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In a conversation I recently had on-line about an article regarding citizens being tracked by GPS, the subject of privacy came up. Okay, I did what I often accuse others of doing and jumped to a reaction before I’d read the article.  The article was actually a serious look at an opinion by certain judges that it was all right for a governmental agent to sneak up to a person’s car that was in his own driveway and place a GPS device underneath it in order to track all his movements. Without going into details, I think this opinion is slightly abhorrent.

This post is not about that.  It’s about what I thought the article was about before I read it.  It’s about an expectation of personal privacy, especially on-line.  Before I get too much further, I should state that if you Google me, you’ll see that I’m all over the Internet.  You can’t get rid of me.  Go ahead, Google me.  I’ll wait. [Click here to Google Geoff.]

I often hear people get really, really outraged when they discover that some fact about them can or could be accessed by someone or anyone in some way.  “How can people be complacent?  How can we let this happen!?!” I hear them shout, shaking with indignation and righteous offense.  I hear people complain about how much information “they” are storing about you.  When we learn that Facebook is Gasp! telling advertisers our likes and dislikes, we’re stunned.  And yet we use those store “Club Cards” to get discounts on every day purchases.  What do you think Ralph’s market does every time you swipe that card?  It tells a database somewhere what you just bought so it can spit targeted coupons at you.  I see no evil in that.  And sometimes I even use the coupons.

I’ve thought a lot about this over the years. My conclusion has been, “Actually, what does it matter?” I’m not complacent, I just don’t care. When everything we do, think or say is already on the intenets for everyone to see, there is so much information available no organization could ever possibly parse it all. (Think about the relatively small amount of information we had before 9/11 that no one had bothered to look at, most of which has STILL not been gone through.)  Yes, I’d rather you didn’t know that, occasionally, I watch Xtube, but what the hell.

And, yes, any information collected could be accessed by the government.  Which is okay when it’s our people in charge, but what about when their people are in charge?  You know their people won’t hesitate to look you up and pull you in front of the court of public opinion because you read either the Communist Manifesto or Mein Kamf or Henry Miller in college. (I haven’t read any of them, by the way, in case you’re keeping tabs on me.  Well, a chapter or two of Miller.)

The only way to not have everything you do, think or say be accessible to anyone who wants it is to go off the grid. I’m not willing to do that, so I’m at peace with everyone being able to know everything they care to about me. If I don’t want the satellite to know where I’m going, I won’t have a GPS. (Actually, I don’t have one, either in my phone or my car, but not for that reason. Just haven’t gotten around to get a phone or car smart enough.)

We love to be outraged by it all, but if we want to be “on-line” in whatever capacity we do want it, we have to know that there is no possible way to still say we have any real right to privacy, which is kind of a strange concept in any case.

The whole idea of privacy as a right is a very recent one in human history.  It’s even recent in American human history.  It started, like much in American philosophy, as the rights of propertied men and those particular individuals are still afforded more of a “right” to privacy than the rest of us poor slobs.  (Poor slobs just being an expression.  I don’t mean to imply that you have less money or are more messy than the average individual.)  It’s not even really a part of our constitution, although in the 14th amendment it does say, “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized…”  which goes to the heart of the original article (the one I hadn’t read when I started going off all half-cocked about privacy in the first place).  That isn’t, however, really about privacy, per se.

We often don’t even know what we’re talking about when we talk about privacy.  Some people equate it with a right to liberty, which is also a relatively new idea.  Some think of it as the right to be left alone.  Some simply think of it as the right to not have the masses of humanity know they read porn and beat their dog.  Or their children.  Or themselves.

Get used to it. What you do, think or say can and will end up in some database somewhere. There’s no point in outrage.  If you put your name into the Google search engine and anything comes up, no matter how many pages deep, it’s already too late for you.  Get used to it or live by candle light.

Carry on.

_______________________________
Geoff Hoff is co-author of the best selling satirical novel Weeping Willow: Welcome to River Bend

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• Court allows agents to secretly put GPS trackers on cars (cnn.com)

This morning at about eleven am, while composing a Tweet (yes, I Tweet.  Don’t you?) to a fellow writer, the power went off.  At first I thought it must be the whole building, so I sat for a few moments listening for any of my neighbors who might be coming out to see what was up.  No one seemed to be coming out.  Then I remembered the Edison bill.  Damn.

My phones are Internet based, so, without the modem and router, I couldn’t call out.  My cell phone is old, needs a new battery, so I knew it would die before I actually reached someone to pay the bill, so I went out to my car, plugged the phone into the cigarette lighter adapter and called.  They said the lights would be on in between three and six ours.

I spend my life at the computer.  I spend my life on the Internet.  It is where most of my business is conducted, most of my socializing is at least initiated, most of my creativity happens and most of my communication with the world takes place.  The soft hum of the hard drive and fans in the computer is a constant companion, so much so that, like an old lover, I have become oblivious to it’s presence.  It was suddenly very quiet.  Even with the street noises, and I live on a major boulevard with much traffic, it was quiet.

After calling Steve (the business/writing partner, for those of you who don’t keep up) to let him know not to come in, and to call the answering service occasionally, I picked up a book and started reading.  The blinds were open, as was the front door, and the light was bright and natural, riding in on a cool spring breeze.  At first I felt guilty.  Not, as you might expect, because of the “not paying the bill” thing.  I felt guilty because I wasn’t working.  I wasn’t writing.  I wasn’t doing things that would bring in money.

After a small while, I realized that the guilt was pointless, that I might as well decide to take advantage of the day.  Several pages into the book that has been long wanting to be read, (one by Orson Scott Card, one of my favorites SF authors) I decided to move out to the chair on my front stoop.  I actually finished the book.  I took in the sky.  I listened to the street noises.  I chatted with my neighbors, something I used to do a lot but hadn’t seemed to find the time for, lately.  I finished another (very short) book, and realized it was getting dark and cold so I came inside to reflect on the day.  I don’t often take an entire day off.  Even when I decide to take the day off, I check my email several times, jot notes, surf the web.  I’m never, it seems, idle or contemplative for any sustained length of time.

Being forced to simply not go on the computer, being forced to not spin my wheels, to sit, read and think, was an amazing experience.  No one needed my attention that quickly, nothing needed to get done, tasks that were there in the morning would still be there tomorrow morning and no one was injured or died because I didn’t get to them.  At about nine pm the power finally came back on.  It was a wholly wonderful day.

So, of course, as soon as the power was back on, I turned on the computer and wrote a blog about it.

_______________________________
Geoff Hoff is co-author of the best selling satirical novel Weeping Willow: Welcome to River Bend

(The following essay is a guest post written by my father, poet Rowell S. Hoff, expanding on a theme from a poem he wrote a few years ago.  I have included the poem at the end. -Geoff Hoff)

We

The English pronoun we is difficult.

Of course it is not difficult when it refers to the person speaking and the person or persons he or she is addressing. The “royal we,” the “journalist’s we” and the “nurse’s we” (“How are we today?”) are also fairly clear, although odd: they simply mean, in the first two instances, “I,” and in the third, “you.”

But we is often used to refer to an undefined and undefinable mass of persons that includes the person speaking or writing, and this can be difficult to clear up. This usage often appears to refer to all the people of every station in a given country or organization, many or most of whom could not conceivably take an active part in the actions being suggested, as in “We must improve our health care system.” It might be called the “polemic we.”

The polemic we is frequently used in scolding. The child utters a forbidden word at table and the father says, “We don’t say that!” Here, we apparently refers either to the family or to members of a certain class. Taken in its literal sense, the sentence is evidently untrue, for a member of the family has in fact just said the word. Nevertheless, the usage may be justifiable as a concise statement of a principle. Such philosophical or hortatory usage seems reasonable so long as the extension of the pronoun is clear, that is, so long as it is known to whom we refers.

Nevertheless, care is needed. Something possibly true of some of those addressed may not be true of all of them. An example, very often followed by a clause beginning with “but” or “however,” is “We are a peace-loving people,” a sentence that has with minor variations been pronounced by John F. Kennedy, Tony Blair, George W. Bush, and who knows how many English-speaking Presidents, Prime Ministers, Senators, Congressmen, Members of Parliament, Lords, preachers, journalists, etc.

Use of the polemic we often occasions a descent into simple falsehood. A popular example of this is the phrase “We hold these truths to be self-evident” in the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence of the United States, followed by a series of things that the “we” referred to were alleged to believe, for example, “that all men are created equal,” having “…certain inalienable rights,” etc. This was, in fact, a lie; the signers of the document, many of them slave-holders or involved in the procurement and sale of slaves, all of them leaders in systematically taking over vast areas of North America from its inhabitants by violence and guile, could not, any of them, have believed either that all men are created equal or that they have inalienable rights beyond the right to die. In this case the extension of the pronoun “we” went well beyond the persons who signed the document, for the title line proclaims that it is “The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America.”

We need to think about these things.

Who?

Doggerel About Who Is We

Here is a question: Who is we?
For pundits, kings and CEOs,
we is I and us is me.
The nurse’s friendly we is you,
her How are we today? untrue.

Problematickest of all
is the we that people use to call
those people things like
nigger! honky! hunky! wog!
hun! gook! limey! frog!
jap! gringo! running dog!
kafir! bitch! pig! flic!
dago! polack! raghead! spic!
redneck! foreign devil! nerd!
papist! kike! fag! dyke!

People have a hateful word
for people people do not like,
believing that always, come what may,
“our we” is better than their they.

But the problem’s not so hard to resolve,
so long as the human heart can evolve
to the point where the finally human mind
is in love with the oneness of mankind.

Rowell Hoff
December 27, 2007

The question we get asked the most at parties, seminars and public hangings is some variation of “how do you guys write together?”  It is usually asked with an air of someone trying to grasp something they don’t believe possible.  Some even offer suggestions of possible processes: “Do you each write a paragraph, then put them together?”  Well, no.  Or, “Does one of you write, then the other edit that?”   Well, sometimes.  Sort of.  Or, “Do you argue?”  We discuss, thank you very much.

If what people are really asking is, “What is THE process of writing with a partner?” I can’t answer that.  We do have our process, honed over the years, but as with every individual writer’s process, ours is uniquely our own, and, as with every individual writer’s process, is a wonderful, delightful, sometimes harrowing mystery.  That being said, this is what we do, and, after several screenplays, a web based comedy story, a best selling satirical novel, a popular web show and several articles, sales pages, blurbs, press releases and forum postings, it works fairly well for us.

First, of course, comes an Idea.  Some of them come fairly well-formed out of one of our heads, some of them as just a vague notion of something that might be interesting to explore, some a request for a work-for-hire project, a subject for an entire blog post in itself.  Then we talk.  We talk a lot, sometimes for days.  We make each other giggle.  (Yes, even Steve giggles sometimes, but he does it in a very manly way.)  Sometimes we even piss each other off, but not too much.  At some point, when the idea seems to be being fleshed out to the point of actual life, one of us (usually Steve) says, “shouldn’t we be taking notes on all this?”  I grumble, then get out a yellow legal pad and we re-iterate all our ideas so I can get them down.  Then I transcribe them into a file on the computer.  Then we talk some more, take some more notes, etc., until it seems like a story.

At that point I go through the notes and try to put them in some sort of logical order, then open up a word processor (Final Draft for screenplays and web show scripts, WordPerfect for everything else) and start typing.  Steve sits to my right, watching.  We don’t talk much, it has, by this point, been talked out to the point where my fingers just know where to go.  Once in a while, Steve will make a comment and it will flow out of my fingers as if I’d thought of it.  Sometimes, he says, “really?” and we discuss the bit he questioned.

Steve had a writing partner before he met me and they used to argue about every word, sometimes getting less than a paragraph written in a day.  When we started writing, we made an agreement and have stuck with it ever since:  Unless we both love something, it doesn’t go in.  It’s a rule with us.  Our only rule, actually.  (Besides not showing up naked.)  Do we ever defend a particular joke or idea or wording?  Yes, of course.  One of us will make a case for it.  If the other one doesn’t really mind, it goes in.  If the other one hates it, it doesn’t.  Simple as that.  During these discussions, we’ve often come up with a “third way” that’s better then anything we’d thought of before and very different from what we were initially defending, so these discussions are very important.

The dictum to leave your ego at the door is utterly ridiculous.  Who could create without an ego, without the thought that they had something to say that other people want to hear?  We just know that our ego, our pride, will be better served if the piece works, rather than if “my idea” works.  Often, actually, we can’t remember who came up with what after the fact.  And it doesn’t matter.  We did.

As we’re writing, we’ll often question a fact, or a word meaning or word usage.  That’s were writing on a computer with an Internet connection is useful.  We look it up.  Google, Wikipedea, IMDB, dictionary.com and thesaurus.com are all a moment away.  And whenever we look sometime up, we get distracted and follow odd trails into vastly unrelated subject matter.  We’re artists.  We like bright, shiny objects and have short attention spans.

At some point on these random wanderings, one of us (usually Steve) will say we need to focus and we get back to the project at hand, but along the way, we’ve often discovered some delightful thing that we can add to the plot or turn into a new joke or have become an entire conversation between the characters as a wonderful metaphor for what they’re really trying to say.  (Free tip: Oblique dialogue is often much more satisfying, and will involve the reader much more deeply.  And often make him laugh.  Free tip #2: Too much of it will make your reader want to hit you.)  We remind each other that the random wanderings work whenever one of us (usually me) wants to get all rigorous and hidebound.

Sometimes we will get frustrated, as a new passage starts flowing, because the “perfect word” isn’t readily at hand, which leads to the question, is there a “The Perfect Word?”  I say yes.  Sort of.  We have spent hours in the pages of Roget’s Thesaurus and on thesaurus.com looking for an elusive word that one or both of us knows is out there.  (We use the original Roget’s format, not the stupid dictionary type format.  Feh! Whose idea was that?)  Often we will come up with a fairly good compromise word, sometimes one that is spot on.  Sometimes we will be disappointed and can’t find anything better than the one we initially came up with, but my thought is that the right word can make or break a thought, a bit of dialogue, an entire paragraph.

“The Perfect Word” isn’t a new word, or, necessarily, even a big, impressive one.  It’s simply the word the most expresses the idea at hand.

I said we only have one hard and fast rule.  We actually have two.  Steve and I are artists, and as such, like a drop or a dram or two.  He’s more partial to Beer, I to a nice Canadian or Irish whiskey.  When we first started working together, this fancy figured heavily in our friendship.  We tried writing with a beer nearby (it’s only a beer!)  It really, really didn’t work.  We quickly became fuzzy and what we produced wasn’t the sharp stuff we love.  We made an agreement fairly quickly that no drinking happens until the writing session was over.  Even the early idea chats were included in that; they’re as or more important then the actual typing it all out.

Of course, we still liked our dram.  Often, after a nice writing session, I’d sort of notice Steve wasn’t right there.  Then a cold can of beer would suddenly appear by the keyboard.  “Oh,” I’d say.  “I guess we’re done.”  Steve would answer, “It fell into my hand!”  I never objected much.  (I would, of course, finish typing the thought I’d been in the middle of before we opened the cans, toasted to our genius and sipped.)  Now, of course, we both drink only rarely and almost never after working.  We’re older.  Eleven years is longer than you might imagine.  I’m in my mid fifties and Steve’s in his mid-to-late forties.  The effects of a beer or several or a shot or several are much harsher and last much longer.  Give me a nice glass of ice water with a slice of lemon in it and I’m perfectly happy.

We treat writing as a job.  We always have.  This is key, I think.  We write after work for several hours at least four nights a week and one full day on the weekend, with rare exceptions.  The full day can involve the roasting of a slab of animal flesh over a charcoal fire or a walk around the block to clear our heads, but the focus is writing, and even while we’re roasting or walking we’re talking and thinking and, really, working.  Is it work?  Yes.  Is it the best work in the world?  Yes.

What he have together, we know, is magic.  Early on, we had a large potential falling out.  I was very angry with Steve.  And he was angry at me for being angry at him.  In what friendship/ partnership/ relationship does this not happen?  I brooded for about a week, barely talking to him, which is odd for two people who write together every day.  Then I started thinking about what we were creating together, how special that was, how unusual, and how important and realized that was much more important than any (perhaps imagined? Possibly misunderstood, definitely overblown) slight I may have suffered.  We made up.  We talked about it and agreed that what we have is more important than either one of us individually.  Friendships, partnerships are often ruined over such things, but what we had and have is magic and is worth the effort to communicate.

It can even be miraculous, sometimes, not to be too hyperbolic.  But it’s not impossible.  Obviously.  Other writers can model what we do, adjust it to their own lives and create their own miraculous partnerships.  I invite and encourage you to do so.

_______________________________
Geoff Hoff is co-author of the best selling satirical novel Weeping Willow: Welcome to River Bend

After getting discharged, I got myself enrolled at County.  Thank God for County.  The bureaucracy is hell, it takes forever to get anything done, plan on spending hours on hold waiting for the appointment lady (you have to do it by phone, not in person, because she doesn’t really exist in actual time and space) but every single person I’ve encountered in the vast system is truly wonderful, caring and committed to the patients.  They actually give me information, explain to me what’s going on, what will go on, why we’re doing what we’re doing and take the time to giggle politely at my sophomoric humor.  Still no mention of the penis thing, of course, but after six months of consuming no salt or fat I’ve lost over sixty pounds and the thing seems to have come back with a vengeance, so no harm no foul, to use a phrase coined by our friends the basketball players.

I’m still on the ton of medication as I’m still in A-Fib (heart out of rhythm.  The pesky thing won’t use its whole top half, it seems.)  I’m having three procedures in the next two months, two to determine how damaged the heart is and how well it will start to heal once it’s out of A-Fib, and the third to get it out of A-Fib.  That is the one where they drug me up, shock my heart so it stops, shock it again so it starts back up in the correct rhythm, then send me on my way.  I’m both looking forward to that (it will mean I can stop a lot of the medication, especially the blood thinners, which react with everything I eat and give me hemorrhoids) and am really, really, really not looking forward to it.  (They are going to stop my heart!)

It sounds more extreme than it is.  It’s an outpatient procedure, believe it or not.  The only prerequisite is that I have someone drive me to the hospital and wait around for however long it takes to stop and start a heart, then drive me home again so I can curl up in my own bed and sleep off all the nifty narcotics they’ll give me so I don’t freak out while they’re actually electrocuting me.  I’m serious.

I must be getting to that age.  A friend of mine called to tell me he’d had heart surgery the week before, a surprise to him that he needed it until they rushed him to the hospital.  We talked on the phone and sounded like two old men on a park bench.  A lot of my conversations, now, are about my health.  When I hear myself, I want to start talking in a faux Yiddish accent.  “Pain?  You don’t know from pain.  I got pain you vouldn’t believe all the way up and down my nichtacocusoid…”  Maybe I should write a blog about it.

I recently visited my brother, his wife and their kids in Washington, DC and the kids thought it was hysterical that I made the “old man” noise every time I sat down or stood up.  I started not doing it, just to throw them off, and they’d giggle about that, too, the savages.  This is all odd, as I still think of myself as in my twenties.  Well, maybe thirties.  Wait a minute, it’s time for my medication.  Ohiee.

_______________________________
Geoff Hoff is co-author of the best selling satirical novel Weeping Willow: Welcome to River Bend

I just received a very elegant looking letter in the mail, “You’re Pre-Qualified for an unsecured personal loan of $500 to $3,000!” from the good folks at Brookwood Loans (a MetaBank company.) Wow. Cool. In looking over their offer, I notice several wonderful benefits, very well presented in their well written sales letter: Approval in 24 hours; Money the same day; Manageable payments; No Prepayment penalty and Fixed simple interest rate. And they make it very, very simple, log on, enter the code from the bottom of the letter, fill out your information and submit your request. “It’s just that easy!” they say in bold text. That is easy, I can hardly wait to get my money.

Then I read the exciting news under the “Fixed Simple Interest Rate” section: “Your rate of interest will not change. Loans have an APR of 96%.” 

Wait, what?

96%?

I actually had to read it three times before it registered as anything besides a misprint or a joke.  96%?  Are they insane? And they list this in bold as if it were a good thing for their customers. (Emphasis not added.)  And they actually have higher rates for approval applicants that choose their manual loan funding process, whatever that may be.

Vinnie must be visibly palpitating with orgiastic glee while doing the Snoopy dance all over South Dakota.

That means if you borrow $1,000 on a 36 month loan, by the time it’s done you will have paid back $3072.24. As the song goes, nice work if you can get it. Where is that carpenter who tumbled the building all over the money changers when you really need him?

I hope no poor, desperate fool falls for this scam, although I know there are all too many out there who will never realize they now owe their soul to the company store, which is run by Vinnie in his $5,000 dollar Armani suit and diamond encrusted pinky ring. The address listed for the bank is a P.O. box. I’m not surprised, they’re obviously too smart to want anyone actually knowing where their offices are.

I hope Brookwood and MetaBank fall into a pit somewhere and dissolve into useful molecular components such as nitrogen that can be used to replenish our ravished farmlands or do some other actual good on the planet. I hope Vinnie realizes loansharking will only end in tears and enters the clergy where the only harm he can do is to small children.

So, no thank you, Brookwood, I decline your kind offer of a loan. I’m good.

Hmmm.  Maybe I should move to South Dakota.

_______________________________
Geoff Hoff is co-author of the best selling satirical novel Weeping Willow: Welcome to River Bend

In the far distant future, I expect someone will invent a way for the text message to become an actual spoken conversation between two people in real time. I would call this innovation “two-way voice interaction”. Although the technology needed for this revolution does not yet exist, never underestimate the cleverness of mobile phone company R&D departments.

There is one manufactured issue that crops up every year, (and has, I find from my study, for over a century, with some variance in particulars) and that is the supposed “War on Christmas.”  In the last several years, this banner has been hoisted mostly by a television commentator and pundit by the name of Bill O’Reilly, who is offended, OFFENDED, by the fact that some folks have decided to be more inclusive in their holiday greeting and say “Happy Holidays” instead of the more traditional “Merry Christmas.”

There is so much wrong with this stance that it’s difficult to know where to begin.  At a store, the time of year is, by definition, a buying season, not a religious one.  The more people you include in your greeting, ipso facto, the more people available who will shop.  Also, most of the Christmas iconography (Crèches aside) are pagan, or at the very least secular, not Christian.  It can be argued (and has, often, by many Christian scholars) that The Christ was actually born in the spring and that the day of Christmas was chosen to mollify locals in Northern Europe in the Great Conversion.

Okay.  Enough logic and seriousness.  Even I am susceptible to the need for outrage.  (Damn it, why, Lord?  Why?)  In the spirit of anti-outrage, we have created something that, I think, finally brings the War on Christmas home.

http://WageWarOnChristmas.com

Now.  Let’s see if we can all become angry about something that really matters.  Like wearing pants below your underwear to show off your boxers or combing your bangs straight up to show off your forehead.

If I have a muse, she seems to have fallen asleep. I wish her good dreams. That she can convey to me once she wakes up and has her first cup of strong coffee. I’ve had my coffee and my pen is poised for the flow of genius.

What interests me about the creative process as much as those times when you can’t stop creating are the times when you don’t seem to get much done. I used to get nuts when I was in that seemingly stagnant place until I realized that it was a necessary part of the process, that I’m always creating and in those times it’s just more subtle. A gestation, perhaps. There are several stories and a couple of novels coalescing in there. Am I mixing my metaphors? Ah, well. As Walt Whitman said:
“Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)”

I am also, I fear, repeating myself. Old Walt has conveyed my feelings on a number of diverse occasions. His passage seems more elegant, somehow, than Emerson’s oft quoted dictum about a foolish consistency being the hobgoblin of little minds. It’s also much more apt to the subject at hand.

Yes, now I am simply rambling, using other poets words to appear knowledgeable and creative, and doing it without any orderly theme or plan. Of course, A. A. Milne said, “One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries.” And as soon as my muse awakens, I’ll convey some of those discoveries to you.

I graduated from college with a Bachelor of Arts degree in theatre. The plan after college was to spend a year in Northern California with my brother and his wife while getting acclimatized to life outside of school, then move to San Francisco and disappear into some rep company or other and spend my days happily ensconced in a life in theatre.

I often visited San Francisco with my brother and sister-in-law, seeing plays, visiting museums, drinking in the Bohemia of it all, preparing for my eventual move there. As Robert Burns said to the wee mouse, “The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men/Gang aft agley…” Okay, so my schemes weren’t all that well laid out to begin with, but they did gang a bit agley.

Soon after lighting in Northern California, I got a job at the Round Table Pizza parlor at Brunswick Plaza, half way between the small towns of Grass Valley and Nevada City. I was quickly promoted to assistant manager and moved into a tiny house in Grass Valley. I didn’t have a car, almost everything I needed I could get to by walking or riding my ten-speed bike. Everything but movies. There was one movie theatre that served both towns. It had three screens and was fairly close to me, but their usual fair tended to ooze a little too much testosterone for my taste. The nearest alternative was in Sacramento, a forty-five minute drive down the highway. If I wanted to see something that didn’t have Sylvester Stallone in it I would need to find someone else who wanted to go who also had a car.

One afternoon I decided I needed to see a movie but no one I knew wanted to go. My friend Vern, however, who lived right across the street from me, offered the use of his car. I decided on The China Syndrome, which was playing at one of the bigger complexes in the outskirts of Sacramento, gathered up the keys and journeyed hence.

The movie, staring Jane Fonda, Michael Douglas, Jack Lemmon and Wilford Brimley, was a political thriller very loosely based on the Three Mile Island incident. A young, naive reporter (Fonda) accidentally stumbles upon evidence that the safety inspections for the building of the local nuclear plant were fudged and those responsible ranged from the halls of corporations to the government. The script was tight, the direction flawless. The tension built slowly but steadily to a fever pitch. Jack Lemmon, an actor I always admired, was never better. I was moved. Stunned might be a better world. On the ride home in that borrowed car, I decided I wanted to be part of an industry that could produce something so powerful. The next day I put my notice in at the pizza parlor.

I saw the movie two more times that week, convincing friends they had to go. None of them seemed as moved as I was, but they humored me. It wasn’t until the third viewing that I realized that there was no background music in the film, only incidental music occasionally coming from a car radio or in a party scene. How tight must a movie be to not rely on music to manipulate your emotions? How courageous must a director be to make that choice? If I’d had any doubts about my impending relocation, they vanished.

I bought a car, a Ford Grand Torino station wagon, bright orange, that I named Stanley (two points to anyone who can guess why), loaded all my belonging in back and literally a month after that initial viewing of the movie I was on my way to Los Angeles. I lived in the car those first few days, parking on side streets in this unfamiliar town, until I tracked down some friends from college and camped out on their living room couch. I stayed with them until I found a small room in a building just north of Hollywood Boulevard, got a job at an answering service and became a Los Angelian. Before watching that movie, it was completely unpredictable that I move to this town, one I’d never even visited. I liked San Francisco. Whenever I visited there, it felt like home, yet here I am. I tell people I was headed for San Francisco but took a wrong toin at Albuquoique.

That was in 1979. My acting dreams have transformed, I am now a writer, but I still live quite happily and productively in Los Angeles after all these years, working in and around the industry that made such a powerful film. I look upon that evening in a movie house in Sacramento as a major turning point in my life.

To answer the question posed by the radio show, yes, I say. Art does have the power to change one’s life. I often wonder what that original trail would have been like, but the one I chose has thus far been wildly diverting.

P.S. Along with this, a sad goodbye to Paul Newman, one the greats, who will be remembered for his incredible body of work, his humility, humor and dedication to contribution to humanity.

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Geoff Hoff is co-author of the best selling satirical novel Weeping Willow: Welcome to River Bend