Taxicab v. Bicycle

Idea. T-shirt line. Taxicab v. Bicycle. Expound: a t-shirt line devoted to the eternal battle between these two outcasts of the streets. Outcasts? Or truest of patrons? Of the earth, it has been said.

But what of the road.

The taxicab driver: not breaking-even until around the 7th hour of driving, typically picking up assholes who are too worried, shy, drunk, or lazy to take public transit. The taxicab driver: sitting all day, back aching as his right calf grows progressively stronger than his atrophied left, counting the minutes until he can make a stop at his favorite toilet or White Hen, hoping that he doesn't get an asshole, praying that he gets a tip. Listening to yet another cell phone conversation.

The biker: pursuing a harmonious understanding of a planet in which one can get from point A (Lakeview) to point B (Randolf and Dearborn) by the sweat of his brow and the technological ingenuity of gears and spokes. The biker: dodging side mirrors and ignoring impatient honks as the roads provide and then do not provide designated lanes (into which open driver's doors will still fly). With every single stop sign he carefully glides through -- and let us be honest, most bikers slide through most stop signs -- he questions: would a police officer really waste time on me? It is a perilous existence -- the least sheltered of all commuters.

It only follows that these two honorable souls, the biker and the taxicab driver, these people of the asphalt, would share a fondness for one another. A bond. A brotherhood of liked minded pilgrims.

And yet, or so the myth goes, on the eighth day the taxicab driver Cain killed his biker brother Abel by pulling -- without warning -- intoa bike lane on Clark to drop off or pick up (the scrolls have deteriorated over time) a silly band of Depaul sophomores with their freshly intoxicated legality. The naive Abel thought himself invincible: he had his head light, he had his back light, he had his shiny reflectors, his helmet. No laws of the Department of Motor Vehicles nor the laws of mortality itself would apply to a fine young non-polluter like himself. And so, as he gazed at the beast that blocked his path, he decided, "Ah, hell. I'll plow right through it."

This rest, my friends, is historical fiction. Bloody, ugly, historical fiction.

Daily on the streets of Chicago, the war continues.

It is a subtle war.

Most commuters misunderstand it as a mere annoyance, that kind of annoyance complete strangers share when they pass on the streets and dislike one another's hair cuts, or shoes, or gait. Even the bus driver -- that lofty profession dared only by the patient and the desperate -- does not fully understand. He does not fear the biker, because us his enormity; and the biker does not fear him because of his lackadaisical sway from one stop to the next.

But the uneasy feud between the taxi and the bike is one of great risk and one of great worry for both.

In the end, there can, of course, be only one.

And it is time to pick sides.

It is time for action!

(and/or t-shirts)

Snake and Mouse

On September 12th and email with a new version of Spirits To Enforce snuck its way into my inbox on my computer at work. And there is sat. Waiting until today, when out it leaped, gleeful, to bare witness to my first major screw up: copying the old version of a script for 12 hungry actors with 15 hours to prepare a staged reading of a brilliantly funny play.

12 scripts. 78 pages. 12 x 78. 936 pages. Around $45 at Office Max. And how many trees.

Sigh.

But anyone who has messed up and cares about messing up and not messing up knows that it is not about money or about trees, but about Pride. That lovely and most frequent deadly sin. That over-exploited tragic flaw. In the end the versions are so similar that it mattered little. It took 37 minutes to remedy. And yet I'm still hot and bothered.

Old Habits Resurfacing

When my hands aren't moving
My brain is moving
outward and away!Notes on how to revise how we comment on incoming scripts.

Sarah Ruhl and I debate the structure of Passion Play

Rehearsal poem.

Opening

I am in the basement of a fancy restaurant. Waiters walk by with silver trays with expensive wine. Waiters walk by with silver trays with little tomato sandwiches. People are streaming straight from the theatre, around the corner, through the door, and down the steps; the waiters offer them expensive wine and nibbles. Romantic lighting. Money frequents these rooms.

I give my guest pass for two to the lady at the door before we come down. I am downing my first glass of red wine, trying to relax. Society. Where does one learn how to play this game? Certainly not in the public schools of St. Louis.

Introduce Rachel to the other interns. Make the rounds. Congratulate whatever actors you run into. Find Tanya. Find Sarah. Find Kristin. Find Pete. Eat the free food. Drink the free wine. Hide at the intern table. Congratulate Tanya. Congratulate Sarah. Joke with Pete. Joke with Molly. Get out.

Three feet away from me is Paula Vogel. Sarah Ruhl brought her to the opening as her date. Sure. Why not. I'd say something, but what is there to say really. Hi, I'm a huge fan. Hi, How I Learned To Drive changed how I think of writing for theatre. Hi, who knows maybe someday I'll apply to your program at Brown. Hi, hi, hi...network network network.

Of course not. I'm not that guy. I never want to be that guy. I hate those guys. At the Hotchner reading of Demons, some random lady came up afterwards to talk about playwriting with me and Liz. She was a playwright, and would Liz read some of her work if she sent it to her and would Liz introduce her to Carter. Of course, says Liz, here's my email.

At the bar later. Me, Liz, and Carter. The waitress says the kitchen closed early, but brings us peanuts. Who was that woman, Liz asks.? No idea. I thought you knew her, Liz says. That's the only reason why I gave her the time of day...

Networking.
Not for me.
Tastes of bile in my mouth.
A discomfort somewhere in my back.
The urge to leave the room.

Or move around the room to the desert table. Back in the fancy restaurant. Little chocolate cookies stuffed with a coconut paste. Divine. On my third one.

Introduce Sarah to Rachel. Sarah believes in the marriage ritual. We had that chat when I told her in rehearsal that Rachel and I had been together almost 8 years. Sarah's plays are about how the rules of love do not really exist. You love who you love, even if they're thirty years older than, even if they are melancholy, even if they are dead, even if they are terrible people and sell organs illegally. She didn't tell me this. I don't know if she knows. I don't know if it is true. But its there. I think it's there.

She tells me she gave Mark my notes. "Did you notice?" Inside I do a little dance. Three seconds of a three and a half hour play were stronger because of me: Eric enters looking for the Village Idiot. A scene (page 77) was clearer because I suggested she change 1 word. Of course I noticed. Later I will do a little dance to the 151.

Second glass of wine. Calming down. Rachel is on her second beer; having fun. Laughing with the other interns. Joking with Jess, but getting tired. She has a theatre company, Jess does. I learn today she might need a dramaturg for a play going up next March. She sent me the script.

Accidental networking. I can stomach that.

Pete has to get up at 4am to work at Starbucks, but he is staying "until the beer and wine runs out" but I'm tired. Rachel's eyes are glassy. She's a good sport.

Dance towards the 151.

Never said goodbye to Kristin. I should call her. I wonder if she said anything to Paula Vogel.

Free Write

...
...
...
Just write. Write anything. I will write something brilliant in a moment. I will write something brilliant in a moment. In a moment. In a moment.

I'd force this on my students what seems like years ago. A lifetime ago. Back when I was older. Back when I had a job at a university and not an internship in a theatre. Standards of success mean nothing. It's all bullshit. In May I was adjunct faculty; from now until January 11th, I will make 9 dollars a day. Upward mobility, how fickle a bedfellow you are.

But I miss teaching. Kind of. I mean I do. I miss figuring out how to reach them. Figuring out how to make them figure it out.

I will write something brilliant in a moment. I will write something in a moment. Brilliant.

I miss some of my students. The weird ones. The ones who wanted to fuck up the system and weren't worried about the grade. I miss the art students. I miss the projects they would pick when they admitted to themselves that their interests were valid: LOST. Tattoos. Pirates. Jon Stewart. Dr. Seuss. The politicalization of the food pyramid.

I'd get them writing. It was a writing course. Academic writing, but what's that mean really. Where's the line? Let loose. Learn what words do. Learn rhythm. Learn how to manipulate the sound of a pause that you make out of the combination of a halting word and a well-placed semi-colon.

There are lessons I miss. The purpose of punctuation. What a period does to the mind that a comma doesn't. Deconstructing your own default mode of writing, that mode of writing that you do at 4am the night before a five page paper is due that you know will somehow get you a decent grade. That rut you did yourself into.

I'm using mine right now. Quick sentence fragments. Staggered rhythm. Pretty soon I will throw in a longer sentence to make sure the reader knows that I am not retarded and can string together a cohesive thought.

Writing is a choosing to be in control.

There are things I miss.

Found my bag of colored pencils

blue skies the earth's on fire

I fly through blue sky. Swift. Sure. Mozart. Debussy. Pachelbel. Angel wings brush my eyebrows. I sail on my back. Through the blue, a hint of stars. A hint of something larger. A hint of something distant. So easy to ignore, surrounded by the blue.

Below me: a burst. A pop. A bomb. A single scream reaches me, stacked on the sound-wave-backs of ten-thousand other screams. I am sure it is the scream of my love. We had met on the back of a hippo. And now she is dead. The stars would have warned me.

The ground is on fire. There is no where to land. And below me the tiny ships begin to swarm like militant bees. They are the fire. And now I, in my tiny ship, am the blue. I am Sky Patrol. And I am the dying world's last hope.

My parents did not allow video games in the house until I was comparatively old (comparative to the entirety of my friendbase who enjoyed duck hunt, mario, and kong at their release), and it was undoubtedly one of their many genius moves because they now eat away at my life in the most masturbatory of ways. And I am 25. I know better. I should be mature enough to be immature responsibly.

Without a console to console me, I would make up worlds as I biked around and around my neighborhood, dodging dragons and skirting under wall-sized doors as they smashed close. I would jump into the wind to save that pretty blonde girl in the second grade. I would latch around her with one arm and around the jungle gym with the other. I would save her.

When Dylan and Eric failed to blow up Littleton Colorado but incidentally achieved a minor semblance of their disastrous rampage, the country divided itself, as it is prone to do. I, of course, came to the defense of Marilyn Manson (whom I did not like) and Doom (which I had not played). Music and video games cannot shift a psyche in any significant way. Then their journals were released.

I think anyone who has both played a video game obsessively and seen The Last Starfighter would have to admit that it would be amazing if the skills learned in, say, Mario Kart were directly applicable to the real world. Dylan and Eric made their world one in which their expertise was applicable. I guess it already was applicable: they could have just waited a year and become quite useful to the marines.

One of my old students sent me a paper that she revised to submit to a campus journal. It asks the question: why do we celebrate pirates and demonize terrorists when in action and definition the two roles are not dissimilar. Why are Eric and Dylan monsters when boys their age are ordered to murder victims the same age as the students of Columbine every day? Cultural semantics? Proximity? The States are a sacred ground on which innocent blood shall not be spilt?

Man. I was going to avoid making these things political. But, hey, what the hell. I've started seven journals over the course of my life, and this is the only time I made it to the second entry.