Adagio 4 – Don’t Go Here
I have to tell you, brilliant as I am, I will probably never figure out the reasons for the existence of things like the Bedrock Culture of the planet, Don’t Go Here. I do know that the first colony that archeologists uncovered from there was a back-to-nature group that had a weird religion that insisted they reject all modern technology. After a number of years, their culture began to be inundated with marooned starship passengers by the Stardog Corsairs. It was claimed that the only entertainment that had been left to them were a handful of cartoon holovids and one holovid player. The Flintstones took on a kind of religious significance among the growing population of the planet.
Evidence clearly indicates that the first colonists were Galtorrian refugees from the planet Dionysus. They were a group of Galtorr/Human Fusions, Earthers, and a group of humanoid saurians known as Dions on Dionysus. You know what that mix looks like, right? Lizard men and half-lizard-men with humans mixed in. They brought with them saurian pets and work animals of the kind usually referred to in Galactic English as the dinosaurs. They also brought numerous Dionysian plants.
Now, Dions are not accustomed to wearing clothing anywhere but in space. They have natural scale armor and even their private parts and prehensile tails are covered by living leather and scales. That’s a fashion choice that makes me cringe a little. The humans who came with them were dedicated to the idea that it was only right to wear as little clothing as they could get away with in honor of their Dion friends. Even the primitive monkey people who were brought along as slaves, those peculiar furry pygmies known as Lemurians, were taught to wear nothing beyond the occasional synthetic fur.
I guess it only made sense when this back-to-nature group with their cartoonish ways and chosen primitive lifestyle were mixed with castaways from all over, and marooned spacers stripped of all tech gear, they were bound to mutate into a blended culture unlike any that had grown up anywhere else.
For clothing, a few electrical material synthesizers were created from scrounged parts of the scuttled colonial ships. Thus, synthetic furs could be manufactured for clothing, since organic material was plentiful, but furred animals didn’t exist on the planet. Synthesized stone-foam wads could be easily hollowed out to make stone homes that looked almost exactly like the homes in the Flintstones holovids.
The fake orange furs with black triangles on them came to be known as Fredsuits. White fur dresses became known as Wilma Skins. Blue fur went into Bettypelts, and Brown was for Barneysuits. Bam-Bam Shorts and Pebblespelts, also known as Bonehead Skins, rounded out the major styles. Fred, Wilma, Barney, Betty, Pebbles and Bam-Bam became the most common names chosen by colonists and castaways alike. They began to distinguish themselves from one another by adding numbers to their names. Most ridiculous of all, the most common vehicle developed by the highly imitative culture was the foot-powered car. They gave up all practical value in order to imitate the cartoon show.
By the time the Aero Brothers arrived, the culture of the planet Don’t Go Here had degenerated into something unparalleled in history and monumentally silly.
Catch a Falling Star 
Writing the Critical Scene
It is a novel I started writing in 1998 with an idea I first got in 1976. So I have been working on this book for either 20 years, or 32 years, depending on when you want to credit the actual work to have started.
It got it’s theme from the fact that I was sexually assaulted when I was ten in 1966, and the feeling the repressed memory of the trauma caused in me whenever I asked myself the question, “Am I a monster?”
Unfortunately the answer to that question, for practically everybody, is, “Sometimes yes.”
Psychological damage sticks with you for the rest of your life. It makes you flinch at things that other people don’t. More than once I must have confused both my mother and old girlfriends when I was compelled to wriggle out of hugs and physical contacts by panic. I felt unlovable. I felt like a monster. And for a lot of that time, I didn’t know why. But it is a novel critical for me to write. Pain needs to become art in order to completely go away. I need to imprison the feelings and ideas in a book.
I am now at the point in that novel where I must write the scenes at the crisis point, the high point of the action, and I have to control the flinching. I have to control the reactions I could so easily fall into. It is critical that I get the scene right. The success or failure of the whole novel is at stake.
I have played it over and over in the cinema in my head a thousand times… several thousand times. It is difficult. But it is there. Soon I will have it down, crystallized in words. It make take considerable time to publish it, though, because editing it will be at least as hard as writing it. And I seriously have to get it right.
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