The following was added on September 25, 2007 at 3:56 AM
I am bankrupt in just about everyway possible. Each month, I rely on local food banks to survive. I no longer possess camera equipment. I need to have my personally done, custom hand printed photographs professionally matted, mounted and framed. They cannot be displayed in a gallery without that. In 2002, I had to turn down one offer for a personal showing at a local gallery, and there would be other's who would be pleased to have my work displayed on their walls. I have several hundred unused negatives to work with, which, to an old pro like me, means that there are a couple of dozen portfolio quality photos waiting there for me to print. I have so many more photographs planned out that I want to take that it's nearly killing me not being able to. Everyday, I miss great opportunities for doing more outstanding photography. I need top of the line, professional computer equipment and software. I already have displayed, on the World Wide Web, beyond a shadow of a doubt that I am talented and I am self-driven towards hard work and success. It takes money to make money. Once I begin receiving profits from this film project, I will be able to work harder everyday.
I also need the monies owed to me by my aunt and uncle, and the monies from my long overdue military service connected disability rating.
I have done everything that I am supposed to do in order to prove the facts about what happened to me up in Maine, and also what it was that happened to me in the US Army on Okinawa. And, yet, another poor excuse for a Veterans Administration doctor, Dr. Jacob (Jackass) Tendler, has declared that all I say about my service on Okinawa is lies. My Aunt Martha and Uncle Finley have always declared that I am thoroughly lying about what happened between us in Maine, and the Army and the Veteran's Administration have refused to believe anything that I say about my being illegally assigned as an official photographer for the 30th Artillery Brigade. Finley is dead, and Martha is dying fast. I say that a large chunk of the sizable Finley Kenneth Clarke estate, that Fin left to Marty, and that Marty is keeping from my side of the family, is mine. The United States Army owes me an apology, and the Veterans Administration owes me a lot of money. Because of those two devastating losses, I live a miserable life.
The money from either one of those debts owed to me could get me what I need to recover the other. The money from the movie would allot me the working capital to take care of both problems.
I have located two 30th Arty Bgde veterans who are witnesses, reluctant witnesses, who can testify that when I was working as an Army photographer on Okinawa, I could neither order equipment nor supplies, that there was no slot for a photographer in the 30th, so I could never advance in rank, and that the photo lab had indeed been illegally and immorally set up in a nuclear fallout emergency decontamination chamber. They are each written about on my blog, 30th Artillery Brigade Okinawa 1970-71. And they know it. They are T. Gordon Barber and Jim Whitcomb. I found Whitcomb through an Internet search for 30th Arty Bgde photographers, and Barber found me through my web published 30th Arty writings and emailed me. I have exchanged emails with Barber, and one time I talked to Jim, on the phone, for over an hour last year. Since then, I have emailed each of them several times, but they do not reply. While on the phone to Jim Whitcomb, he verified to me that he remembers well that all that I say and write about concerning these military matters is true. At the time of that phone conversation, he had no idea what it has meant to my empty life, my lost family, my long gone friends, and me. Both of those witnesses do know it now, but they are not cooperating.
The money owed to me from Fin and Marty is enough for me to do what I legally need to do in order to take care of unresolved military/Veterans Administration related issues. Had the monies owed to me by the Veterans Administration come, when I had proven my service connected disability case to them, it would have been enough and in time for me to have gone to Maine, while my uncle was still living, and remedied the situation with Fin and Marty.
Monies from this movie project will be enough for me to take care of both of those long-term problems.
I have been working on this synopsis for eight days straight, during most of my waking hours. And when I am trying to go to sleep I have to sit up now and then to write down notes of what I just thought about to write out on the computer in the morning. This started out as, "Ten Reasons Why My Northern Maine Adventures Will Make A Great Movie." Now it has a life of its own, and it keeps growing.
Yesterday evening, I was walking up to the shopping center, which is two blocks away from my home, to buy a sandwich, when I heard what sounded like a gun being fired from around the corner of the large building that I was walking next to, on the sidewalk. Then two 13 to 14 year old boys, on one small bicycle, came rolling by from behind me there on the street, and they slowly moved past me. I heard another gunfire-like popping sound and turned around to see another 13 to 14 year old boy on a bike slowly rolling towards my way. I was getting a little scared, but hoping that the pistol popping type of sounds that I was hearing coming from behind, and now also to the far side of that third kid, were from some of those little Snappers that kids throw against the pavement to explode. I was actually afraid to turn back around and look to see if I could see what I did not want to see—a pistol in the third kid's hand. The first two kids slowed down, and one said to the third kid, "Give that guy some. Hey, give that guy some." As the kid spoke those words, he was grinning like the smartass little piece of crap that he turned out to be, and he was pointing his finger at me. I was the only other person out on that side street. As the third kid came up next to me there, about thirty feet away, he pointed a pistol at me, from his waist level, where the gun was being held slightly hidden under his overhanging shirttail. I heard a pop and saw this little puff of white smoke blow out the end of the pistol barrel, right towards my midsection.
I immediately looked down all over at my body to see where I had been shot. I become overwhelmed with an instant, terrifying rush of fear. I also instantly expected my fatally injured body to begin crumbling down onto the pavement, and begin dying. Fortunately, I only thought that I had just been shot and murdered. I don't know whether it was a real pistol that was loaded with blanks, or a loud CO2 pistol, but it made me believe for the longest short eternity that I have ever lived through that I had been murdered.
When I was serving in the US Army, on Okinawa, an Army buddy of mine, a Vietnam combat veteran who had only been out of Vietnam and on Okinawa for a short time, told a group of us guys who were drinking a case of beer together with him, "If you're ever in combat, or if anybody ever shoots at you, back home, always check yourself over real quick to see if you've been hit. I always do, because you don't always feel it when you get hit. Sometimes it burns and hurts like hell, other times you don't feel a thing. Always check yourself for wounds."
When that punk, in Dundalk Shopping Center, pulled that trigger, if he'd a had that gahdamned gun crammed right up in close to my midsection, I would have had no way of realizing that I was not actually being shot. When I saw the end of that gun barrel pointed right at the very vulnerable center mass of my body, had that kid with the gun been close enough for me to have reached out and grabbed him, I would have had no other reasonable choice but to hurt him badly. I know a little about self-defensive movements, just a little, but enough to have had him, or even a much larger aggressor, on the ground and disabled in an instant. Had he wheeled over closer to me, or had he been on foot and had walked right up to me, and pointed that pistol and popped off that round of lead free air in towards my gut, I would not have had the time to realize that I had not been shot before I would have taken the initiative to prevent him pulling that trigger again. In order to prevent him from pulling the trigger more times, I literally could have been forced to seriously injure him, and to quite possibly severely maim him for the rest of his life, in self-defense. Now how in the hell was I supposed to deal with the knowledge that I had been forced to critically injure a kid?
Had that incident with those three punks occurred in closer quarters, with the shooter so close to me that I could have grabbed a hold of him before I realized that there were no murderous bullets being fired into me, well now, we all best thank the Saint of Circumstance, that it had not gone down that way.
That crime against my person happened in Baltimore County, Maryland, and within about a 1/4 of a mile from the Baltimore City line. Baltimore! Ten times the national average murder rate. Baltimore, Maryland. Bodymore, Murderland!
I know that those kinds of punk kids who shot that gun at me have more and easier access to guns than most adults around here do. Just about everybody around here is aware of that!
Being shot at was terrifying! But there mere fact that a kid that age was in possession of a pistol was not that much of a surprise to me, at all. You can expect that here now. In and around Baltimore, you can rightly fear that you will encounter a punk kid with a pistol. Up until around five years ago, it wasn't that way in these Dundalk suburbs, but the neighborhood here has changed.
Two of those punks on bikes were white, and one was black; a white kid had the gun, and the other white boy was the one who sicked his sick little white buddy on me. Some of the kids around here emulate the inner city thug lifestyle, the thug ways of talking and walking, and the gangland/street-corner-drug-dealer clothing styles. The kid with the gun had an oversized shirt on, that is perfectly designed for concealing the shape of a gun that is stuffed down into a person's pants. These kids listen to thug music—music that worships violence. Thug mentality has spread like a social plague all throughout our local young people here, and is influencing them in all of the wrong ways, turning them into thugs, or just lame little thug wanna'bees.
Then add the violent video games, which these kids play, into the mix of bad influences. Then the violence in the movies that they watch, over and over again. They witness many acts of faked or real violent behavior on TV, everyday. Parental Guidance Warnings on video games, music CDs, recorded movies, and TV shows do no good for children whose parents provide little, to no, guidance to their offspring.
If you go to my blog, "Blue Skies Over Dundalk Maryland" you will see plenty of good and beautiful in my neighborhood. But I am an outdoorsman who needs plenty of deep forest near his home. I gotta get outa here.
So anyways, after I realized that I had not been shot, my terror was replaced with instant, overpowering rage. I flipped-the-fuck-out on them punks. I can't really run anymore, so I couldn't go after the little punk who had the fired gun. I can't afford to own a cell phone, to have called the police with. So all that I could do was to let loose with a loud, angry string of extremely furious cursing and swearing at those punks. Anytime that I walk anywhere near a group of those kinds of kids, they are liable to be talking like that too, and sometimes they have parents who talk like that to them, so don't give me any grief about it.
What'd ya' say? Did you just say that I am supposed to be the reasonable, decent acting, clear thinking adult here? Right? Screw you. I was too pissed off to think straight. You do understand that I believed, ever so briefly, but powerfully so, you do understand that, for over a full second, I had believed that one of them had just shot me with a gun and had possibly murdered me, and that they all three of them were thrilled to see it happen? Right!
Unfortunately, that act of emotional violence that they had committed against my person was probably only just a substantial part of the beginning for them three. They won't stop indulging into that senseless garbage until they are somehow made to, or they get put in prison or killed by the police because of it.
After that lead-free pistol shot rang out, as the three little thug wanna'bees slowly pedaled on, they were loudly laughing, grinning broadly, evilly, and yelling curse words at me all the way—with pure, self-satisfactory pleasure written all over them.
If I could have gotten my hands on that punk with the pistol, well, you can imagine what I would have done, and how it would have played out in a courtroom.
As I walked along the sidewalk cussing and screaming at the top of my lungs at those smiling and laughing little punks, I knew that, because I am so deeply sunk down into poverty, that I have no money to defend myself in court with. I usually don't even have the money for taxi fare to the county court house.
I can't take this any longer.
I went on up the street and bought my sandwich. But instead of eating it in the café there as I had planned, I was still raging inside, far too intently, so I took my food home to eat it. I thought that I might be having a heart attack or a stroke, so I looked up the symptoms for each, on the Internet. All that I could think off was that the discomfort was only from stress, and would subside without killing me. I was more fearful of calling the Ambulance, and then later on having to take a bus home at 3AM, than I was of dying at home last night. A Baltimore bus at 3AM? Screw that. I don't have any money for a taxi. If I wasn't having a heart attack or a stroke, I don't have anyone whom I could have called, in the middle of the night, to come get me from the hospital. I couldn't deal with going out of my house to go be in the hospital, either. I couldn't stand the thought of being in the hospital over night, so that tests could be done on me. I chose to stay here and whatever was going to happen was going to happen.
Now I have to worry that every time that I am walking around outside in my neighborhood here, those punks will come rolling on by me again, or walk up to me, then begin to belligerently and mercilessly harass me, come real close to me, threaten to physically assault me, and I will get my hands on them. It is very difficult for a person not to always feel some residual anger towards their once perceived, cold-blooded murderers. For as long as any victim of a once perceived murder lives, they will most likely retain some of the resulting, raging anger that an assault like that instills in a person. Mine sure as hell hasn't subsided very much. Though I only felt those horribly intense, gut-smashing feelings of being murdered for a second or so, the anger at my attackers remains.
Those three boys are punks with piss-ass parents who don't raise them right. Parents who are probably used to trouble; they probably are trouble themselves; and they may be used going to court, every few years or so. They may very well be family neglecting, abusive drug addicts and/or drunks. And them three boys have plenty of punk-ass friends who would all cop the attitude that those three little idiots were just playing around, and that I did not actually get shot, so what's the problem? They can do what they want to whomever they want to. They're bad-asses. But if I booted them three punks' butts around some, they would be portrayed in court, and in the media, as innocent, harmless little children. (He's a good kid, would do anything to help anybody, he was just playin' around. He didn't do anything bad to that big, mean old man.) If I see them again, they will harass me. If I ever encounter them within a larger group of teenagers together, they will jump me. During the past couple of years, there have been several older men jumped, by punks like them, up in our small, local parks here. Those little felons have no respect for anyone else, at all.
Last night, I lost all patience with the rest of the world. No, my patience had been worn down to next to nothing; then those three little punks destroyed the rest of it
My life is a mess. My home is the kind of a jumbled up mess inside that I never imagined it could be. Due to degenerative back disease, I can't hardly bend down to pick up stuff off the floor, and I can't clean up around here as well as I used to. The depression has also painfully restricted my daily activities. Physical and emotional pain has nearly ruined my life. To top it all of with, the telephone company has a very loud, piercing signal they send out to people who dial a number wrong, in a certain way, and that screaming damned signal pushed my Tinitus right up past tolerable, but my primary care Veterans Administration doctor refused to send me to a hearing loss specialist. The ringing in my ears is LOUD.
For the past decade or so, I have been gathering up items such as tools and other home-fix-it-shop supplies, from the many dumpster dived garage cleanouts that I run into. I have antiques and collectables and plenty of other goodies from dumpster diving; including a Skunk fur jacket, in perfect shape, that I want to sell. I have numerous items for using around the nice sized, single home that I was going to purchase and move into, when my service connected disability checks and the money that Fin and Marty owe me came in. But for now, this stuff that is intended for use in that larger home is piled up all around me—in this smaller sized, low rent townhouse. And I can't take the losses of getting rid of it. I worked as hard as I could to get this stuff. I could stock a nice sized booth at an antiques mall with what I have here, and still keep a few tools and antiques and collectables for myself. I don't have the working capital and the rest of the where-with-all to be able to stock that antique mall both, or to sell some of it on EBAY. This is frustrating and demoralizing.
In the past few years, I have had to pay to have several of my teeth pulled. And there is another tooth that is going to need to be removed, sometime soon. Two years ago, I was ripped off badly by an auto mechanic, so my little truck broke down again, and I could not afford any more money to fix it. I contacted the proper authorities about it, but they did nothing to help me resolve the issue. Then they said I have to sue the crooked mechanic. That truck was then sold for a measly $50. Without that truck, I had no reliable way to get to court for any lawsuit that I could have brought against that mechanic. Due to the costs of the dental work and the mechanical work, I had to pawn my camera gear to survive. Since then, I have never gotten that well earned, much deserved break from my poverty that I have been struggling steadily for, ever since 1998. I have never given up hope for being paid for some of my photographic or written work. So I kept paying monthly pawnshop interest rates, until I could no longer do that, and I lost my camera gear. Now to pay for that next tooth extraction, I expect to loose my stereo equipment. And I cannot replace my reading glasses or anything else of any value—like my TV set—that gets lost, gets stolen, is broken, or stops working. My computer is scrapped together from dumpster dived and donated parts, it is old and barely makes it on this Internet.
If I do not take care of this well stated Maine, and also the military/Veterans Administration business within a very short period of time, I can't survive. Because surviving without collecting those two debts owed to me, or without selling my story and turning it into a good movie, means selling off almost everything that I own.
Then what?
An empty heart, barely beating inside of a worn down, constantly pained body, a heart surrounded by an ailing soul that is fiercely struggling to survive, that is inside of a person who dwells in a nearly lifeless home. A person who is wracked with tremendous anger aimed at their debtors—anger eating away at their insides. That nearly empty person receives harassing daily phone calls from the entities that they owe money to. How can I pay my debts if I can't collect the ones owed to me? Hardly anyone else besides a few entities I owe money to call me on the phone, and it rings several times a day. Good thing I was given a used phone with an answering machine to screen my calls. I only talk on the phone an average of 2 or 3 times a week, and usually for very short lengths of time. But the worst part of this bummer here is that as a 100% disabled person living on a tiny pension, I am supposed to be relieved of my largest debt, federally backed college loans. But those debt collectors did not accept, as true and legal, the information on the form that my Veterans Administration doctor filled out and signed for them, the form that declares me to be 100% disabled for life. For some reason, one friggin' asswipe US Government agency does not accept the legal word of another.
I am stuck here in this small, messy home, without benefit of the protections of many of my rights, here in this grossly limited, lousy life, with no hope for the future, outside of the hope that this future movie project allots to me. And with no way to go where the movie makers are, to be able to approach them with the full, detailed information about this project, that is presented here within this synopsis.
How long could you last like that?
If you have not yet gone over to the site that has the set of great photographs about my Maine adventures on it, then now is the time do so. These photos will definitely aid you in visualizing this future movie.
All of this together, all that is written in this synopsis here, the stories, the photographs, and the other blogs of mine that are published on the World Wide Web, all provides you with more than enough to convince you that this will be made into a good movie someday. If it does not convince you, then you are not right for this project. In that case, I do hope that you got something good out of reading this. It was my pleasure.
Thank you for reading this. I hope that you at least found it to be thoroughly entertaining.
{End of section 4 of a 4-part document. If you didn't start reading this document at its beginning, please go to Section 1 / Northern Maine Adventures / The Movie from there. It'll be well worth your time--I swear to it! }
David Robert Crews
ursusdave
patten maine
bear hunting
dundalk maryland
writing
creative
photography
movie producer
screen writer
movie director
30th artillery brigade
okinawa
veterans health care
veteransveterans affairs
writing
No comments:
Post a Comment