Right before I left Lago Vista, I had a visual hallucination. This was the first and only one I ever had (to the best of my knowledge. I’m fairly self-vigilant, but – you. Never. Know. Until it happens again.).
Note: I’ve never been on any psychoactive meds because they all have a dry eye side effect; any more dry, and I’ll go totally blind.
It was dusk. My last day ever in Lago. I was taking one of my last walks around the campgrounds and lake near my home. I saw a woman. All in white. Kind of like a ghost.
Clear as day. Only for a short while. Then – poof! – gone. This experience stayed with me. Over time, it would become the speck of dust inside an oyster that becomes a pearl.
A black pearl.
Beverly McMillan was my realtor in Mississippi. When I’d driven over a month before to look at houses in the area, we talked a lot.
Her office was in Vicksburg, a little building next to her home. Spectacular view of the twin steel bridges going over the Mississippi River. Her house had been the scene of a murder, a Jewish heiress of the Levitz Furniture family. The body was never found. Blood everywhere. Still blood-soaked floorboards in the house. “Nobody else would buy it. We got it real cheap.” The FBI investigated. Not even the tin hat paranormal crowd could figure it out.
“All the houses in Vicksburg are haunted,” she told me.
Things got wooly before I even left Lago for Mississippi.
When I arrived in Port Gibson with Jaxx the cat (with the moving van full of our stuff a couple of hours behind – the movers were AMAZED at how much I had crammed into that tiny house – and lost money, too, had to rent a BIGGER truck), well I soon forget ALL about Lago Vista and Austin damn, Texas.
The closing attorney for the real estate deal had just been SHOT. Allen Burrell. DEAD. Age 53. Right in front of his office there in downtown Port Gibson where I was standing. Only a couple of days earlier . . .
Welcome to Mississippi.
You wanted grist for a good story? Well, we’re a-getting there. Real fast, because Mom left me the Family Bible. Like I said before, I’d researched our ancestors a good bit before I left Austin. Wrote a novella about Col. William N. Brown, called Deo Vindici. Along with Behold Leviathan, it was on my Texas X Files website.
And here I am. Port Gibson was part of the Vicksburg Campaign and sieges and dozens of skirmishes back then between the Yanks and Confederates. All sorts of historical events. Col. Brown was in the middle of it all, chasing down Bluecoats.
And here I am, chasing down – lady ghosts. Murders. Haunted bloody houses in Vicksburg, site of the largest assembly of Bluecoat forces in the whole Civil War. Bigger than Gettysburg, even.
Ulysses S. Grant landed not far from Port Gibson on his way to Vicksburg. Burned everything else to the ground. Not Port Gibson. “It’s too pretty to burn.” Lots of churches. Gorgeous oaks along the main drag. All gone now, chopped down to make way for a four-lane highway. Not too pretty to burn no more.
How’s that for progress?
I spent the next 12 months fixing up my new house. 206 China Street. Ripped the old carpet out. Painted all the rooms in different colors. Repaired sheet rock. Painted the exterior.
I found a bunch of old vintage Venetian blinds in the basement. Painted them. Put new rope inside. Hung them in the rooms. Gorgeous! Cleaned up the lawn and trees. Insulation in the attic.
The previous – the ORIGINAL owner had just died. Well into his 90s. He’d built the place out of red cedar trees cut off the lot it was built on. (Beautiful timbers in the attic.) The whole basement was chock full of junk. Well, not quite junk. He’d been a gunsmith. All his old tools were still there.
His wife had been the secretary at a military boarding school right down the road, Chamberlain Hunt Academy. They’d just recently remodeled all the school buildings (Ground Source Heat Pumps – God bless them). It was a Christian School now, for kids from broken homes. Drugs.
I interviewed for a teaching job there. Math. Science. They offered me the job. “Sorry, actually – I’m not quite ready for that.”
Turns out, Lee Harvey Oswald and his brothers had went to Chamberlain Hunt, where the owner’s wife had worked as school secretary. I found the records buried in the Warren Commission files. The owner of the house had been a – gunsmith!?
I later made my one trip back to Texas, to Galveston, house looking. Ran into a man from Dallas whose family had known Lee Harvey personally. Said Lee Harvey couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn with a shotgun, much less a moving target from the 6th floor at an acute angle through trees.
Soon thereafter hatched an idea for a screenplay, Deo Vindici. “God Will Vindicate,” an old post-Civil War saying in the Old South back then. Didn’t actually start writing the screenplay. A few more things had to transpire first – and I had to be inspired by a new house.
Otherwise, all that hard work for those 12 months was good therapy. I listed the house with Steve Purvis. Then had him take it off the market almost immediately. (Here comes another amazing “coincidence,” because your average house in Port Gibson takes YEARS to sell)
A lady named French, had seen the listing – made me an offer! Steve Purvis closed on the deal, and even did it for just 3%. (I sold it for what I bought it for.) My new house was at 3030 Rose Lane in Vicksburg, just a block off Confederate Avenue which defines the battle lines of the confrontation back then.
The day I sold the China Street house, I was walking around the neighborhood and chanced upon Wintergreen Cemetery. Earl Van Dorn is buried there, a famous Confederate general. His is “the only grave facing South. His beloved South.”
A few steps away I stumbled upon the grave of my ancestor, Colonel William N. Brown.
None of the salient facts coalesced into a real story yet, not fit for the silver screen as a script. But we’re getting there.
After I moved into the Rose Lane place. Boom! Everything crapped out. God bless Beverly McMillan for buying a home warranty to go with the house because I ended up having to get a new gas furnace, new air conditioning; and several new sinks. Electrical work, too. A good $15,000 in repairs.
The house was in bad shape otherwise, too. Eight months of painting, scraping, cleaning, and more painting – and it was okay. Finally, I had a little leisure time. I got back to writing.
By now there was a computer program that formatted the screenplay for you, Final Draft. So that helped. And I had all sorts of ideas for the story, “An avenging Confederate general terrorizes a small Southern town.”
The lady ghost was there, too., She materialized in the flesh as a Banshee, the Irish wraiths who warm the Druid faithful of impending death. (My Grandpa Howard was a Druid O’Cleary, the keepers-of-history storytellers).
Over time, I started several other scripts and worked on the five of them to develop my skills. The biopic about Texas was tough. The hardest of all dramas to write. But I was determined, and I kept at it.
After a few years, I got restless and started looking for somewhere else to move to. That’s when I went to Galveston and talked to the nice man about Lee Harvey Oswald. My Pop had a letter signed by JKF in his belongings, which led to another screenplay project. And so forth. More story ideas. . .
Hollywood LOVES “based on actual events” tales. Hey, I’m an engineer. That kind of creativity doesn’t come easily. Fortunately, life gave me all the creative drama I could ever ask for.
I tried several times studying my old grad school math. I still had all my class books and notes. I reviewed all the prep notes I’d created for the qualifying exams. Still remembered almost everything. . .
Including all the HATE and MALICE. Just couldn’t get past that part. Still can’t. Can’t even LOOK at a math equation without all that malice RUSHING back.
Can’t hardly even look at ANY of my old ENGINEERING tech.
You can well imagine my frustration. All my life I’d been enamored with engineering. Now it was out of reach. Worse! Surrounded by a moat of despair. Burning oil. Demons. Holy terrors.
Back to my go-to solution when all else fails: computers and the internet. There ensued a long series of websites. News websites. Political analysis. I was vicious. Would have made my old lady editor at The Daily Texan proud. Ripping the powers that be apart. Republicans. Democrats. Everybody. When one site failed, I packaged the best columns into a book and moved on.
A book on movie reviews. Political satire. Philosophy (think Nietzsche 2.0. . . “If you criticize one group you’re a bigot. If you criticize them all at once, you’re a natural philosopher.”)
Nobody escaped my ire.
Then, I created a small series of web pages (I was by this time using WordPress, which frees you of all the tedious HTML hand coding) on my old Celestial Mechanics research. Not any math, mind you. Just the illustrations.
My final dissertation had 150+ figures, illustrating ALL my ideas. (Very NICE figures, too – thanks to my old mechanical drafting skills.) I’d had all that C Mech tech online a few times already, but it never took ahold of folks. It was too complicated.
This time around I used basic psychology ideas to illustrate it. Three Bodies? Doh! Id, ego and superego.
Gravity? How about a close “fly by” of somebody you’re attracted to. On a close-approach trajectory. You’re captivated. You end up in orbit. Crashdown!
Men are from Mars. Women are from Venus.
Psychology was a natural for me. I’d had plenty of “experience.” The Army psych ward. Years of therapy with Dr. Parra at the VA Clinic in Austin. Talking about people all the time with Mom playing tennis.
Psychology had been my only defense against the Evil Empire. These days everybody calls it the Deep State. Back then it was kind of an illusion. A paranoia. Now? It’s a fact of life.
Bane of our existence.
My little psychology experiment trying to use psychology ideas to get folks interested in Celestial Mechanics?
I ended up with a whole new psychology model. Based on MATHEMATICS. Whoosh. What an absolutely revolutionary idea.
All sorts of Mars applications in there. I even matched the Three Act screenplay structure to all the elements of an interplanetary trajectory.
Fun!
Then came another book I called “Temporal Mechanics.” Temporal as in “not celestial” and the second half was psychology, temporal as in “between the temples.”
Later came two more books – both still using the same 150+ figures – one all psychology called The Zen of Gravity and another mixing religion into the psychology batter, called Dark Side of The Force.
I self-published all these books, by the way. Originally I used Lulu. Then Create Space. Then it was Kindle Direct Publishing (an Amazon.com operation), which purchased Create Space.
I became quite expert at InDesign and Adobe Illustrator. Computers? Software? Ahhh…. Relaxing . . .
Remember my NASA presentation for Dr. Z. “Find the time function and you’ll get your name lit up in lights.” I found it. Finally. In the most bizarre and unexpected way.
All that maneuvering with the C Mech figures, a bunch of new Fractal Levels based on psychology ideas – boom. Time! A simple function. Wrapped up in quantum entanglement.
A Fractal Theory of Everything I called that book.
There’s no other theory to explain quantum entanglement, only that Einstein thought it was possible. Nothing in Relativity. Astrophysics.
Stephen Hawking’s String Theory? Are you kidding? No part of his entire body of work (and the thousands of papers it spawned) has ever been proved. There’s zero physical proof. In fact, there’s an axiom of String Theory that says it cannot be proven with physical evidence.
Isn’t that the definition of mental masturbation?
And yet, ask any scientist, and they think Hawkings deserves the Nobel Prize. And these bastards killed Celestial Mechanics? Which is the complete opposite: based 100% on fact. On. Hard. Core. Mathematics.
Is the scientific community INSANE or what?
You look into Alice in Wonderland’s mirror at the end of Oz’s Yellow Brick Road and what do you see? Me! Looking back at you.
My old Unified Field Theory? It’s in there. One level of Fractal Theory among fifty. Hardly a footnote. Yawn. I moved on.
All this tech meandering unfroze the gears in my brain a little. I slapped together all my old energy tips from “BTU Bill’s” radio show. Bought a bunch of new books. Write them all up in, “1001 Energy Tips,” with lots of new, fun illustrations.
I paid Dorrance Books ten grand to publish it for me. I made the mistake of writing in the author’s blurb that I was schizophrenic.
Bad mistake. REAL bad!
Their page proofs came back with literally thousands of grammar and typo mistakes. (MANY of which were theirs, not mine.) Their formatting had hundreds more glaring mistakes. I corrected everything and sent it back. They sent me the new proofs. Maybe HALF their mistakes had been fixed.
Sorry, Charlie – no more corrections. Not unless you pay a tidy sum.
They published the book. It was a horror. One example: I had written “professional engineer” and corrected it to read Professional Engineer. The final page proofs read “Pprofessional Eengineer.”
I ended up using InDesign and Adobe Illustrator to typeset the damn book myself. Published it with Kindle Direct Publishing. Then Ingram Spark. Barnes and Noble. A dozen ebook platforms. Lulu.
I spent $5000 on marketing: postcards to every bookstore coast to coast. Magazine adds. Several magazine articles. Lined one room downstairs with carpet pad (walls, ceiling) to create a wonderful sound studio. Bought all the tech (microphones, mixer, even a setup for a video blog – this was in the middle of the pandemic.
I was ready for video interviews, too. Even had a teleprompter rig and a giant monitor to read off).
I created a podcast just like my “BTU Bill’s Energy Tips” 30-second radio spots. It was on all the podcast channels.
I created a GIANT new website. Wrote several new columns each day on new energy-saving ideas. Analyzing all the global warming “fixes” out there. Lots of visitors. Spent twelve months night and day promoting that damn book.
Everybody else in America despised the $5 a gallon gas that was happening at this time. Not me! I was finally at the right place at right time.
Wahoo! This me, Bill – on the podium with a medal at last.
Wrong. Zero sales. Z. E. R. O.
(Regan said she loved her copy. Lie. I know. Because not one single, solitary paperback copy was sold at ANY outlet.)
It’s too bad. I paid for an official review by Reader’s Choice. The analyst loved the book! “Most interesting, well-written energy conservation book I’ve read. It left me with hope.” Gave it their top rating, five stars.
Yeah. Gimme a little of that hope, will ‘ya?
But, honestly. I’ve concluded that people don’t want energy conservation, especially the younger generations. They want it mixed in with the DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) agenda being pushed aggressively on Wall Street.
That is, F the environment if we can’t force-feed the entire trans agenda on the world. (Which is a real shame, because women lose out in their million-year-old campaign for equal rights.) Well, the natural world loses out too, of course, but nobody cares about that part.
I’d given copies to the local paper (no comments). To the HVAC outfit in town (ditto). Just this past summer they took 6 weeks to repair my AC – hottest summer ever!
Had a custom “skin” put on my Mini, advertising the book. Signs all over town (like realtors use). Notices to ALL the local libraries and bookstores (Dorrance did that part – $1000 worth of advertising, including ads at Amazon).
Not only did my book make zero sales. Same with the Dorrance edition. Thank you for sending me the royalty statements. Now I know what it’s like when you rub a puppy’s nose in his pee when he leaks on the kitchen rug.
I shut down my operation. Just like always before, I bundled up all my website columns into a new book, Going Green. Then got back to my screenplays.
Americans and their conspicuous consumption.
Why do I even try?
The End