anything off, but it sucked. Our comic is going to be way better. I also want to watch Costner’s “The Postman”, because there is an echo or two of that world, though Tom Petty won’t - I don’t think - be appearing in our book.
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