The Remodellers

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The year was 87 and I'd graduated from university and was living with my girlfriend
in a basement suite while she finished her degree to become a doctor. I started on a novel
called 'the remodellers'. It was supposed to come out before 1989 and be the story
of a hypothetical 'design science revolution' that was predicted for that year by Buckmister Fuller..

I kept working on it for years, missed the 1989 deadline, rewrote and rewrote...
the problem is, as you get closer and closer to a project, you lose balance. You sort of
get a little too in character.

For me, trying to write a book that visualized how hope would occur, and failing,
I think I kind of decided that there was no hope. I mean the late '80's under raegan were
a pretty dark time. Kind of pessimistic, dark art was really all that I saw or worked with.

But by '91 I was trying to just put it behind me. It was the first time I had ever tried a creative task
and failed, but I wanted to just move on. Living in New Zealand that year I wrote a book of short
stories.

But it kept leaking out of me. When working on a video game in the late '90s a lot of the ideas came from
my unfinished novel and now, starting global toast I'm actually trying to implement some of the ideas from that book.

 I mean that's the real issue, was I trying to write a novel, or make a plan for my own work? If you read my thoughts on politics you'll be reading a plot outline much like the remodellers. A group of people get together and make a list of things to do for all mankind. They are not well diggers or aid workers, but more media people... those with the skills to move people with media.  They do something very much like a globaltoast to provide clean water for all, raise money from it, and move on: Sanitation, health services, education, and eventually food and shelter...are all provided as basic human rights.

           I think it's a good idea for me to not share too many details. Bucky's goal says 'through spontaneous cooperation' and by that very definition, it can't be planned or pre-visualized. But at least in my head it's been previsualized in detail. I might as well be honest about that. A series of celebrations leading up to Bucky's day.


           Of late I've been rewriting the book in my head one more time. In the new draft, what's important is just how anti-climactic making it through the party steps (celebrate each time a new universal right is improved) is.
           Sure, poverty and starvation and extinction are eradicated, but the focus is elsewhere...on the space elevator and the sea rafts...not on the poor.  Like the eradication of smallpox, the huge steps that are taken forward for ALL mankind are barely news.  While my early drafts had rock stars and reality t.v. shows involved, I'm starting to think that the remodelling will not even be noticed by many.
            Still I hope it happens.