Forsyth, Montana. I’ve already driven through the beautiful part of Montana, I guess this is what’s left. I want to make it to Beach N.D. this morning to see if Gene Skoglund, a shirttail relative I met on the internet, will meet with me. These last two days are more about heritage and just getting home. I will also stop at Turtle Mountain.
I met a couple of sort of interesting people. There is a large coal fired power plant in Forsyth and boilermakers from all over the country come here for a couple of months to clean it while it is in “shutdown”. I almost didn’t get a room because of this. The boiler is 10 stories high and they have to erect scaffolding on the inside to effect the cleaning. My neighbor Anatoli is a Russian living in Portland, Oregon, of all places, who is here to work on the boiler. Someone said there were many Navajos here also.
After breakfast I meet a young man coming off the night shift working security at the power plant. We discuss Socrates, Plato, Greek and Roman history, The Illiad and the Odyssey and his time in the 1st Gulf war. He says he was discharged due to being in a war trauma induced psychosis and having Gulf war syndrome. He is well now and wants to rejoin the military as an MP. I, of course, tell him of my days as an MP guarding rusty tanks and old paint in Kaiserslautern, but I decide not to tell him about SIDIPO. He might be carrying a gun.
On the road to Beach I begin to think about a movie I saw called “The Beach”. It stars Leonardo DiCaprio as a young man who stumbles upon paradise in the guise of a commune of young free spirits who live on a remote island off of Thailand. The other star is the chick who plays the Ice Queen in “The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe”. She is the queen of the commune and instills an iron discipline to keep their paradise secret. They share (uneasily) the island with some violent illegal Marijuana growers. As with most human utopian dreams, this one ends badly as paradise lost.
I want to write the sequel to “The Beach”, only I will have to rename the original “A Beach”. That is so the sequel can be titled “Son of A Beach”. It will be the story of Leonardo’s son. He grows up and eventually hears the story of his father’s flirtation with paradise and is smitten with the idea of finding out what happened. He travels to Thailand and discovers that the ice queen has made a pact with the devil and now lures rich tourists to “paradise” and then enslaves them in cultivating and processing marijuana for the illegal drug trade. In their down time, the tourists are kept in a drug induced stupor to keep them compliant. He goes home and remembers an uncle’s tale about PUA superheroes who did wondrous deeds when the uncle worked with them on 7a at St Mary’s in Minneapolis. He calls the retired head PUA and entices him to perform one last deed. So the head PUA comes out of retirement and recruits his former sidekicks, Anne and Don, to join him in one last quest. They take a leave from their jobs as: psychiatric nurse/teacher and head of corrections to become again doers of deeds. The son leads them to the island and the superheroes swoop in and smite the evil drug lords and capture the ice queen. The rich tourists are released and return to their former lives living in a money induced stupor. The ice queen is thrown into the locked unit where she is injected with Thorazine and lives in a legal, drug induced stupor. The superheroes return to their former lives, retired once again. Anne and Don will play themselves. I can’t tell you who the head PUA is/was but I can tell you he is a wise looking man with white hair who thinks he’s an Indian and looks ridiculous in a “Billy Jack” style hat. Maybe if I add a religious theme Adam will make the movie. Almost home, Jon.