I am a real person but for the ALM movie it’s useful to think of myself as a character, to take a director’s eye view and reveal unexamined assumptions that might be important to the story. I don’t mind the audience thinking that the Dan Kelly character is mildly delusional, a Walter Mitty type. If we establish that he is a functional kook, then the premise (doom) doesn’t need to be supported with empirical evidence, it’s just his world view. Folks will be happy to ride with him on his emotional roller coaster.
When it’s too late to turn back, we’ll reveal what’s really going on }:)
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This is the nearly true story of a mostly unknown middle age artist. A man who’s trysted with various modes of expression but never quite established a viable career. He’s coasted along on family money supplemented with spotty freelance work and the rare grant. He’s divorced with neither kids nor much savings to speak of.
He’s a geek but enjoys pushing his physicality, handsome but socially inept, a cult leader sans cult. In spite of not amounting to much of anything, he imagines himself an key figure in a grand unfolding, a mystic hero stashed away and awaiting deployment. He senses invisible forces arrayed against him and intuits that he must be someone of great importance to be so targeted.
His shelves are stacked with science fiction and the Wizard of Oz makes him teary. He loves being in the wilds and feels that the entire earth is alive and probably self aware. This sacred epiphany stands in stark contrast to the seemingly suicidal bent of his fellow humans who undermine the global life support system with habitual mediocrity. Endowed with an epic perspective, he deduces a secret enemy at work – trans dimensional conquistadors yanking the puppet strings of power.
He decides it’s time to act, to take personal responsibility as an agent of earth. He buys a decrepit sailboat, spruces it up and schemes a dream.
Sailing a 30 year old catamaran 1000 miles Around Lake Michigan, Searching for Sustainable Civilizations – our guide, Dan Kelly.