Series 1957 B

Know what that is?

It's the secret to life!

... kinda...

I'll explain in a moment. But first, what lead me to it.

Okay, so my baby's computer got sickers and I haven't been able to spend time with her this week.

Which sucks... But also works out well for me. 'Casue when I have a choice, I'm spending every waking moment in SL with her. But when I DON'T have that option...

...I get bored...

...and when I get bored....

I get CREATIVE. (I daresay that most, if not all, of my creativey has been borne of boredom. And with every passing year I get better and relieving myself of the "curse" or boredom... with the VERY pisitive upshot that I become a more creative person.)

And lately I've been obsessed with questions of why I haven't written a horror screenplay that I am proud of yet.

Last night I went through my impressive library of horro flicks, looking for some inspiration, and I could find none.

Then I noticed my comic book adaptation of I AM LEGEND by Richard Matheson -- one of the ALL-TIME CLASSIC horror novels EVER WRITTEN. EVER!!! (This book has probably influenced every horror writer who has ever forced you to leave your lights on at night. Most of them will admit it outright, the youngers ones might not even realize it because they were influenced by the ones that admit to having been influenced by Matheson and that book specifically.)

And I could never finish it.

The novel, I mean. It was written in 1954, and I'm a slow reader, so nothing short of Michael Crichton's or Douglas Adams's prose can hold my attention for an entire novel. Most writers, including Matheson, tend to cloak the action and ideas of their stories in detail description. Very artistic and clever, but I'm neither artistic nor clever. I like the ideas and actions of a story to be laid bare before me, right there for me to experience and move on to the next one. (I'm a screenwriter... That's how we do it. It's not pretty, I'm not proud of it, it's just a fact.)

So, I'm SO NOT saying that Matheson isn't a good writer... I'm saying I'm a SUCKY reader. Page-for-page I read A LOT more non-fiction than fiction.

And Matheson's work is written in that "novelist" fashion. So it's really hard for me to really get into. (However, when someone else does the parsing for me, translating his work into pictures and actions -- like the directors of the TWILIGHT ZONE episodes he's written, or the many movies he's written -- I ALL OVER IT!!! I love his ideas and his take on Life and on people and on the world we live in!!! He truly is a GREAT WRITER! But when I'm reading detail-laiden prose my attention usually wanders before I can explore the symbolic depths of the details, so much of the story is lost on me.) (I'm not half as literate as my friends and collaborators will tell you I am.)

So blah...

I discovered that Steve Niles and Elman Brown had adapted I AM LEGEND into a comic book series, which was a small run, but sold well enough to justify repeated reprintings as a graphic novel!!!

YAY!

Right up my alley! (Short of being adapted into a movie. But Vincent Price starred in the one adaptation that Matheson wrote the screenplay for called LAST MAN ON EARTH and it was pretty bad. Not because of the writing, but because of the production. OMEGA MAN is supposed to be a really good adaptation of it, but Matheson didn't write the screenplay, and there were several story elements that were changed... So I'll wait to see it.) (Incidentally, I just noticed on IMDb.com that another adaptaion is slated for 2007 release... Maybe someone will finally get the movie right?)

One of the things I noted from the interview with Steve Niles was that he left most of Matheson's text in tact, adding nothing and extracting very little. So this comic book adaptation would be even closer to reading the novel than usual!.

And when I bought the book and started reading it, I found that that is very much the case. Un fortunately for me at the time.

See, one of the reasons I can't read deatil-cloaked prose is bacuase my own imagination gets ahold of those details and runs off and does it's own things. The physical result of my mind running of with a wealth of discription is that my body has nothing to do and simply shuts down. I fall asleep. Reading description-heavy prose often puts me to sleep.

Not reliably, mind you. If I WANT to go to sleep, and to that end begin reading some description-heavy prose, I find myself mining the text and becoming excited and reading 12 more chapters.

So it's not even useful as a cure for insomnia :(

But if I want to digest a story and begin reading it, and it's the typical detail-/description-heavy style of prose that authors LOVE to write, then I'll fall asleep. And each time that happens, it takes me longer and longer to pick up the book again.

So I got, like, 9 chapters into the comic book version of I AM LEGEND and put it down for several months.

But last night, after my previous blog entry, I went through my horror dvd collection looking for some inspiration to the stroy-structure problems of my current screenplay (not the one I'm working on with Brian, but the one he's working on with me) and I could find NOTHING that could help me.

Then I spotted my graphic novel of I AM LEGEND...

So I picked it up, read a chapter, almost fell alseep, but I wanted to read another chapter, so I did, felt a little less sleepy this time... After a couple more chapters I was finally too tired to stay awake. BUT... I also recognized the narrative as very close to where I had left off in the actual novel!

I was catching up to myself!

I was 60 pages away from finishing the novel when I put it down! So if I kept this up, I might actually FINALLY finish this novel that has inspired so many horror writers before me!!!

Today I read a few more chapters -- feel not drowsy at all! -- and got curious: Where exactly DID I leave off on the novel?

I pulled out my reprint of I AM LEGEND and found the place... Marked by a 1957 $1 Silver Certificate!

I forgot how I had gotten it, but I remember being amused by how different this dollar bill was from any I had known in my lifetime. Plus, the fact that it was printed just 3 years after the novel was published (and 2 years before THE TWILIGHT ZONE would hit the air and introduce Matheson's work to many, many generations of sci-fi/horror fans) seemed amusing. So I had replaced whatever bookmark I was using with this dollar bill that I now had no interest in spending.

I pulled it out and showed it to Brian, who remembered me showing it to him before, but was still amused to see it now. He meantioned a website that tracks where a dollar bill has been, but it doesn't track before 1963.

So I did some Googling, which turned up the Illuminati type stuff I already knew.

Then I remembered my good, good friend Wikipedia which provided me with a wealth of info!

Now, here's where the "secret to life" stuff comes into play:

I was disappointed that I wasn't able to track the bill. Once Brian put that idea into my head it really took hold. I had the idea of simply tracking down the date, 1957, and seeing what interesting things had happened that year (for instance, I'm failry certain that when that bill was minted JACK BENNY and THE ADVENTURED OF SUPERMAN were still popular shows on the radio, a fact which linked me to a portion of the past before my birth by way of this single object). But after Brian suggested that I might be able to track how the bill had spent the last 49 years, I was way-curious!!!

Still, I wanted to know more, so I told myself that maybe this bill was meant to simply tell me whatever it could tell me, instead of the specific questions I asked of it.

I ended up learning about the movement of the US Treasury from the bi-metalic standard to the gold standard, and the uproar that caused, which lead to the creation of Silver Certificates.

Then after that, I was pretty much sated. I can still always go back and look up the year 1957 and see what more the bill can tell me -- that I would never have known otherwise -- but the bill had amused and informed me plenty for tonight.

And that sparked off the idea that the information this bill can tell me is similar to all money, it that it's worth is really what you can get for it. For instance, I believe I remember trying to spend this particular bill when I first got it, but the clerk refused to take it because he doubted its authenticity (since it looks so much different from what currnt $1 bills look like). So in that case, the bill was worth nothing. However, there might be a collector somewhere that has all the Silver Certificates minted except a Series 1957 B... In which case the bill might be worth a couple hundred dollars to him.

But our money is no longer backed by gold or silver... It's backed by "The US Economy". Which means, essentially, that it has worht because just about everyone on the planet agrees it has worth.

Then -- because I'm like this -- I realized that that is not at all dissimilar to our experience as human beings!!! Every second of every day has exactly as much worht to us as we GET OUT OF IT! You could stub your toe and have the value of your life decrease in those moments of intense pain, but someone going through an emotional trauma could stub their toe and curse and shout and then be happy for those moments when they weren't thinking of the trauma, to have their minds actually taken away from the far worse and far less temperary pain they're dealing with.

I know, I'm getting all esoteric again.

But that's me... That's what gives my life richness and value. Just about any given experience holds for me far more wealth than the experience itself. Hell, if nothing else the experience might give me a scene for a story! :D

Or... maybe just something to blog about ;P