no fate but what we make

I clean my desk and I clean the dishes in the sink because I think it is a way to clear my mind of the clutter that prevents it from writing. But I prevent myself from writing even when the silverware shines and the paperwork is neatly filed away. It is easier to sit on the couch and watch Terminator 3 (a damn fine movie no doubt) and ponder what it says about me as a person that the commercial advertising the success of a penis-enlargement pill (though they never use the word penis: that would be too vulgar) comes on every other break. It is Saturday night. And I am home alone with two cats watching Arnold before he became governor. What demographic am I filling? What statistic? There is a cast party up on the Brown Line; I think I'd have fun but it is just a little too far and just a little too cold. But it hasn't started yet, so I tell myself there is still hope.

Some advertising clerk decided that the 7 to 9:30 Saturday night slot on AMC attracts an audience of men who needed some enhancement...what if they are right?

Spent the afternoon in the Newberry Library: a public library that manages to feel like an exclusive country club...but for dorks. There are lockers on the main floor in which you have to stow your bag and coat before you can enter, which you can then only do when you explain what specifically you have come to the Newberry to find and then you sign in and then they give you some paperwork to fill out once you have reached the 3rd floor before you go down to the 2nd floor where you hand the clerks the information for the three (3) books you would like them to fetch for you; no civilian is allowed in the stacks. They give you a desk number and point you towards your chair and a few minutes later the clerk has come with the books...Public Mirror: Moliere and the Social Commerce of Depiction by Larry F. Norman (1999)...Moliere: His Life and Works by John Palmer (1930)...Moliere, a playwright and his audience by W. D. Howarth (1982)...and before he arrives you run quickly to the john and check to make sure your pen is functional because once he arrives you need to read, your hand feverishly keeping up, because you cannot check books out of the Newberry and photocopies are $.40 a page at the Newberry and the Newberry closes at 5pm on Saturday and aren't open at all on Sunday...

A dramaturg's utopic dream.

And it is quiet like no library is quiet because the rigmarole to get in is so thorough that once you are in you are there to work. You are there to get done what you needed to get done. You have a mission and you have gone through marine boot camp and survived the hazing and by-golly you are going infiltrate the Communist Military Base and deactivate the launch sequence because that is what you were trained to do...only the Military Base looks a lot like Paris in 1622 and deactivating the launch sequence involves discovering that Jean Poquelin IV is a lot like Horton Foote in that they were both actors well before they were writers...but Horton Foote is still alive. And Moliere's, well, not.

I wonder how many other people left the Newberry at 5 -- having satisfied their need for research; we are all researching the exact same question, we're just going about it differently -- only to find themselves on their futon with a cat 3 hours later watching commercials on male-enhancement...

If I stare at the television hard enough maybe I will see them staring back at me.