In The Year 2525

Have you ever got a song stuck in your head? It happens to me all the time. A couple months ago, I was stuck on "Jesus Christ Superstar". As with many of my stories, things going on in my life tend to show up in the story. In this case, one of my characters went around humming "Jesus Christ Superstar". My youngest son told me I hummed it a lot - I didn't realize I was vocalizing it. :) Now, the song in my head is "In The Year 2525" by Zager and Evans. I bought my first copy when I was about 7 or 8 years old. I bought it again on CD a couple years ago on a collection of "California" songs. It was the best $3.00 I ever spent. It has a lot of fab songs. Anyway, I want to play this one over and over. So far the kids haven't started moaning and groaning like when I was playing my David Cook CD all the time. In case you don't know it, it's a real downer of a song with a really upbeat. Weird, I know. The lyrics go through the next 10,000 years in one thousand year increments, pondering what man will be like - real 60's style doomsday thinking - of course in the 60's everyone thought we were going to blow ourselves up with the A-bomb or destroy our world with pollution. For instance, it says something like "In the year 2525 if man is still alive, if woman can survive, they may find...In the year 3535..." It predicts test-tube babies, getting all our food through pills, having machines work our arms and legs, having all our thoughts come through whatever pill we took today..." (I'm pretty sure the song's writers were on drugs.) I got to thinking. It reminds me of romance novels. Yeah, Im warped but hear me out. You know how romance stories thrive on conflict and the best have the protagonists go through sucky and suckier things? And yet, they're still pretty upbeat. Somehow they usually strike the balance of putting the heroine in particular through really sucky things like facing the eminent loss of her ranch thats been in her family for generations. She might also be framed for a crime, be an orphan, etc. etc. And yet she has hope. She's not downtrodden. She doesn't dwell on her misery but presses onward and upward. Listen to the song I mention above and feel the beat. Its really uptempo. For me at any rate - I don't know about anyone else - that's really tough to strike that kind of balance. Of course, achieving such magical feats is why we make the big bucks. I think I just realized why my stories seem more realistic - and what I need to do. Wow! An epiphany brought on by a 40 year old song. Isn't it funny how you can do something for years, study hard, and it takes a long time to sink in? You'll also want to see what Amarinda Jones, Anika Hamilton, Anny Cook, Barbara Huffert, Brynn Paulin, Bronwyn Green, Dakota Rebel, Kelly Kirch, Molly Daniels, Sandra Cox, Regina Carlysle, and Cindy Spencer Pape are up to, so make sure to visit them also. :)