MUSE and WRITER Dialogues #9
FADE IN
A room that passes for an office. There are bookshelves on one wall, a motley assortment of carvings, signed storyboards, and framed magazine covers on the free wall space. On the far wall is a medieval-style heraldic wall display of a cockatrice and a banner in bad Latin “Pullus non Est.” Horizontal files sit beneath the window. The computer desk is on the wall nearest the door, facing away from the window. Beside that is a printer on a stand. In the base of that is a PC and a PS3. On the right wall hang three guitars. There would be four, except WRITER, currently sitting at the desk, is strumming one of them.
Enter the MUSE. She looks like a Greek goddess, except when she doesn’t. Right now she tends to morph between goddess and rocker chick.
WRITER: Can’t you make up your mind?
MUSE: You’re one to talk. And why are you torturing that poor guitar?
WRITER (Holds up guitar in question): Beauty, isn’t it? A Michael Kelly Deuce
Phoenix, semi-hollowbody. They don’t make them anymore.
MUSE: I didn’t ask what it was, I asked why you were torturing it. Are you channeling Dick Cheney?
WRITER: Don’t be silly, and I’m not “torturing it.” I’m practicing a 12-bar blues shuffle.
MUSE: Same thing, from where I stand. Didn’t George Carlin once say that white people got no business playing the blues, ever?
WRITER: If BB King, Albert King, Buddy Guy, Hubert Sumlin, “Sonnyboy” Edwards, etc. didn’t have a problem with Stevie Ray Vaughn, why should you?
MUSE: You’re not Stevie Ray Vaughn.
WRITER: It’s your job to encourage my artistic pursuits, not throw cold water. And even SRV had to learn.
MUSE: Speaking of which, isn’t it about time you got your butt back to work on the rewrite of The War God’s Son?
WRITER: Almost. There’s still some continuity research to do.
MUSE: You’re stalling.
WRITER: Am not. I had the final battle location way too far south. Plus I had
assumed that Yoshiie led the final campaign alone. Not so. His father,
Yoriyoshi, was present as well. Which does, as you well know, affect the middle
section.
MUSE: Really? The old guy was pushing eighty.
WRITER: Tough old bird. But I do have to reconcile how he was seeing portents of
victory back in Kamakura when he was supposed to be in Mutsu. The only
primary source is 1) Rare and 2) In Japanese. Sansome only goes so far, but
I’ll get what I need.
MUSE: Well…okay. But that’s not a proper D major, you know.
WRITER: I do know. It’s a D7. Next I’ll practice the turnaround. Want to heckle?
MUSE: I’ll pass. Just be gentle with that poor guitar, okay?
WRITER: I’ll do my best.
MUSE: You better. Otherwise we’re both wasting our time.
FADE OUT.
Something you should probably know about me before I go off on this—I grew up in the (American) Deep South during the 1960’s, and came of age in the late 1970’s. And when I say “Deep South”, I mean you couldn’t go much deeper. To us, Tennessee was a border state, ‘mkay? This was a time when a guy like me couldn’t take a walk down a dirt road without some yahoo in a pickup pulling over to ask if I needed a ride to the Klan rally, and if you think I’m exaggerating, well, you weren’t there. All by way of saying that I learned about racism the way all my peers did—by being taught it. To be fair, it wasn’t as if we had classes and homework on the subject, it’s just that every day we were led by example: if I was part of a seasonal crew hauling hay, for instance, that had both black and white members, at lunch time we didn’t eat together. We ate the exact same things, but at separate tables set up for the purpose. And, like I imagine most everyone else did, when I was younger I asked why that was. The only answer I ever got from the adults was “because that’s the way it is.” I never found that answer particularly satisfying, but I finally realized that they weren’t holding out on me—it was the only answer they had. I had been told that Martin Luther King was a dangerous radical, and the ones who told me that believed it. Then I listened to MLK give a radio speech on the Viet Nam war and realized, somewhat to my own surprise, that I agreed with everything he said. By this time I definitely had the feeling that “something wasn’t right.” 
