Death Rides In On a White Horse — Will James

THE EMPEROR'S NEW CLOTHES (MEMOIR & FABLE) -- I chose this fable because I identified with the child in the story (who knows something is wrong). I was deeply disillusioned. My beautiful storybook parents had become unraveled by a monster, by alcoholism. My dad would drink and mother would fly into a rage. Often at night throughout my early childhood, I would be awakened not by a nightmare but by my parents, by their cries and curses, by the war between them. My beautiful parents were unrecognizable from the ones I knew in the daytime. The United States had also become unraveled by war, by the war in Vietnam. I knew this, too.



WHITE NIGHTS (NOVELLA) -- Robert Rouan is a kind of Don Quixote with a heroin habit. Strung out and desperate for drugs, Rouan stabs a drug dealer in a scuffle in the North of Paris. He is then locked up in the Santé, an old prison. After rumors spread that Rouan is a spy, he is brutally beaten and falls into a deep coma. Decades later, Rouan awakens to an altered and damaged world, marred by wars and the collapse of the U.S. Government. What is left of America is under quarantine: where life is controlled by monolithic corporations and its inhabitants live in misery.



THE BLUE POET (SCREENPLAY) -- Haunted by the ghosts of the past, a young musician turns to drugs. Set in the mid seventies (except for flashbacks from the Kennedy era), and in the spirit of REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE and ORDINARY PEOPLE, THE BLUE POET looks into the heart of a young man haunted by both the Kennedy assassination and the death of his own father in a drunken car crash.



PETER PAN, UFOs & THE MARLBORO MAN (SHORT STORY)



DEATH RIDES IN ON A WHITE HORSE



An electric eye opens. It watches us while we sleep.

It opens doors and windows and lets the others in.



We hear them, their voices echoing throughout the house.

We can't quite understand what it is they are saying.



A one eyed fat man reads from a book of tarot cards

and a crystal ball.



He looks into the meaning of things.

He sees the towers fall.



He sees flashes of a burning world.

The fool remains but no one is laughing.



Death rides in on a white horse.

The talking heads have all gone home.



Satellites bounce signals into outer space.

Who can hear us? Who will save us from ourselves?





REGARDING ROGER -- the death of my childhood friend.