Old Man Ira

See you, space cowboy

2008-10-19T23:06:00.004-05:00

I was reprimanded by my buddy Marisa through a comment on the last post. It lovingly reads, "I wish you blogged more, punk." That was 11 days ago, but I am only getting it right now because, as she points out, I have not been keeping up with this blog. My last post on Old Man Ira was a little over a month ago.

But I have been blogging. I have actually been more rigorous in my posts than ever before. But not here. Old Man Ira, I am afraid, was something of a starter blog.

So, if you are still periodically looking to this blog for my wheres and whats, then you should definitely check out http://darkknightdramaturgy.wordpress.com/ as it has been where I've been writing since September 8.

And sorry, Marisa, for not sending out a memo!

Punk.

me and my red pen

2008-09-13T23:08:00.002-05:00

This is the sort of English up with which I will not put.
-Winston Churchill

At the age of 26, after having finished six years of university, after having written a thesis and gotten some minor things published, and after having taught Writing 1 for four semesters, I am taking my first non-fiction writing course since AP English, senior year of high school.

Okay, it's not a writing course: it's a copyediting course. And work is paying for it. But still.

I am writing this entry because I am avoiding doing my homework. HOMEWORK! My current assignment is to read Chapter 14 from The Copyeditor's Handbook, "Grammar: Principles and Pitfalls." It's not bad actually; I wish I had known about it so I could have assigned it.

Having never taken a writing course (other than playwriting), I am learning a lot of little things, and, yes, as a writer I really do geek out over them. This whole concept of notional agreement (which formally disregards formal agreement by relying on the meaning of what is being said rather that the words being used) BLOWS MY MIND.

Rachel is sitting next to me, working on a real writing assignment. She is struggling to get started, and asks for advice. I read over the prompt: basic, beginning of the semester, let's see how loose I can get them to go (is this phrase a subjunctive?!), assignment. Write about anything from the perspective of anyone but yourself in a detail-oriented style. I turn off the student inside me (careful, you sick bastards) and turn on the teacher and go to work, with 5 pages left in Chapter 14: the preposition section.

"The more pressing issue for copyeditors is to ensure that the author has selected the correct preposition."

Soon I get to do a worksheet!

in appreciation of articulation

2008-09-10T19:17:00.002-05:00

The human body evolved over eons into an intricate machine whose expected fuel is fruits, vegetables, legumes, nuts, meat, and, since the last Ice Age ended ten thousand years ago, a modicum of wheat, corn, and rice. Food was abundant only seasonally, while migration or at least nomadism was a way of life. In the epochs before domesticated meat sources, those centuries of hunting wild prey with spears and traps, the body's metabolism adapted to store any caloric surplus in the form of fat--which could be broken down during subsequent starving times into fuel again.

That plan remains the evolutionary strategy of all the human bodies now making their way though our entirely different contemporary world. Reduce the greens in that body's intake, add dairy and processed carbohydrates, make meat a daily part of the diet, shovel in sugar and oils, provide a steady supply for the appetite, and on top of all this turn the hunter-gatherer into a mostly sedentary being, and the result is both unfortunate and predictable. The machine stores fat to its own detriment, while the body's strategy for nomadic survival becomes a fatal anachronism. Evolution did not anticipate nine to five. Evolution has no reply to TV.

From Stephen P. Kiernan's Last Rights: Rescuing the End of Life from the Medical System (which I am reading as part of my research for Jane Anderson's Quality of Life, in which we explore the topic of Right to Die)

off the job training

2008-09-10T00:15:00.001-05:00

I did not know this morning that tomorrow I would be a student again, but today I found myself registering for UC Berkeley's Extension course down the street from where I work at A.C.T. in the heart of San Francisco. Tomorrow at 6:30 p.m., I will be sitting in a computer room learning the finer points of copyediting. And, yes, I am excited.

I have actually really been wanting to learn Spanish so I don't have to read Hispanic / Latino / Mexican / etc. plays in translation. I searched Craigslist for a used Rosetta Stone (Tangent: This was before Mr. Phelps started promoting Rosetta Stone with that stupid "I like to do everything fast" commercial. If the pool at the 1972 Olympic games had been as deep as the pool in China's Cube, and if the swimmers wore the same Speedo LZR Racer suit that they wore this summer, Mark Spitz would still not have been able to win eight medals because there weren't eight medals to be won), but all of the deals sounded sketchy--the kind of sketchy that means that either a) the program wouldn't work properly or b) I would be caught up in some FBI sting operation targeting this guy named Sam:

I have been in the business of selling these for 3 years now. I am aware
that others on craigslist is selling stuff for cheaper but in all
honesty, I can bet those are not authentic. I can sell burned stuff for
even $50 and make more then what I make on authentic stuff but I care
for my customers and don't want them to get in trouble!

You have to be very carefull with
non authentic rosetta products as there is a license as a copied one
will work anywhere from 3 days to 6 months as rosetta will then see a
duplicate of the license being used and will blur it as the disk will
then read as disk error and there is a good chance rosetta will issue
you a $1000US fine as I can give you contacts of people who have got
these fines.. the sellers of copied rosetta don't care for the buyers
as they are trying to make a quick buck! If you have any problems with
my rosetta products I promise to give even 10 times your money back!

Please let me know
thanks kindly
Sam

So I didn't buy from Sam. I learned that you can access some verion of Rosetta Stone through the library here, but it won't work on my computer yet. All this is to say that I am in no way opposed to becoming a student again, even a student of Chicago Manuel editing rules.

musings of a sore throat in september

2008-09-08T21:06:00.003-05:00

It is an ugly day. San Francisco, realizing it should be autumn now, has covered itself with a wet blanket of fog that, unlike its frequent fog, has lasted throughout the day. I think it too is moody that it doesn't really get autumny here. My boss took last week off, finally having someone she could trust with the office (me!), only to get slightly sick with a soar throat. We both joked (when we spoke the one time I called her so that she could explain to me what a House Board is and what my role should be in acquiring the information for said House Board) that it was just her immune system's way of saying, Yeah, well if you can take a break so can I; I've been holding this ship together with chewing gum and paper clips for two years while you went full speed. So screw you, I'm going to Vegas.

But now I too have a soar throat, meaning that it was not just a psychological-turned-physiological phenomenon. And we are out of juice. And it is an ugly day.

I dropped a commission last Thursday. Horrible, isn't it? Someone is actually willing to pay me to write a play, and I tell them to go screw. Criminal. But they didn't meet my terms (my terms begin that I, not they, would own the end product). And I could have probably negotiated, but they were only giving me a month to write the thing, and, honestly, I was sick of dealing with it. Too much going on here.

Stage direction: As he writes this last bit about the commission, a bright pink post-it should slowly fall from the notes from the project in questoin, notes he has tucked between two magazing holders. The post-it should fall like a spray painted leaf, and when it lands the words, "Luis = Warrior" and "Nesto = Serious", should be visible to remind him that he had put some thought into it. He will be left with the question, Should I throw this note away just like I threw the commission away? Or should I save it as a reminder? Should I save it for some future play when I need two brothers, one who is fighting for change and one who is too serious about his future to disrupt the status quo.

I dropped the commission and then preceded to waste my weekend. I have never been good with spare time. Rachel says I need to learn how to relax. I tried to relax by watching Arrested Development on Hulu, and then moseying through episodes of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. Very different shows, both good and bad for very different reasons. I kept trying to tell myself that I was relaxing, but I kept retorting, you aren't relaxing, you twit, you're wasting time.

Time I should spend doing what exactly, I ask.

To which I scoff, Time you should be figuring out how you are going to spend your time.

You twit.

this message will inevitably self destruct at some point in the future whether you read it or not

2008-08-25T23:08:00.005-05:00

I am a reluctant nihilist. I do not embrace this. I do not rejoice in my nihilism (though maybe I do wear it around my neck like a pet albatross), and that I look to the distant future and see nothing but void does not give me a sense of liberty or freedom. The literally inconceivable absence of myself forces me to turn to other options: the breathing of the cat passed out around my feet; a thought on a script I read earlier that day; memories; the near future. Anything. Even writing about it is not thinking about it. Writing about it does not create the panic because I am choosing words. I am carefully crafting sentences to convey a meaning so that I can avoid feeling what is behind that meaning.

Life is a defense mechanism.

I have had many MANY a conversation with the faithful about my envy of their security. Do not mock it, their devotion to a higher power: how can you accuse them of being illogical when they live their lives in comfort and promise? I think missionaries would find me endlessly frustrating: a willing convert whose ______is too stubborn to accept what his______would like to accept. You cannot CHOOSE to believe in something. The question, How can you believe in something, is no more difficult to answer than, How can you not believe in anything? Maybe we should be using "may": How MAY you believe in that? Who let you? What opened you up to it? Where can I get some? Do they sell it at Walgreens?

And yet this is not a sad post for me. I have been grappling with this on some level since I was 13 and in the affirmation program of my church and we were told that we get to decide what to believe in. A great gift, not to be forced into a doctrine; but no doubt a burden to those of us who took it seriously. So this is not a new conversation I am having with myself.

And here's the kicker: the flip side to nihilism is that there is ABSOLUTELY NO REASON NOT TO BE HAPPY. If nothing matters, than misery is just as worthless as happiness. And yet happiness is just so much more enjoyable.

This was going to be an entry about my new life in San Francisco. It tried really hard to be, but fell to a false start. I am thinking about moving my conversations related to theater over to the Dark Knight blog, but that idea stresses me out. That idea makes it seem like I should take it more seriously. And should one take a blog seriously?

i'm writing again i'm writing again i'm writing again so stop nagging my brain and let me write again

2008-08-25T22:52:00.005-05:00

Write something.
Write anything.
Sneeze in your hand and wipe the snot on the page.
Anything to start.

Draw a line around the snot.
Oh that's a nice shape.
Looks kind of like a flower.
Maybe you should write about a flower.
You like flowers.
You were a gardener once.
You bought a calathia for your bathroom. Though those don't flower.

Flowers remind me of vampires. Cue vampire segue:
I am reading Twilight that new book (with vampires) that is supposedly the next Harry Potter. It's not the next Harry Potter. It's not a smart book. It's an easy book. It is the kind of novel that makes me think that I could write a novel. In like three weeks. I actually started. In my head. To write a novel. I think the problem a lot of writers have is that they are trying to be good; when I write my novel, I am going to do like Stephenie Meyer did it: to make enough money to pay for maintenance on her mini-van. She needed to make 10,000 bucks; she got a book deal for 250,000.

Okay, I don't know where I heard that, but I definitely heard that. I just tried to find a link to some evidence that this is truly what happened, and came up shorthanded.

Sometimes I am in the mood for that kind of book; other times I read one sentence and am disgusted with myself and more disgusted with how it really is just up to a publisher to decide what becomes popular.

I have often thought that becoming famous isn't all that difficult: you just have to find someone who wants to make you famous who has the power to make you famous. That's it. That simple.

Day 1

2008-07-31T11:08:00.002-05:00

A young Hamlet whines of nunneries outside my 7th floor window. Elizabeth admits that this is one of her pet peeves, and when I start writing for the Publications portion of my Publications and Literary Associate gig, when these external recitations compete with my internal experiments, it will probably become one of my pet peeves as well. But for now I can only giggle. I work in an office where on any given day one might hear Juliet bitch out her nurse on the 7th floor patio.

Damn you USPS!

2008-07-09T13:24:00.005-05:00

I built my bookcases on Monday. After days of Craigslist games -- The Waiting Game; Cat and Mouse; Bullshittm; etc. -- we caved and went back to Ikea to get some bookcases named after some guy named Billy. And they are lovely, and now all my books and comic books and encyclopedia collection (The DC Comics Encyclopedia; The Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology; A Dictionary of Angels; The Encyclopedia of Witches and Witchcraft) have been freed from their boxes.

Some books were not so lucky. Of the seven boxes I sent media mail, only six arrived unmarred: the seventh sadly had broken open en route and only a third of contents made the trek: Sylvia Plath's Ariel was unsurprisingly a trooper though her friend Sappho was left behind. God smiled down upon The Five Gospels and A Dictionary of Angels, but surprisingly did not favor my collection of Horton Foote plays. I don't know all that was lost, and all you bibliophiles out there know my heart is breaking.

If anyone sees Horton Foote having a tea party with Sappho somewhere in the vicinity of the Rocky Mountains, let me know: I'll send Paula Vogel and Richard Rodriguez to come rescue them.

Pilgrimage

2008-07-04T13:30:00.002-05:00

I'll begin in the middle of things as it seems like an epic.

Kansas is beautiful. It's supposed to be boring and monotonous, isn't it? It was last time I did this drive when I was coming back from Colorado with my family when I was, what, 16? 15? Maybe earlier. Earlier, I think, because I bought that t-shirt in Durango that I wore through high school (and college), but I was old enough to sample dad's samples at the microbrews. But maybe it was middle school because I remember being poolside at our hotel and calculating the chances that I had with random girl A. That was a middle school mindsent, and a middle school mindset cannot appreciate Kansas. Or was that Arizona? Maybe I was in high school...but still had a middle school mindset.

It is the second shift on Day 1 and I am driving Defne's 1994 Ford pickup through Kansas with the windows down and I think I understand America.

It is the third shift on Day 1 and we are driving north around Denver towards Ft. Collins where we will spend the night at a hotel that allows pets with the sun setting behind the mountain range and I think I understand much of art history.

It is the first shift on Day 1 and I am driving Rachel's 2008 Honda Fit which she bought off the lot yesterday afternoon from a charming salesman who used to be a highway patrolman and has a niece in PT school. He doesn't bullshit us about the price or the trade-in. It's a hatchback: Rach has beamed over hatchbacks since I have known her. I am driving towards Kansas City, MO without cruise control because we are supposed to let the engine relax periodically. I am hoping that this zippy car has the stamina to make the 30 hour pilgrimage. With 5 cats in the back seat yelling in my ear, I am hoping I have the stamina to make the 30 hour pilgrimage. I wonder what the ramifications would be for removing a cat's larynx.

It is Sunday and we are finally moving towards San Francisco. Last Wednesday we drove from Chicago to St. Louis to pick up Rachel's new Honda Civic, which will arrive from the manufacturer by Friday at the latest. St. Louis is not on the way from Chicago to San Francisco unless there is severe flooding in southern Iowa. I enjoy returning to St. Louis more every time I return to St. Louis. Family, yes of course; but the trees. St. Louis doesn't have a lot of height to it. Not like Chicago's apartment filled skyline. In St. Louis, the trees are often the top of the civilized world. At least in the parts of St. Louis I frequent. I am missing a staged reading of a play I wrote for a company I adore in Chicago, but I will be able to attend the opening of a site-specific piece I wrote for a young company in St. Louis.

On Thursday, we take Defne (who is our roommate in SF if I neglected to mention it) to Blueberry to visit with old friends who prove to be very much the same as when we left a year ago. Time moves slowly in that bar if it moves at all. Delightful for us now that we are on the outside, but obviously frustrating for some of our friends who are tired of the stasis. Breaking stasis is difficult, especially when it pays well and the drinks are half off.

Friday comes and still no car. The manufacturer is in Ohio. If the car were coming from overseas, then the dealer who sold Rachel the car (Randy Borth, whom we have dealt with before and who is a straightshooter and an all around great guy...there are some lovely car dealers in this world, let the record show) would have been able to track every leg of the journey. But as the car is coming from Ohio, we are at the whim of the trucking union, who is apparently is not required or expected to communicate with the car dealers. We begin to panic because we wanted to leave Friday, Saturday at the latest, Sunday as a worst case scenario. I am driving the Fit through Wyoming (first shift Day 2) when Randy calls Rachel to tell her the Civic finally arrived.

I am not sure about Utah. Utah has exits off the highway that don't seem to go anywhere. You exit, the road bends, and then the concrete ends. Other exits lead to towns which appear to be merely a short series of trailers. Utah confuses me. Wyoming is beautiful, and it is interesting to me that the state lines are not as arbitrary as I imagined. Wyoming is marketable; Wyoming is a cigarette ad. Ten minutes into Utah, and you stop imagining cowboys and start wondering where people buy milk. You drive for an hour and a half at 80 mph on the same straight highway going between one mountain range and another, congratulating yourself for filling up your gas tank at the last station, listening to the Bible Station explain Revelations and Jezebel because it is the most interesting of three stations and because it couldn't hurt to have God on your side out here seeing as the wilderness seems to be God's thing. I am driving the truck again. It is not as comfortable or as fun as it was on Day 1.

Utah shifts into Nevada without much fuss. We stay in a small city ~100 miles outside of Reno where we get a roll of nickels with our hotel (motel?) room and are encouraged to eat at one of the 7 or 8 casinos on our block. We do. I win a dollar in nickels before losing them.

We get into San Francisco at 2pm on Day 3. Our keys don't work because they apparently fixed (changed) the locks, but luckily the third floor had burst a pipe over the weekend and workmen were around the building with keys and they let us in so that we can let our cats (little troopers) out of their crates. Earlier in the day, Linus had finally had enough and succeeded in expanding a small hole in the carrier he shared with Mabel into a hole large enough for him to jam his head through and subsequently shimmy his body out of. But they survived. We survived.

Tips for moving from the Midwest to California:

1) Burger King has the best vegetarian options of the fast food chains. They also have cheesy tots.

2) Gas is cheaper in Wyoming.

3) Go through Kansas. Skip most of Utah.

4) Drive an old pickup with bunk air conditioning.

5) You could do it two days if you had to...two really long days.

words are words

2008-05-03T11:34:00.004-05:00

Taking a break from a marathon playwriting binge, my lower back is getting sore sitting in Argo's wooden chairs. I am sitting with a view out the window, which has been surprisingly unproblematic. I used to peoplewatch. I guess I still do but maybe with less intrigue...hunger? I don't get distracted by them as they walk by anymore, and I'm not sure that is something to be proud of. Have I finally shaken off whatever tendencies that encouraged some random neighbor to suggest to my mom that she put me on ritalin when I was 3, which my mother promptly, and smartly, rejected. Or have I just lost interest? Has cynicism taken over?

Or do I people watch differently? I watch out the window and I see bodies -- some attractive, some less so -- and clothing. I adore our era of clothes, at least in my neighborhood. There is this hodgepodge rebellion against the trendiness of whatever label is big right now. People wear what they want and wear what looks good on them. An eclecticism of colors and styles and fits.
And then there is the blogosphere. This is the first time I have ever used this word: blogosphere. An atmosphere created by electronically reserved ideas. It's funny that my blog spellcheck doesn't even acknowledge it's a word. Now we people watch from the perspective of the people we watch.

rushed

2008-05-01T20:19:00.001-05:00

I feel the decaffinated starbucks surging through my veins like a bobsledder on acid. That is how desperate I am for time: coffee at 8pm on a work night. I will fall asleep maybe around 3 if at all. Decaffinated starbucks is, for a tea drinker, like plugging your heart to a car battery.

But I need the time. A project that was proposed a month ago was reproposed three days ago as a larger project with a sooner deadline...namely the same deadline as the other commission I have been working on. Namely this sunday. 45 to 60 minute play in 6 days. Go!

And quickly it becomes clear that plays are like children. And you don't want to have a favorite, but you kind of do...or maybe it is just that the younger one has so much promise and possibility and needs more nurturing and love and is just, frankly, a whole lot cuter than the older grungier child with her problems and hidden tatoos that you don't even want to think about. She won't change and she doesn't care what you think because she is her own independent preteen. So getting her to put on a dress to go to the theatre: an exercise in manipulation, coddling, and bribery.

I have this shirt that barely has any thread left; fits like cobweb. It was my dad's old Wilson baseball tee. She finally got me to stop wearing it because it really wasn't a shirt anymore. But it took her like three years. And I only have three days to make my preteen play presentable.

Sunshine Melody

2008-04-20T14:13:00.002-05:00

This I learned from Italy:

Sunny Sunday. Comfortable t-shrit. Old jeans with the holes at the knees. Stop at the store: two apples, a croissant, hunk of gouda, some gypsy brand salami, and a bar of chocolate (Veritas Chocolatier's espresso & milk chocolate fittingly).
Grab a knife. Grab a drink.
Grab two scripts off my desk -- one rehearsing at the theatre; one I'm revising for a commission -- and head to the lake.

Nothing but sun and our sea of a lake. A few couples walk their dogs. Some fishermen. A guy who shows up when I do with his guitar. Same mission; different weapons.

But the sun cannot cut the cold, and I last 30 minutes before the chills impede my turning of the pages.

When does this damn city warm up!

I mean, honestly.

Back to the apartment and two sleeping cats surprised I'm back so soon. Open the blinds. Let in the sun.

A picnic on my coffee table.

2008-04-19T20:32:00.000-05:00

We can never know what the future would have been.

The Words

2008-04-19T20:25:00.002-05:00

Maybe it is because of my new job that I found myself in the script aisle at Borders. I did not go there to buy scripts; with the potential impending move -- still not completely finalized because of a scholarship complicating matters that my homework-crazed ladyfriend is too busy to wade through -- buying scripts that will just add to the weight of boxes that not nine months ago made the walk from the moving truck to our apartment door unbearable...it seems counterintuitive. I went to buy Juno and the new Ludo CD. Which I bought. Along with August: Osage County (which I have since read; a wonderful amalgamation of Buried Child, King Lear, and some other flavor that I just can't define...a sprinkle of Whose Afraid of Virginia Woolf maybe?...or maybe it's just Letts himself...maybe great playwrights are like prime numbers) and Three Days of Rain (which I mayhaps will read after I cook some dinner).

But my new job is...well...a departure from what I know about theatre. In fact, in my first 4 days on the job, it has had very little to do with theatre other than it is on the fourth floor of a building that houses two theatres in a cubicle surrounded by people who are in someway responsible for the general functioning of those theatres. That is not to say it's a bad job: as Interim Education Coordinator -- filling a position on short notice and no training when it was left vacant by its former occupant -- I will be dealing with students and teachers (which I have done before and miss) and seeing to the theatre's interns (which also reminds me of my teaching days when fresh-eyed freshman would ask my advice on what to do with their lives as if I had lived any myself at the ripe old age of 25). But it is not what I signed up for; not in the long run.

But, I signed up for it for the next few weeks. Which is why I wake up in the middle of the night fretting over transforming revised Word documents into PDFs and sifting through the applications for the next Education Intern -- "I trust you" says the boss -- when I have only been in the Education department for 4 days and have little idea what makes for an exceptional Education Intern and am wondering if I, in good conscience, can sign someone up for multiple months of free labor in an environment that does not value their interns as students to the extent to which they like to pride themselves or to the extent, I think, they probably should considering the free labor aspect of the deal...

August: Osage County works because it is big, but not out of control. It has thirteen characters and requires a whole house of a set, but by dividing the set into a dollhouse of segmented rooms and by allowing storylines to fade out of focus for periods of time, Letts is able to build a larger story out of smaller components. It's like the backside of Big Ben -- which is actually the bell not the clock but oh well: the world sees a big time piece clicking through the days effortlessly; but inside the Clock Tower hide lesser cogs and gears working in perfect collaboration. I am not saying the play appears effortless, nor would I argue that it is perfect. But it is certainly worth celebrating...

I would rather be talking scripts that study guides.

But it has been only four days. By the end of next week I will know how to comfortably convert files into other files. I will learn how to use TypePad. I will know how to work Tessitura. I will have met the teachers. I will have interviewed applicants. I will have asked my boss for a $30 expense fee per intern to give them an opportunity to take someone in the business out for lunch so that they can understand a little better how the theatre world of Chicago works. This time next week I will understand my new job, and I will be comfortable with it.

And I will be back on the couch, reading another play, wishing I was dealing again with the words.

2008-04-17T01:14:00.001-05:00

Psychiatry is our new mythology,
In which we are all our
Gods and Monsters.

Goodbye Bountiful. Goodbye.

2008-04-13T21:38:00.002-05:00

Lois and Hallie hold their stare a little longer tonight. The audience probably doesn't notice, but this isn't their third time seeing Trip to Bountiful in as many days. The staredown itself is a rather new, rather lovely, invention. It is a moment of reconciliation. It is a careful negotiation of power. Mrs. Watts offers her daughter-in-law the pension check -- the object of much consternation; her daughter-in-law takes it only to hand it back to her.

Oh here, you hold the check; but don't go and lose it before we get back home.

Sometime last week (or maybe it was only Friday?), Lois began teasing Hallie with the check in this moment. Ever so slightly. Almost lovingly. Maybe lovingly. Since the success of that experiment, it has tempered slightly but the stare remained. And today -- closing -- Hallie held it. A second maybe two. Not wanting to let go. Not wanting this amazing run of an amazing show to be over. You would only notice it if you had seen the show about ten times. Or maybe you had to be in the van on the ride from the rental apartment to the theatre when Hallie laments the show's end and becomes -- some suggest uncharacteristically, but I don't know her well enough -- sentimental.

I found myself getting uncharacteristically sentimental during this afternoon's performance of a show I'd seen twice already this weekend and close to a dozen times over the course of its run. Every moment was final. I would not hear these words I had come to memorize any time soon. All the old heartaches that broke during the opening resurface: when Meghan talks about Robert (I guess any name he had I think was nice), when Devon acknowledges that he thinks his life is a failure, when Lois says goodbye to her house. These aren't characters anymore. They're friends. And then it is over. Lois gives a quick hug and is in a car to the airport, where she will catch a flight to LA, where she will be picked up by another car and driven to some HBO set. The crew immediately begins taking things down. We go to a brief closing party, and then it is goodbyes.

And earlier today I started moving in to my new desk in the Education Department for a 10 week stint as Education & Outreach Coordinator. I am the cheerful nomad of the Goodman's 4th floor.

I'm in the hallway outside Horton's apartment, walking with him to the elevator. He has more spring in his step than when he arrived in February; Hallie found him a damn fine yoga instructor. He forgets his cane, not because he turned 92 in March, but because he doesn't use his cane in the apartment anymore. I joke with Frank's 5 year old daughter that I'm aging backwards, but with Horton it might actually be true.

We're on the way to the theatre for one last show. He begins to get nostalgic, sad that his gem of a play will soon be over.

I say to him, all things must end, with a pleasant smile.

So they say, he replies with an equally pleasant smile.

So they say.

in the air

2008-04-06T23:36:00.003-05:00

Today was one of those raw days, or at least it started out as one. It started out like that mosquito net that normally surrounds you, that normally dulls the world ever so slightly (not necessarily in a malevolent way, but as the softest subtlest defense mechanism that comes standard on all models), had been lifted. I woke up to a song on NPR (it must be Sunday) that was sung by Nina Simone three days following MLK's assassination: Why. "A song written for today, for this hour."

Folks you better stop and think Because we're heading for the brink. What will happen now that he is dead.

So I guess this vulnerability to the worlds psychic waves was understandable. Maybe I should start waking up to music rather than to the news. Maybe it will make me less...analytical?

Also, it was beautiful outside. One of the first days that one could reasonably call Springlike. I now subscribe to the folklore surrounding Chicago winters...it is not so much that they are cold (thought they can be), but that they are interminable. And some days the cold feels downright English: wet and invasive, like a fog of ghosts walking around the city sticking their ethereal hands into your chest just for ghoulish shits and giggles. Dead jerks.

But today was blissfully sunny. Rachel is in San Francisco looking at CCA where she got accepted to the Graphic Design MFA program...it is sunnier more often there...and their winters are considerably shorter...it is an enticing proposition indeed. Old friends from St. Louis are picking up and moving to Portland. They are encouraging in more ways than one. They have a successful business making and selling stunning artwork online (that's their work above). They are the heroes of Etsy.com, an online market place of craft. They're actually where I got the idea for darkknightdramaturgy. The internet is not going away, and we are the generation to assimilate this tool into society (or adapt society to incorporate this tool).

I am reading Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert on orders from a friend. This too might have contributed to the rawness. I didn't think I would like it: I imagined it to be much too self-helpy. But it is surprisingly delightful. Well maybe the delightfulness is not surprising. Gilbert is like a less academically-grounded Joan Didion: where Didion relies on structurally mesmerizing tangents and allusions (brilliantly), Gilbert prefers metaphors and other figurative tricks. It is easy, and enjoyable. I guess the surprise is that it is intriguing. Even inspiring.

In a world of disorder and disaster and fraud, sometimes only beauty can be trusted.

It was one of those days when you could see cleverness floating just above your head, waiting for you to pluck it. Everything was in sharper focus. Clarity. It would have been a good day to write, but I didn't have the time unfortunately.

So I simply enjoyed the rush.

Passing Go

2008-03-31T22:38:00.002-05:00

It is difficult to start again. Like picking up in the middle of a conversation you left off a month ago. Or like writing a letter to that friend you said you were going to call last November and even worked out which day that week you would have time to sit down and actually talk for an hour or so. But you never called. And now you think about what you would say if you did call; you think about this about once a week; the hole of silence becomes deeper and harder to climb out of. You want to say something to make up for the lost time. Make the wait worth it. You want to catch them up on the last 8 months (jesus have I been in Chicago that long; three seasons?; I watched my first Cubs game today [or at least part of it: the exciting part as it were when they were tied and then they weren't and then they were tied again -- I turned it off before they lost]; that was weird) but you don't know where to even start because the person they knew made way for this new person that you are.

I've lost many a friend this way.

Rachel may be moving us to San Francisco, and that impending possibility and the fact that I actually have a full-time job for the time being (I'm not at risk of not paying rent) is driving me into treading-water-mode. Don't pursue any new projects because you don't know how long you can commit or if you are going to need to get a better paying job to afford the move; don't pursue any new friendships because you don't know how long you can commit or if you are going to have to break them off as soon as you've started them: nobody needs another long-distance burden; start evaluating; start prioritizing; start distancing.

It is a shitty way.

while I wasn't writing my script reports

2008-03-10T15:21:00.006-05:00

me: that food fight video is f-ed up in the best possible way though i wish i hadn't been eating when i watched it

rachel: me too

me: i am still trying to unpack it

rachel: i had to pause it for a while because i was eating

me: i think it will take a few more viewings

rachel: yeah it's pretty loaded

me: to really understand the symbolism

yeah

are the pretzels Germany?

they are right?

rachel: i guess so

i mean, they killed the matzha

me: right

rachel: matzah

me: and then the croissants were obviously france

yeah

i'll need to rewatch

which means its awesome

rachel: you can dedicate a blog entry to figuring it out

me: I SHOULD

Sent at 3:16 PM on Monday

rachel is offline. Messages you send will be delivered when rachel comes online.

incompleted

2008-03-08T15:33:00.002-06:00

A reading of this play I didn't write?

2008-03-08T15:19:00.001-06:00

I inadvertently had my first Chicago reading today. On January 22, I was offered one of the oddest jobs: ghost-rewriting another playwright's play. In this play, three goddesses come down to save the planet from, firstly, environmental destruction, and then, secondly, a nuclear holocaust. They intend to do this by inspiring three activists to do...well to do what they are already doing...only better. They want to convince them to embrace their inner "god" or "poet", as the original playwright put it. Only these gods accidentally allow human emotion to consume them and they fall in love with the humans they are attempting to assist. Whoops.

Not my thing really. Although, I realized half way through the ghost-written rewrite -- for which I would receive no credit or royalties but had attached to it a commissioning fee that would pay my rent for the three months to follow -- that I started my own playwriting experiments with gods, goddesses, and spirituality. My first full-length play was about a son and a father in the afterlife who could travel to visit the living on a horse; one of my first completed one-acts was about the three Fates and what happens if they just quit; an early ten-minute play for a 24 hour play festival examined a couple in the Elysian fields. So I can deal with that crap. Mythology's just my cup of tea.

Activism though? Really? Me? I'm fairly moderate. More over, I'm a libra. The idea of getting passionate enough to do, well, just about anything seems foreign to me, as did writing a play about characters who are passionate enough to fight. But I did it and it's done and I've been paid and after Monday's meeting with the original playwright and his staff (his alter ego is the President of the Center for Cultural Interchange), I don't have to have anything to do with it...

Except I probably will. There was a reading today. I hadn't been invited: this was either a) an oversight, b) a decision based on the assumption that I would not want to come because I wouldn't be paid for my time and because it says quite clearly in my contract that I will have no association with the play after Monday's meeting, or c) a decision based on the idea that it would be easier to criticize the play if I was not present. But Chicago's off-loop theatre scene, though vast, talks. And word got 'round.

I talked to Lois Smith about what to do. She is the lead in the Goodman's Trip to Bountiful and one of the lovely actors I am driving around as part of my current day-job as the Company Manager's assistant. I asked Lois if I should warn them that I was coming or just show up. Just show up, she said. I forget her reasoning. It was something simple and true and I wish I could remember it. So this morning at 11am I just showed up.

I was surprised to learn my name is attached to the script. I thought that part of our contract was that it wouldn't be. I don't know if I feel strongly either way...or maybe I feel strongly both ways. Of course I would like to get some recognition for the changes I made, and believe me I changed quite a bit. All of the character development, the majority of the dialogue, and a few key plot points. The intentions of the script and the basic structure of the original plot are all that really survived. And I am pleased with it. I am pleased with what I did to it within the parameters that surrounded me.

But at the same time it is not a play I would have written, and I am not sure how I feel about people thinking that it is a play that I would have written. It is didactic, but also campy. It requires 10 actors. These rules made for a fun exercise, but they are frankly not my style.

This was clear in today's reading. Oh yes, there are problems with the script still. Thankfully we had one of the most helpful talk back sessions I have ever experienced. Critical but constructive. Honest but polite. And articulate. Incredibly articulate. Many talkbacks consist of people wanting to blather about themselves. "Well I liked that a monkey popped out of the microwave because that reminded me of this time my husband..." "I hated when she kissed that boy because I would have never kissed that boy because his eyes aren't pretty." But the few audience members who accepted the invitation that I never received were brilliant: this isn't working and here is why. That can't happen because then it betrays that. I liked the old beginning from the last draft because this, this, and this...

So now I have these ideas on how to fix it. But it's not my play anymore. And not how a director's production is not his production anymore once the show opens and it becomes the actors' play. I mean legally it's not my play anymore. If it ever was...

So odd. So so odd.

a dragon

2008-02-25T13:15:00.002-06:00

My two brains: 5 Rehearsals in Ink

2008-02-16T21:50:00.008-06:00

It is fitting that I first embraced my doodling addiction in Jami Ake's Shakespeare class Freshman year of undergrad. I should say that I shouldn't have even been in this Shakespeare class, it being an upper level course, and I being a lower underclassman; I would later find out, furthermore, that this 300 level English course could not and would not count towards my 200 level English requirement, and that I would have to take one of the survey courses I was avoiding by focusing on the bard. The bogus logic of academia.

I have been drawing since preschool, and though I don't know this for sure, I assume that I have been doodling since at least high school if not middle school. But it was while debating Desdemona and talking about the twin-cherries in Midsummer's Night Dream, that I first started using two notebooks: one for note-taking, and one (now far more interesting to revisit) for doodling. This was much more practical than it was artistic: my doodles had begun to dominate my notes when they shared the page, and I wouldn't hesitate to draw over the fact that Shakespeare was born in -----------.

As I simultaneously pursued a drawing/woodcutting minor and a psych minor, my artistic brain and my analytical brain strengthened in unison. Great, right? Right. Sure: I think so. But with this, like the valley between two active volcanoes, the divide between these two brains became more pronounced. They can work together, sure. There was no fall-out. No schism. They are like brothers who play well together; but they are also like brothers who both constantly want dad's attention and when dad is playing frisbee with the analytical brain, the artistic brain is jumping up in down in the window until dad finally turns his attention to him, leaving the analytical son alone in the backyard wishing his frisbee was a boomarang. Pretty soon the analytical son drops the frisbee altogether and chases after his brother and father, leaving the frisbee forgotten and unattended, lost in the tall grass for eternity.

To drop the metaphor, my brain wanders to whatever play I am working on or an idea for a woodcut, and once the artistic brain starts wandering, the analytical brain takes its cue and starts wandering as well: revisiting conversations and memories; breaking a part a play I read yesterday; etc. And then Jami asks me what I think of Claudius's prayer to heaven and whether I think words without thoughts ever to heaven go, and I sink and try not to think about the huge intellectual crush I have on this professor and how if I open my mouth I will prove that I have no idea what she's talking about, and I quickly stumble my way to an empty answer that sounds good to everyone but her and my friend Kim because they know it's bullshit just like I know it's bullshit.

The solution has been to doodle. I don't know what the denotation of doodling is, but for me it is a drawing without intention. It is a drawing that is more interested in being visually appealing than meaning anything. No truths are sought. No great mysteries are uncovered. And if you happen to spill coffee on it, so much the better. For me it is a way to engage my needy artistic son while I am playing frisbee with the analytical son. Over this last week, this trick has come in handy. We are at the stage in rehearsals where I am (as dramaturg) most valuable listening to the language of the play and making sure the actors are communicating the intentions of their characters. Greg and Libby - the directors for Girl in the Goldfish Bowl and the director for The Misanthrope - can worry about shape right now, and I will start worrying about it when we move into runs. And at that point my two brains can play together all they want; but not yet.

Of course it appears rude. It looks like I'm not listening at all when I am engrossed in a doodle, but in reality if I am doodling I am listening intensely. If I'm not doodling, then you should wonder where my mind has wandered to.

Rachel had to make a trip the paper store for school, and she gave me some of her scraps of some super swank paper! Delicious. My bank account is thankful she did not take me with her.

Doodles from a week of rehearsal:

Journey To
Dragon
AcornThree Wise MenSystems

2008-02-10T23:03:00.000-06:00

What if rhythm is action,
And words are after thoughts.

While you were drying.

2008-02-04T13:51:00.000-06:00

My clothes are in the drier. Drier. Weird word. Makes you have to make a weird shape with your mouth. "Dry" is fine because you can let it go, but the noun-ifying suffix "er" forces you to make an odd loop because you silently must return to a closed position. Drier. Almost necessitates mumbling. I'm probably overthinking this.

Primary Lament

2008-02-01T14:21:00.000-06:00

Damn. Reading Bellwether State Fervently Seeks Choice Who Can Win in the Fall in today's New York Times makes me disappointed in myself for my political laziness. I am still registered to vote in the great state of Missouri (the Libra of the US). Which would be great if I didn't live in Chicago. Or if I had gotten my shit together to vote absentee on Tuesday. As it happened, I procrastinated by watching clips about the debates, reading articles about the rise of McCain (yay!) and the demonization of teary-eyed Hilary, and following who won what states and trying to figure out how the point system works. And I never registered in Illinois. And I never called in to get a Missouri ballot sent to my Illinois apartment.

I honestly believe in this Presidential election, which I could not say about the last election because I didn't believe in Kerry because I didn't believe Kerry and I only voted for Kerry because Bush is, well...Bush is, how do I put this...Bush embodies the worst of politics: secretive, obstinate, inarticulate, closed-minded...we could continue because we all have continued and by this point we are all preaching to the choir because the choir is overflowing the church.

But the world is watching this election as we here in the states are (maybe even closer than some here in the states are). They see it as a reflection of what we value and what relationships we want to foster with Europe and the Middle East and China and Russia. The next president could bring the world together even before yo (apparently the new genderless pronoun?) takes office because of the message we will send by electing yo. By electing Obama or Clinton, we will announce to the world, We agree with you: Bush fucked it.

Damn. I should go home to vote. Because: Bush fucked it. I could catch the megabus. $20 down. $20 back. 10 hours on a bus. Lose time on rewriting that commission. Miss rehearsal. Miss rehearsal again, I should say, since I am going to the opening of Talking Pictures on Monday. I guess I could skip the opening.

God that's a lot of work though! But I guess not as much work as the Revolutionary War.

Damn.

T-shirts are like tattoos that you can take off.

2008-01-25T20:46:00.001-06:00

I have gone through many phases: DVDs, CDs, plays, board games, coffee table books, comic books. These phases consist of me spending way too much money collecting these goods so that I have them in case I need them. For instance, I bought Team America before I had seen it because I knew that I wanted it for my collection. Bad call. I bought a Tales of the Weird -- a mesmerizing book with gritty illustrations about strange occurrences throughout history -- which I have only flipped through. I have never played Risk, but I own it. These binges usually last a month or so. The comic book addiction was a little longer, and I have weaned myself off them only gradually (I am down to 3 series that I am following: Powers, Scott Pilgrim, and Priest [not to be confused with Preacher]).

T-shirts, however, are not a phase. They are a philosophy. Rach likes to remind me and inform my.her friends that my high school wardrobe consisted of gray t-shirts, jeans (often with paint on them; often with holes in therm), and a black-hoody. Which I don't deny, though I do defend the practicality of this aesthetic. But I also had a military green shirt with a tri-colored emblem in the middle of it that said Durango, from Durango Colorado. I wore this shirt until it broke. I loved that shirt. What I liked about it was the following:

1) It was aesthetically pleasing, but not overly complex.
2) It's meaning was open to interpretation.
3) Nobody else where I lived had it.

These have been rules I have tried to follow with my t-shirts ever since. I have complicated them from time to time, sure. I went through a Khol's video-game oriented T-shirt phase (and I still have 2 or 3 from that period that I wear). And my current trend is narratives: t-shirts that you have "read" to get. Like the design above, which my sister just bought me (though she doesn't know it yet because she actually gave me a gift certificate. And she gave it to me last October. Whoops!)

If you are interested in awesome t-shirts, I highly recommend two sites:

Threadless

This pick is hardly a surprise for anyone who digs t-shirts, but I want to give it a shout out because they have awesome stuff.

Etsy

I was introduced to Etsy by my friend Ashley who used to work at Blueberry Hill and is one of Etsy's greatest success stories. Etsy is a website for independent artists to sell their wares. Including, of course, t-shirts! CHECK IT OUT!

If you don't wear t-shirts, start. And if you don't take your t-shirts seriously, you should!

Power to the T!

when it rains

2008-01-25T16:06:00.000-06:00

For one of my Comprehensive Exams in Spring of 2006 I wrote:

In Victor Hugo’s 1827 Preface to Cromwell...he proposes that God did not create humans as a perfect species; thus, it is inappropriate and, for that matter, untruthful for dramatists to ignore the unpleasant side of human behavior. Classical dramatists have focused too much on the ideal soul and not enough of the corporeal body with all of its passions, impulses, instincts, and desires. That is not to say that the concept of human frailty was completely absent from the history of dramatic texts, but such moments were masked and hidden. Such ugliness was purposely pushed to the back of the viewers [sic; shit] mind in order to emphasize human spiritual nobility. The solution Hugo proposes is a "comedy" in which the sublime and grotesque compliment each other.

This fascinated me. Ever since that fateful day I took my first playwriting class with Carter (Lewis), I have been drawn to the dark, to the cynical, and to, though I didn't know this at the time because I would not learn about his theories for another four years, Hugo's concept of the grotesque. One of my first plays for Carter centered around a son and his dad: both were dead, and the dad had no affection for his son and in fact blamed him for getting in the way of his dreams. The they returned to the land of the living and "got mom." Happy stuff right? When Carter first met my mom, he said something along the lines of "Boy your son is morbid." My mom was a bit perplexed (probably still is). "He's seems like such a happy grounded person."

Though perversely flattering, I'm not sure Carter's description was necessarily true. I would not characterize myself as "abnormally susceptible to or characterized by gloomy or unwholesome feelings," but I would certainly agree that I am intrigued by gloomy and unwholesome feelings. Maybe its the sincerity of them? Maybe its their complexity and the unseen backstory. Maybe its the potential energy I fancy they have: energy that at any moment might break through its casing and explode into a glorious white light. There is something honest and human about the struggle. "I find happy people suspect," a character in one of the plays I am currently dramaturging explains.

And I do too. But it's kind of exhausting. And I'm not sure its healthy to think happy people are just sad people in hiding.

I have for a long time now (half a year?) been trying to bring more unabashed, unsoiled happiness into my writing. If you read the two "Towers" entries, that was what that exercise was about: transforming ugly tragedy into hopeful tragedy. Which is still tragedy. I realize this. I'm a work in progress.

But this week I decided I wanted to bring more happiness into my every day life, not just my writing. My outlook. It was a good week for this apparently because a good many things happened that made looking on the bright side of life that much easier:

0) Rachel made me join a gym. I forgot how good it feels when your muscles ache.

1) I'm in rehearsal for Girl in the Goldfish Bowl with a company I adore, with a director I trust, with a cast I believe in, and a play that surprises me every time with its lovely articulation of a painful situation (oh yes, it is VERY grotesque indeed!). Furthermore, we have been nomads due to some contractional mishap with New Leaf's normal rehearsal space, and we have been rehearsing at the Heart of Gold which is an amazing artist Commune with incredible digs. The kind of digs any artist who has ever gotten his hands dirty would want to live in. We return to the New Leaf space tomorrow, and everyone is thrilled. But I'll miss the Heart of Gold. It makes me happy that places like that exist.

2) I landed my first free-lance writing gig: I will be ghost-rewriting a play for a local non-profit. The "ghost" part of this means that I will not get any credit or future residuals, but the commission fee makes it worth my while. Let me put into practical terms: two months' rent! I asked advice from every professional dramaturg I'm friendly with, and I was introduced to some I hadn't previously known, and they were so generous with their time and their thoughts. Dramaturgs rock.

New T-shirt: Dramaturgs Rock.

3) The Goodman called yesterday, and they need a personal assistant for Horton Foote when he comes in for a festival of four of his plays. If you don't know who Horton Foote is, you're not alone. He is American Theatre's best kept secret: he is a 91 year old playwright who has been writing since the 40s. He adapted To Kill a Mockingbird and Of Mice and Men, but I am only telling you that so that you can say "Oh yeah I know those!" because he is above all else a stellar playwright. I have no business liking his work. It is not like the theatre I usually enjoy because it is simple: chronological, straight-forward, no frills, storytelling. He's just so damn good at it.

4)

For release after 12:00 pm, Friday, January 25, 2008:
NOMINEES FOR THE THIRD ANNUAL KEVIN KLINE AWARDS ANNOUNCED
Twenty-four theater companies in the St. Louis area receive 118 nominations in 22 different categories
Forty-five different productions receive nominations; twenty-five productions receive multiple nominations

Outstanding New Play or Musical

Philip Boehm, Return of the Bedbug (Upstream Theater)
Joe Hanrahan, Soldier Boy/The Little Frenchy Files (After Midnight)
Andrew Michael Nieman, Veil of Silence (Veterans for Peace)
Dan Rubin, Demons…and Other Blunt Objects (HotCity Theatre)
James Russell Wax, Insignificant Others (Hydeware Theatre)

It has been a good week. A blessed week, my mom said, quoting the woman from the metrolink.

I am now going to go buy a couple lottery tickets.

When you run around a track that is 12 laps to the mile you begin to question the validity of the track and the mile as points of reference

2008-01-21T16:24:00.000-06:00

I joined a gym today. Well, actually yesterday. I joined yesterday. I went for the first time today. It went well. My lungs hurt, but in that good way that lets you know your scrubbing the bile off the walls and making them more efficient.

Back in St. Louis I had a gym, but since I moved here money has been tight and time has been limited and I didn't make it a priority since in the beginning when it was not 3 degrees outside I was exercising on the lake path and biking to the Goodman, but then I got nailed by a car door and it got cold and I hung my bike up in the downstairs bike storage room, and then I started to look for a job and so I didn't have the time or the mental energy to consider joining a gym since that involves research and comparing and budgeting and I could still just run outside, but then it got REALLY cold and the ice on the ground made running legitimately dangerous rather than just uncomfortable.

Then Rachel got back from Louisville, walked us into Bally Fitness, pulled her little Siren trick where she says something and I immediately agree to steer my ship into the cliffs (this happens more times than I let on), and now we are proud owners of a joint gym membership.

On Friday I was out with Tim and Annie (and the Goodman interns who just finished and Willa & Misty [our coordinators]) at a dive bar up in Andersonville where they serve a spiced alcohol drink from Germany (?) called glug. I had many glugs. I recommend you drink glug. On a night that is 3 degrees warm but feels like negative 20, you need to drink glug.

Tim and Annie told me that there is a theory that if you avoid 5 foods you can eat whatever else you want and remain healthy: soda, "sweets", fried food, pastries, and chips. I have given up soda before, and I don't eat fried food often anyway. I don't buy chips -- Unless you count tortilla chips. Are we counting tortilla chips? -- but I'll eat them when they come with a sandwich. I mean I'm not going to waste them. But do pastries include bagels? And sweets? Really? All of them? That seems a bit outrageous.

I mean, I want to be healthy, and I want to live as long as I'm able to live; but at some point you have to determine where the line is between living and subsisting. And while I am deliberating on this matter, I am going to go enjoy some Spicy Chex Mix.

Which is delicious.

daybreak semicolon

2008-01-13T21:13:00.000-06:00

Tomorrow I will wake up and I will be a freelance dramaturg (production and development), a playwright, a writer, and a literary manager (in search of literature to manage). Tomorrow I will wake up and my professional aspirations will be focused towards these ends. Tomorrow I will wake up and I will stop dallying, stop equivocating, stop leaving my options open. I will stop lamenting the roads I did not take and remember why I took the road I took.

Tomorrow I will be what I want to be when I grow up.

identity theft

2008-01-13T20:55:00.000-06:00

jogging back home along the lake there is a man about your make about your build about your height almost in every way your like except that he is wearing jogging clothes and is back home whereas you just returned from rome to the southern coast, near nice. and also different between you and him is the confection you are carrying back kim. she waits for you on rocks watching as the sailboats dock watching everything but the clock not really caring when you arrive if you arrive at all but she thanks you for the pastry and kisses you politely before gently pushing you out of her view: i can always see you. i can always see you.

last night you left your window open and the breeze danced with the thin drapes and tickled your back through the thin sheet and reminded you in every dream that time trots along while you sleep. kim is dreaming of ireland and she is dancing with her dad and she rolls over and smacks you in the chest and then laughs because she meant to hit her dad who was teasing her about her haircut. she doesn't wake but you wake enough to count the constellations over the Riviera. you find orion after whom you named your cat who is staying with friends until you return to chicago.

identity theft

2008-01-13T20:14:00.000-06:00

along the southern coast of france is a man wearing your pants wearing your shirt wearing your shoes wearing everything that you would choose. he is wearing your woman on his arm and wearing your dreams. along the southern coast of france is a man who took a chance to take a risk to make a leap to take the plunge into the deep deep dark unknown and that's why he has flown to a europe you will never see. he slides into your bakery drinks your coffee and brings your woman a morning snack where she is resting on the shore alone. not thinking of you. thinking of the sea. mystery. you sit and peer out your window at the lake. what did you forsake. what did you forsake.

down by the lake you're jogging in new jogging clothes you bought at Macy's because they were on sale after christmas and you needed some jogging clothes because you're out of shape old man and you're getting fat old friend because all you do all day is sit at a computer and it's february 13 and this is the first time you've exercised since before thanksgiving because sometimes life's too busy. your jogging clothes don't keep the cold out. your jogging clothes don't hide the rolls on your stomach or ease your breathing and you stop to let your bleeding lungs hack themselves open so they can gasp some air down and your lightheadedness makes you momentarily delusional and you find peace in the fact that you are about die. because it would be easier than jogging back home and making dinner and washing the dishes and watching history's mysteries before going to bed at 11 remembering how little you accomplished that day or that weekend or that year. i'm 39 years old, you'll think, and tomorrow i will be older.

unemployment

2008-01-13T20:01:00.000-06:00

I remember sitting on a bench near this open lot near my parents' house which was at the time of that sitting my house too because I lived there still. Just sitting and staring at the sky until my eyes filled up with those floaty things that look like chromosomes or amoebas or something microscopic and very well might be something microscopic which -- because of the lack of additional environmental input -- the eye can focus on (or not focus on) because it's not doing anything else at that particular moment. I sat there watching them float across my line of vision for a long time. If I moved my eyes, they would slide a bit. That's how I knew they were mine.

Looking at the bookshelf behind me, I realize that I still haven't read The Decameron and realize that I still want to.

2008-01-03T21:10:00.001-06:00

This is what blogs are good for! I told Jess at dinner that I had not had coffee for 3 weeks when, in fact, it has been (let's see Dec. 31 minus Dec. 6, plus the Jan. 3, divide by 7 days) 4 weeks. In other words a whopping month!

This victory would be sweeter if I had not made concessions: on a tip from my mom I have had a few cups of decaf (but NOT Starbucks decaf because that's not really decaf) and on a tip from Rachel's mom I have recently started drinking tea on a regular basis. And I don't avoid chocolate. HELL no.

But by most accounts I am succeeding. My sister decided in 5th grade that she would never utter a curse word and to my knowledge she never has. And she's 22 now. (We share the stubborn chromosome.) But if I don't use her as a bar, I'm doing pretty well.

I'm procrastinating (another thing blogs are good perhaps). Or maybe I am warming up before getting to work on one of many potential projects I could tackle this evening. Or maybe I am cooling down after a long day of research at the Goodman. I am nearing an end of my internship which is a shame because I believe in the Goodman (and Unitarian's don't throw the phrase "I believe in" around on a whim) and in what they are trying to do and what they are planning to do. It would be lovely if they had room in their budget for me but they don't so oh well. Time to pack the saddlebags and make sure Ol' Rusty is properly shoed.

***

When you have a lot in front of you to do those things you have to do commiserate and decide amongst themselves that what they want to do is build a wall out of themselves so that when you try to focus on any one of them you cannot help but see the whole wall. And it is easy to step over a stone, but much more difficult to climb a wall. Different muscles. Thus sending your Grandmother's Christmas present is interwoven with writing a recommendation for an old student which is interwoven with researching Veteran Legions in 1962 Canada.

And so the metaphor of wall building and the metaphor of weaving are mixed at last.
We all knew it was only a matter of time.

Mod 12

2007-12-31T18:04:00.000-06:00

Twenty years ago I am playing in my best friend's basement. Probably my first best friend. I can almost make out what we're playing - like a word on the tip of my tongue I can almost verbalize - but I know if I attempt to look straight at it, the memory will dodge and weave. Evade.

So I can't make it out before the phone rings.

Mom wants me home for supper in ten minutes.

I tell Jeff, "My mom wants me home for supper in ten minutes." And I start to leave. I live down the block. About a minute away if I walk at a moderate pace on my six-year-old legs. When I was six I ran a mile in 6 minutes and 52 seconds during the memorial day fun run. I can't run a mile at all right now. I could jog it. Slowly.

You said ten minutes.

I know but I'm going to go.

Ten minutes is a long time.

I go up the steps and out the front door before Jeff can stop me and run down the block. I sprint like I am running away from something. Running away from Jeff like he is chasing me with something. Twenty seconds later I am home.

For one of the shows I am working on, the sound designer (a company member) wants me to conduct a series of interviews with actors, designers, the director, etc. The play is about a girl reliving the final days of her childhood before her mother abandons her. During these interviews I could ask: "What do you think about this play?" "How do you relate to your character?" Blah blah blah. But what would that accomplish? So what I am going to ask them is this: "When do you think your childhood started to end?"

I am 3 years, 11 months, and 23.5 days old and I am on the playground of my preschool and a teacher (babysitter?) is telling me I have a phone call and then my dad is telling me I have a sister. I am in kindergarten and I propose to Alexis right before naptime; Sam A. teaches me how to draw a horse (he would die of some pre-existing condition when we are all in seventh grade during a sleepover; I would learn about this from Lauren - a blonde i had a crush on in second grade - at lunch while Liz is sucking on a bouillon cube and I'll shrug it off and say I didn't really know the guy so why would I go to his funeral; when I am taking classes at the art school during undergrad I will run into Sam's mom on a regular basis. Her smile's still sad.). It's first grade and I pee on John for making fun of me in the bathroom; I don't understand why I have to sit out in the hall, why I always have to sit out in the hall. Second grade: have a crush on a blonde who doesn't choose me as a square dance partner; she chooses a guy with the last name Valentine (who would later apparently do some weird f-ed up shit); I have to play Little Bear in a fucked up rendition of Goldilocks and I swear I will have nothing to do with the theatre ever again...in seventh grade I am Will Parker in Oklahoma! and Liz is coaching me on how to sing in front of people: "If you can't sing in front of me," she tells me in my living room, "how are you going to sing in front of a whole audience."

The memories unfold like a personalized yearbook. Does our childhood end with every memory we carry into our adulthood? Does it end as we accumulate the ghosts that will haunt us for the rest of our life? Ghosts that always seem to resurface at the end of the year when we are taking stock. Looking back.

New Year's Eve is my favorite holiday because of its inevitability. Nothing drives it but time itself. A year ends. And you wake up the next morning and all your calendars are invalid (burn them!). And whatever you were is now optional. A suggestion. I am going to quit smoking. I am going to stop eating poorly. I am going to make more of an effort at maintaining my relationships with people other than Rachel (yeah that was mine for 2007)...I am going to stop masturbating in the middle of Walgreens...you saw the news right?...oh you didn't...oh well then this is kind of awkward...

The resolutions aren't inevitable and are, in fact, completely arbitrary. You could decide to change your ways any day of the year just like you don't have to wait until Lent to give up chocolate. But the holiday is inevitable. The temporal renewal is inevitable. And maybe that's what encourages us.

It's January again. Mod 12. Right math guys? 313 mod 12 is 1 right? And we all want to go back to 1 again. Pass go again. Collect $200 again.

Jeff moved away about a year and ten minutes after we were playing in his basement, and I never saw/spoke to him again. I often wonder...no that's a lie...on New Year's Eve I wonder what we could have done in those ten minutes. I wonder if our friendship would have solidified enough that when he moved we would have stayed in touch...okay, I don't wonder that...retroactive nostalgic editing.

But I am wondering it now...

Resolution 2008: Don't sprint home.

From "The Year of Magical Thinking" which I am reading tonight in lieu of "getting anything done" (a big step for me)

2007-12-16T21:16:00.000-06:00

"I never actually learned the rules of grammar, relying instead only on what sounded right."

--Joan Didion

If I ever teach an introductory writing course again, this quote will be the centerpiece of the first day.

razorbutterflyapple

2007-12-15T09:16:00.000-06:00

Here is that wild play -- wild in the sense of whattheFwerewethinking rather than in the sense of actual wild things happening in the script -- I was telling you about a while back that is a collaboration between me and EJC Calvert (whom I miss terribly: move to Chicago you NYC jerkface!) and Kristin Idaszak (who should add another i to her last name so it is more like Naomi Iizuka). Liz wrote razor, Kristin wrote butterfly, and I tackled apple. Other than the initial rules, we did not discuss what we were writing until we had each finished the first drafts. Then we kind of rotated the play around and revised to make it somewhat cohesive. But it is still fairly wacky. And by fairly I mean TOTALLY wacky.

razorbutterflyapple
act i: razor

TREE
razorbutterflyapple: Act I: razor.
It begins, as it always begins, in a field.

(CAROL enters, MAE dragging behind. She sets up at the base of the tree.)

TREE
Everything doesn’t always begin in a field. But all the stories that happen to me do. I don’t… move. Generally.

(CAROL begins shaving her face.)

TREE
Usually, I’m so sad, I’m the saddest tree in the world. A sad, sad, sad, sad, lonely tree.

MAE
Carol… Carol… come on… Carol… the bus…

CAROL
We got time and you know it.

TREE
Though, to be perfectly frank, these beginnings always make me nervous. The beginning began, it has already begun, and now all we can do is dread the end, when the story will be over and I will be lonely again.

MAE
If we miss the bus again—

CAROL
Shut up, Mae. I can’t talk and shave at the same time.

TREE
Usually, my only visitors are birds. Always flapping, flapping, pecking, flapping. Today I have children! O, joy!

MAE
You won’t grow hairs that way. You’re being stupid.

CAROL
I’ll grow hairs if a goddamn well want to!

MAE
You can’t! You’re a girl, and you can’t grow hairs on your face!

CAROL
Try having faith, Mae. “If you shave there, hairs will grow…”

TREE
I want hairs! I want hairs, too! Shave me! Shave me! Shave all over my bark, and we’ll be haired together!

MAE
Your mom only told you that because she didn’t want you shaving your legs and turning into a whore.

CAROL
You shave. Don’t you?

MAE
None of your business! Come on. Let’s go. Seriously. Come on come on come on come on come on come on come on come on come on come on

TREE (simultaneous with MAE’s “come on”s)
No! Take your time. Stay forever. Lounge, read, climb if you want, I don’t mind! Just stay!

CAROL
You can go on by yourself! Why don’t you just go on and pretend like you don’t even know me, if you think I’m such a freak and an idiot, why don’t you do that.

MAE
If you didn’t think this was wrong you wouldn’t do it hiding.

TREE
She’s not hiding, she’s with me!

CAROL
Mae, there is only one thing I want in the whole entire world. I don’t give a shit about trust funds or celebrity or my virginity, all I want is a thick, full beard.

TREE
All I want is YOU! I want US!

CAROL
Please, Mae.

MAE
Just hurry.

CAROL
Thank you.

TREE
If you slip with that razor and die, promise you’ll be buried among my roots?

act ii: butterfly

MAE
Act ii: butterfly.

TREE
Thank god we’re onto the second act. I mean, beginnings and endings are all the same. Middles, though. Middles are fun.

CAROL
What?

MAE
Mae and Carol die.

CAROL
That’s fucked up, Mae.

MAE
I don’t say it.

CAROL
I just heard you. Listen, I know you’re mad about the beard thing, but—

MAE
I know it came out of my mouth, but I wasn’t doing the saying. It just came out.

CAROL
That’s fucked up.

MAE
Mae and Carol die, Mae and Carol die, Mae and Carol die.

CAROL
Stop it. You’re freaking me out.

MAE
That’s how the story ends.

CAROL
What story? No it doesn’t. Mae, I’ll kill you.

TREE
Telling the middle of a story’s like detonating a bomb. You’ve already done all the hard science-fiction lab construction bullshit, and you don’t have to worry about cleaning up the bodies. You just press the little red button and watch the fireworks.

CAROL
So what do we do?

MAE
I don’t know. Something middling. Say something about a butterfly?

CAROL
My pussy looks like a butterfly.

MAE
That’s it?

CAROL
Uh-uh. Passive aggressive. Like you.

MAE
I’m not—

CAROL
Sit there in a shadow box looking beautiful and dead.

TREE
Stop!

Carol and Mae acknowledge the tree for the first time.

CAROL
What?

TREE
Know what’s hard about being a tree?

CAROL
You can’t have sex?

MAE
You’re such a nympho.

TREE
There’s no pathos or bitter longing or sweet affection in this play. There’s no sense of scale, no grandeur.

MAE
Trees have grandeur. Or at least scale. Right?

TREE
You’re missing the point. There’s no high tragedy. The stakes aren’t life-and-death.

CAROL
Life’s not life-or-death.

TREE
Fuck it. Let’s just move on to apple.

act iii: apple
TREE
apple has nothing to do with the fruit. There are no apples in this scene. I'm not an apple tree. No apples are going to be eaten, and no apples were harmed in the writing of what you are about to see.

Apple attempts to extrapolate from one's understanding of an apple and create an end to this strange tale. The friendship you've seen begins with a conflict between Mae's need for punctuality and Carol's need for a beard and progresses into a conversation about coming of age with the brief acknowledgment that a pussy resembles a butterfly.

Many years have passed since the razor and the butterfly, and we are looking for an end like an apple: clean, crisp, hard, sweet, juicy. Refreshing. Simple. Many years have passed because sometimes time passes. We trees know this.

MAE
Can I say I'm sorry.

CAROL
You can say whatever you want.

MAE
I'm/

CAROL
Shut up.

MAE
Okay.

CAROL
Just shut up. Just shut up. Shut up shut up shut up.

MAE begins to cry softly. CAROL goes over and hits her and continues to hit her until MAE is curled up in a ball and then CAROL kicks MAE and CAROL is crying and they are both sobbing and then CAROL collapses on top of MAE and they hold each other and rock back and forth.

MAE
I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I am so so sorry.

CAROL
Shhhhhhh. Shhhhhhhhhh. Oh god. Shhh shhh shhh.

MAE
I didn't know. I honestly had no idea. I didn't I wouldn't have, there's no way.

CAROL
Shhhhhhh. I know. I know. Shhhhhhhhhh.

More crying and hugging that eventually turns into laughing.

MAE
You hit me really hard.

CAROL
I'm sorry. You can hit me back if you want.

MAE
I'm not going to hit you.

CAROL
You can if you want.

MAE
I miss you.

CAROL
I miss you too.

Hug into blackout.

TREE
This is the moment I dreaded. Everything doesn't always end in a field, but all the stories that happen to me do. Mae and Carol die. Yes, it is my line. Mae and Carol die. Not now, but eventually. And they won't be buried amongst my roots.

There is no one here to hear me as I fall apart. Not even you. I'm alone waiting for visitors. The saddest tree in the world because I'm the most awake.

END OF PLAY

clownaround

2007-12-14T19:28:00.000-06:00

i think this is how Iago felt
justified

tossing things
from
a
ten-story window
hoping to hit

and hurt

i think of the blonde alto
and how
one smothers

but
smothered pride
reminiscing wasted time
concocts plots

then
sits
in a corner
wearing the dunce cap

(brewing)

moral: never trust men in corners
you don't know where they've been

TOWERS (TOWER version the second)

2007-12-11T22:32:00.001-06:00

TOWERS is the first revision of TOWER in an attempt to make it less of a complete downer and to incorporate the two other rules set down for the project: 1) use of a mandolin and 2) "future building as a theme." Rule 3 was to use a character who was silent but present, but I nailed that the first time. I love rules!

TOWERS

Scene 1
Lights up. SAMMY, alone on the stage, is looking straight up. He is carrying a sack lunch. There is a distant yelling that gets closer and closer as the lights fade. And then, in darkness, the sound a body makes when it hits the pavement after falling a few miles.

Scene 2
Lights up. Mandolin music starts quietly. There is a broken body face up almost exactly where SAMMY had been standing. The body reaches his hand up to SAMMY. SAMMY is looking down at the body. The mandolin music gets louder and louder. SAMMY bends down to the man and tries to hear what the man is saying but the mandolin music is too loud. Lights fade but music does not.

Scene 3
Lights up. SAMMY is facing the audience as far away from the body as the stage will allow. The mandolin music quiets slowly until it is a soft hum.

MAN 1 enters with a briefcase that he
immediately drops and goes to the body.

MAN 1
Oh my god Oh my god. Hey man. Hey are you alright. Oh god you're not alright. You're not alright. Alright what do I do? Ummmm...hey you you there hey! Call 911. Hey you! Oh shit oh shit.

MAN 1 approaches SAMMY. Mandolin music gets louder.

MAN 1
Hey. Hey! Somebody call someone! Where's that music coming from!

The body reaches his hand up to MAN 1. And MAN 1 leans down to listen to the body.

MAN 1
What? I can barely, what? No I can't...what? Turn that damn music off!

SAMMY closes his eyes and concentrates really hard. The music dims.

SAMMY
In the middle of the street there is a man.

MAN 1
Shhhhhh. He's saying something! Somebody help!

SAMMY
And that man's my father. Who I haven't spoken a word to in thirty-three years.

MAN 1
He's trying to say something. You're his son? Get over here!

SAMMY
And he wants to tell me all that he didn't tell me when he was alive.

MAN 1
He's not dead yet!

SAMMY
But he can't.

MAN 1
Help!

WOMAN 1 enters with a purse from which she has pulled a cellphone.

WOMAN 1
Omigod what happened?

MAN 1
He just fell. He fell from the sky.

WOMAN 1
What?

MAN 1
Just call someone.

WOMAN 1
I'm calling, I'm calling. Jesus Christ Jesus Christ.

SAMMY
He didn't fall from the sky. He fell from his tower.

MAN 1
What? What? I can barely hear you. Sammy. Are you Sammy? Sammy's here. Sammy's here. What? I know. He won't come. Should I make him come?

SAMMY
He fell from his tower.

MAN 1 goes to SAMMY

MAN 1
Hey man, you gotta get over there your dad he's/

MAN 1 grabs SAMMY and the mandolin music bursts so that MAN 1 is blown over. SAMMY tries to help catch him.

SAMMY (shouting over the music)
I'm sorry. When I was seven I swallowed a mandolin. My dad's mandolin.

WOMAN 1
Hello? 911? Yes there is man in the middle of the road.

Mandolin music begins to quiet.

SAMMY
I swallowed it because I thought he loved it more than he loved me.

WOMAN 2 enters with a grocery bag leading CHILD by the hand.

CHILD
Mommy look.

WOMAN 2
Don't look sweety.

CHILD
He's all flat. Did he fall.

WOMAN 2
Sweety I said don't look.

SAMMY
He asked, Sammy where's my mandolin and I lied and said that it had run off with mom. But then mom came home and then the mandolin started to play in my stomach. So he knew I was lying.

WOMAN 1
Yes. In the middle of the road. Where? Where? I don't know where? Where are we?

MAN 1
Corner of 5th and 2nd.

WOMAN 1
At the corner 5th and 2nd. No I'm not hurt. No, nobody is hurt except the guy lying in the middle of the road. No he's not drunk he's dying!

SAMMY
But he wasn't mad. He smiled. But it was a sad smile and that's when I realized that I had eaten my dad's best friend because my dad talked very little because he hated talking. Or he was bad at talking my mom said. He got uncomfortable talking because he was a brick-layer and that was solitary work.

WOMAN 2
He's asking for a Sammy.

MAN 1
That's that guy over there.

WOMAN 2
We should go get him.

MAN 1
No. No.

SAMMY
And after I ate his mandolin, he didn't have anything to do so he started building his tower. He would leave at sunrise and come back late into the night. Mom blamed me. She hated me for a long time. But dad was happy.

WOMAN 1
The ambulance we be here in 3 minutes.

MAN 1
I don't know that he has 3 minutes.

WOMAN 2
He's asking for him.

MAN 1
That Sammy guy won't come over.

WOMAN 2
Well, how do you know if you don't ask him.

MAN 1
I asked him.

WOMAN 2
Well, I'm going to ask him.

SAMMY
He'd say hi to me and pat me on the head on his way up to the bedroom. He would walk straight into the shower leaving a trail of his dirty work clothes. I'd watch him sometimes and sneak out when he was toweling off.

WOMAN 2
Hey your dad's over there and/

SAMMY is taken by surprise and the mandolin music bursts from him. The groceries spill every where. He rushes to help her pick them up apologetically.

SAMMY
I'm sorry. I can't control it. Whenever I'm startled or nervous or sad or...well anything.

CHILD
Mommy? Mommy? Hey mommy.

MAN 1
Hey man cut that out!

WOMAN 1
Hello? Hello are you still there? Yes can you send the police too? Oh they're already coming great. Great. There's a man here...yelling music at people. I don't know...yelling music. I don't know if he is drunk or not? He might be.

SAMMY
And every day I would come here and bring him lunch. My mom would make it and I would carry it down and he would come down and pat my head and grab this sack and go back up again. I would get so nervous I couldn't say anything to him. Just, music.

CHILD
I think he's dying.

WOMAN 2
Get away from him.

WOMAN 1
He is dying.

CHILD
Do something.

WOMAN 2
We have to wait for the ambulance.

CHILD
Why?

MAN 1
Because we don't know the right thing to do.

CHILD
We could ask him.

WOMAN 2
Sweety leave him alone.

SAMMY
Every day for 30 years.

CHILD
Hey mister. What can I do? Huh? Sammy? Oh is that your son? He's real mean. He's yelling at everyone.

SAMMY
I’d meet him at this spot.

CHILD
What? You have to tell him something. Well can you tell me? I don't think he's coming over. I don't know, were you mean to him?

SAMMY
It’s about 3 miles high by this point. He’s a local hero.

CHILD
I’ll write it down if you want.

CHILD writes.

SAMMY
My dad.

CHILD goes to SAMMY and hands him paper. SAMMY reads. He looks down at CHILD and then he concentrates as hard as he has ever concentrated in his life. If the actor can make his nose bleed, that seems to be the current visual cue to indicate concentration. The mandolin music becomes more manageable and then it is just a hum and SAMMY goes to his father and leans down.

END OF PLAY

Birth of a New Blog!

2007-12-09T22:41:00.000-06:00

Blogger, you have been so good to me. You helped me see that I could secure my own little corner of the Internet. But sometimes, Blogger, a man has to branch out:

http://darkknightdramaturgy.wordpress.com/

Coffee Detox Day 2

2007-12-07T19:14:00.000-06:00

For the last week or so I have become hyperaware of my heartbeat. It felt like it was beating harder than it should be. Even when I was sitting still and had been sitting still for a good long while at my desk researching Wharton, TX -- hometown to Horton Foote, 91-year old playwright extraordinaire (who liked me according to his agent according Tanya, he having made this assessment during our half-hour interview in which I said about two sentences and was otherwise dumbly starstruck [which has never happened before: not with Sarah Ruhl. Not with Naomi Iizuka. I wonder if it is because I never had a grandfather figure in my life...]) -- it would punch my ribs. Not quickly. My pulse was normal. Just with gusto. It is probably nothing, unless you consider early onset hypochondria to not be nothing, but it has made me reevaluate my little addiction to coffee.

I have, like many of you, been battling this addiction for years. I attempted to give it up last semester. My students playfully mocked me. And with Meshuggah right down the street from my apartment and working at a restaurant with its own special blend -- Khaldi's Blueberry Hill Blend -- which I could drink for free, giving up the sauce was inevitably doomed. For those of you who do not know about Meshuggah's coffee: they brew each cup individually with their espresso machine. It is dark, and rich, and is like liquid electricity speeding through your veins. You can get a free refill, but I don't recommend it unless you want to be wired for four hours and then crash. I, of course, usually opted for the refill, except on days when I felt like my heart couldn't take the pressure...
I had the refill when I was home for Thanksgiving. I had to: you know. I think it is what set off the chest pains. And the longing. The other problem with Meshuggah coffee is that you will NEVER find a cup of coffee as delicious and fulfilling. I tried. I usually get an Americano -- just espresso and water -- at my usual haunts, but you get exactly what you should get: watered down espresso. Which Meshuggah coffee is not. It is not watered down at all. It is the opposite of watered down...

I like coffee. I like it for more than just "what it does" for me. Yesternight, after detox day 1, I was reminded of the physiological dependency as I went to bed at 9:15 with an all-consuming headache that had not gone away when my cats decided to play tag on my face at midnight. I will not exaggerate and say I had the shakes and the sweats all day, but you can certainly tell -- in your soul -- when you go without. But I went into work yesterday with a mission of not drinking coffee: I knew what to expect from the previous semester -- oh, I lasted about a week before I caved and found myself in Meshuggah's upper loft area celebrating my week-long sabbatical with a breaking of the fast -- and I welcomed it. No pain no gain. The throbbing in my head was me beating the crap out of my addicted cells, telling them to fall in line and shape up. My weariness (it should be said that I had woken up early to get Rachel to her crit on time) was the exhaustion of my victorious soul who had fought valiantly on the Trojan fields two-to-two with Mighty Ajax and his Shield all the long day.

But I like coffee because I like coffee shops. They are good places to work. They provide a mock-society that makes one feel like they are not completely closing themselves off from the outside world when they work, even if one does feel little tremors of rage whenever a couple starts talking too loud (or at all). One has to remind oneself that it is not a library and if one had wanted silence one should not have left one's damn apartment...In addition to the frustration of the distraction, this couple reminds the coffeehouse scholar that he in fact isn't participating in the world at all: rather he has brought a 3x4x10 foot cube of solitude with him into the public sphere and he sits sipping Americanos within its woefully un-soundproofed walls.

I don't know what I will order now. I cannot in good conscience buy tea. That's like paying for water. Maybe I will order coffee and not drink it. I'll just look at it. To test my soul.

I think my cat has the hiccups. Either that or he is about to barf all over my keyboard.

Writing

2007-12-05T21:52:00.001-06:00

I owe Jess a play. TOWER was way too dark, and it did not follow the parameters we set for it. That's fine. I'm happy with it, as uncomfortable as it makes me. And I am just as happy to try again.

But I critiqued a friend's paper tonight. A paper she is applying to grad school with.

I like critiquing papers. I do. I like seeing how a paper is trying to work and figuring out how it can work better. Academic writing is intriguing because it is a balancing act: how to juggle in-depth pertinent information without being stale and boring but also without being inappropriate and colloquial. How do you engage with secondary sources without sacrificing your own authority and voice? How can you be creative with it? Wonderful challenges. Fun challenges.

But it takes so fucking long to do a thorough critique of a paper. Not merely commenting on aesthetics, but getting dirty with it. I'm not sure I can write a play tonight because I just spent 2+ hours in a coffee shop reliving the glory days of teaching.

I don't know if she wanted as in-depth a critique as I am giving her. I'm not really sure what she expected when she dropped the papers on my desk. I warned her I wasn't nice and that I don't pussyfoot around. Many of my teachers pussyfooted around, and I never got any better. Not until my friend Nancy tore it all to shreds.

I solicited Nancy to be my adviser on a fellowship project exploring Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. She was one of two people on campus qualified to deal with Middle English poetry. "What do you want from me?" she asked when we first met. I wanted to say "I can sleepwalk my way into an A- just by turning a clever phrase, but I don't know how to write" but I didn't know her as well as I do now.

So I edited: "I have been getting A minuses for three years of college with no explanation of why it wasn't a B and why it wasn't an A. I want someone to be straight with me and tell me when I'm not writing well instead of pushing me through with a grade I won't complain about." Her eyes smiled. She was not teaching at this point because she had turned to the dark side of academia: administration (which she reluctantly started to enjoy). And Nancy loved the harsh and honest critique of papers as much as I do now. Because that's how you get better.

"No pain no gain," the beautiful deaf soccer player in high school would yell as he whizzed by us during one of our morning Brazilians.

I just wish I was faster at it. I barely wrote when I taught because I was always grading papers, and when I wasn't the last thing I wanted to do was think about words. Is that a balance I can teach myself, or is it physiologically impossible to push the brain that hard without illegal and dangerous stimulants that burn bright and quick?

Maybe I should be asking myself whether I should edit the end-comments for the paper I just critiqued. Like I said, I'm not nice. And, like I said, I don't know what she expected or how long she has to revise before applications are due or if she was even intending to revise or if she just wanted me to circle sentence fragments and the spaces where missing words should live. I hope I don't lose a friend over this. That would suck.

Maybe the most unrelenting play yet! Yipes!

2007-12-05T00:24:00.000-06:00

After HotCity did Demons, my friend Nancy mused that I must be incredibly put together to be able to write about such screwed up people without being consumed by them. I like to think that she's right. I think she's right. Right?

Disclaimer for the posted play: My dad and I get along REALLY REALLY REALLY well. Except when he bugs me about health insurance. Although I now have health insurance thanks to him bugging me. So, I guess, he wins.

TOWER

Scene 1
Lights up. SAMMY, alone on the stage, is looking straight up. He is carrying a sack lunch. There is a distant yelling that gets closer and closer as the lights fade. And then, in darkness, the sound a body makes when it hits the pavement after falling a few miles.

Scene 2
Lights up. There is a broken body face up almost exactly where SAMMY had been standing. The body reaches his hand up to SAMMY. SAMMY is looking down at the body. The lights fade.

Scene 3
Lights up. SAMMY is facing the audience as far away from the body as the stage will allow.

MAN 1 enters with a briefcase that he immediately drops and goes to the body.

MAN 1

Oh my god Oh my god. Hey man. Hey are you alright. Oh god you're not alright. You're not alright. Alright what do I do?

MAN 1 realizes he is going the throw up and runs offstage and throws up offstage and runs back to the body.

Ummmm...hey you you there hey! Call 911. Hey you! Oh shit oh shit.

SAMMY

I'm sorry.

MAN 1

What? Hey. Hey! Somebody call someone!

SAMMY

I can't.

The body reaches his hand up to MAN 1. And MAN 1 leans down to listen to the body.

MAN 1

What? I can barely, what? No I can't...what?

SAMMY

In the middle of the street there is a dead man.

MAN 1

Shhhhhh. He's saying something! He's not dead yet. Somebody help!

SAMMY

And that man was my father.

MAN 1

He's trying to say something. You're his son? Get over here!

SAMMY

And he wants to tell me all that he didn't tell me when he was alive.

MAN 1

He's not dead!.

SAMMY

But my father once told me never listen to ghosts because they are lying sonsofbitches so I am talking to you instead.

MAN 1

Help!

WOMAN 1 enters with a purse from which she has pulled a cellphone.

WOMAN 1

Omigod what happened?

MAN 1

He just fell. He fell from the sky.

WOMAN 1

What?

MAN 1

Just call someone.

WOMAN 1

I'm calling, I'm calling. Jesus Christ Jesus Christ.

SAMMY

He didn't fall from the sky.

MAN 1

What? What? I can barely hear you. Sammy. Are you Sammy? Sammy's here. Sammy's here. What? I know. He won't come. Should I make him come?

SAMMY

The sky wouldn't have let him fall. The sky loved him. It cradled him his whole life.

MAN 1 goes to SAMMY

MAN 1

Hey man, you gotta get over there your dad he's/

SAMMY punches MAN 1so that he falls, unconscious.

SAMMY

My dad once told me a story about his childhood.

WOMAN 1

Hello? 911? Yes there is man in the middle of the road.

SAMMY

He and his friends built a kite our of sheets and broom handles and wire.

WOMAN 2 enters with a grocery bag leading CHILD by the hand.

CHILD

Mommy look.

WOMAN 2

Don't look sweety.

CHILD

He's all flat. Did he fall.

WOMAN 2

Sweety I said don't look.

SAMMY

And everybody laughed at them and said it couldn't fly and his parents just shook their heads and went back to playing gin because it was Sunday afternoon.

WOMAN 1

Yes. In the middle of the road. Where? Where? I don't know where? Where are we?

WOMAN 2

Corner of 5th and 2nd.

CHILD

What happened to that man over there?

WOMAN 1

At the corner 5th and 2nd. No I'm not hurt. No, nobody is hurt except the guy lying in the middle of the road. No he's not drunk he's dying!

SAMMY

But the design was flawless and they took it to the field and my father wouldn't let anyone fly it but him and the sky laughed at him because it saw its own stubborness in this boy and it pulled the kite harder and harder until the kite lifted my father into the air.

WOMAN 2 has gone over to MAN 1

WOMAN 2

Hey are you okay? Hey you. Honey, stay back.

SAMMY

They found him an hour later three miles away. Smiling as he picked the bugs out his teeth and the feathers and leaves out of his hair. "Like goddamn Peter Pan."

CHILD

Did he fall too?

WOMAN 2

Hey are you alright.

MAN 1

I'm fine.

MAN 1 gets up and returns to the body.

WOMAN 2

What happened?

MAN 1

He fell out of the sky.

SAMMY

From that moment on, he was in the sky whenever possible.

MAN 1 (about the body)

What is he saying?

WOMAN 1

I'm on the phone with 911. I don't know.

SAMMY

He climbed every tree to its highest branch and never fell. He visited his grandmother whenever he could because she lived in Oregon and he had to fly there. When he was 16 he dropped out of school to join the air force. Never shot down. Never shot down once. He retired to fly stunt planes and then he found skydiving and realized that he didn't even need a plane anymore. He could fly without wings. The sky let him.

WOMAN 2

He's asking for a Sammy.

MAN 1

That's that guy over there.

WOMAN 2

We should go get him.

MAN 1

No. No.

SAMMY

But it was all too temporary for him. He always had to come back to earth. To eat. To sleep. To marry. To make me.

WOMAN 1

The ambulance we be here in 3 minutes.

MAN 1

I don't know that he has 3 minutes.

WOMAN 2

He's asking for him.

MAN 1

That Sammy guy won't come over.

WOMAN 2

Well, how do you know if you don't ask him.

MAN 1

I asked him.

WOMAN 2

Well, I'm going to ask him.

SAMMY

That was the only story he ever told me.

WOMAN 2

Hey your dad's over there and/

SAMMY punches WOMAN 2 so that she falls, unconscious. The groceries spill every where.

SAMMY

That and the advice about not trusting ghosts.

MAN 1

Hey man I know you're upset but/

SAMMY punches MAN 1so that he falls, unconscious.

CHILD

Mommy? Mommy? Hey mommy.

SAMMY

Because when I was seven he started building a tower. A tower that he could live in that would be tall enough so that he could always be in the sky.

CHILD runs to WOMAN 1

CHILD

I think my mommy's hurt.

WOMAN 2

Why don't you wait over here. The ambulance is on the way. Hello? Hello are you still there? Yes can you send the police too? Oh they're already coming great. Great. There's a man here punching people. I don't know if he is drunk or not? He might be.

SAMMY

And every day I would come here and bring him lunch. My mom would make it and I would carry it down and he would come down and pat my head and grab this sack and go back up again without so much as a "hey son".

CHILD

I think he's dying.

WOMAN 1

He is dying.

CHILD

Do something.

WOMAN

We have to wait for the ambulance.

CHILD

Why?

WOMAN

Because we don't know the right thing to do sweetheart.

CHILD

We could ask him.

WOMAN 1

I don't think he'd know either.

SAMMY

Every day for 40 years.

CHILD

Hey mister. What can I do? Huh? Sammy? Oh is that your son? He's real mean. He punched my mom. What? You have to tell him something. Well can you tell me? I don't think he's coming over. I don't know, were you mean to him?

SAMMY

It’s about 3 miles high by this point. He’s a local hero.

CHILD

I’ll write it down if you want.

SAMMY

What a shit.

CHILD

I think he’s dead.

WOMAN 1

Are they close? How close? No I think we’re losing him. I don’t know if there’s a pulse hold on. Nope no pulse. Okay. Okay hurry.

SAMMY goes to the body and stares at him like he did in Scene 2. CHILD goes to WOMAN 2.

END OF PLAY

A play I'm fix'n to submit.

2007-12-03T23:32:00.000-06:00

Two friends and I are joint writing a seven page three-act play called Razor Butterfly Apple. Why, you might ask? Well, Kristen and I were at Red Moon's Hunchback (stellar!) and we were waiting for the show to begin and she said "razor butterfly apple," not randomly but the back-story to how we reached this point in the conversation is long and incomprehensible, so suffice it to say we arrived at "razor butterfly apple."

And I said, "What a great title for a play."

And in the deep background of both of our brains, a gunshot rang and we were off: Structure: 3 acts. Length: 6-7 pages. Characters: two girls and a potentially talking willow tree. I claimed apple. Kristen took butterfly because razor was too obvious. This took about 2 minutes. An email to Liz later secured our third. And our guerrilla playwriting project had begun.

This was all last night. The first draft is already done. I have found my people.

I will post the completed terrifying mess when we have "finished" it.
The length of 6-7 pages was actually determined by a festival that a local company holds every year called Sketchbook, and it is our intention to submit it after we dramaturg the shit out of it. And once I start writing, all I kind of want to do is write, so I wrote another piece to submit (we can enter three each because they are short).

I am posting this play with the following disclaimer:
This is NOT autobiographical.
The character in this monologue play is NOT me, though we share some thoughts.
And most importantly: mom, I do NOT think you look old at all.

WHEN IT’S ALWAYS 3

ACTOR

I am ignoring the large dark elephant in the room. So are you. I'm distracting myself by talking to you, and you're distracting yourself by watching me, listening to me, wondering if I am going to go up on my lines, wondering if I am going to crack under the pressure. But the truth is when I'm up here is the one time that I feel no pressure because I have ceased to be me. I have taken on my merry little role, my character, which in this play is a reluctant nihilist, just as you have taken on your polite little role as audience. We don't do this because we have to, we do this because we need to. To distract ourselves.

Because in the back of the room behind the seats resting comfortably by the door ready to slide behind us as we exit is a truth that we don't want to think about. And if I'm not doing my job or if I'm doing a shitty job, he'll sneak into the seat next to you and prop his elbow on the arm of your chair and start breathing silently into your ear and you don't even realize it but all of a sudden you thinking about how old your mom looked when you went home for her 60th birthday. You're thinking about how you can't remember high school anymore and how when you look back at your childhood you are seeing yourself in the third person. Thoughts usually reserved for the eerie quiet of 3AM when you haven't been able to fall asleep because you can't quite reach that annoying little itch somewhere between your skull and your chest and suddenly the flood gates crack and you're drowning.

You roll over and cling to the person next you. You try to think about anything else. What you have to get done at work tomorrow: oh I have a lot to get done I have to xerox that report for administration and coordinate that meeting with management and utilities and if I can sneak it in my nephew's birthday is in two months and I wonder if that toy store has an internet site, or if Amazon.com has it, or if Ebay has it.

ACTOR looks around content and then it fades and s/he is freaking out again.

You think about what you are going to eat for breakfast oh bacon sounds good bacon sounds great maybe I should make some bacon right now oh but I am so tired I can't move there's no way I can move I’m just going to fall asleep.

ACTOR looks like s/he is asleep but then is freaking out again.

Hey baby hey sweety: sex come on come on kiss kiss kiss wake up sweety I am going to rock your world baby if you would only wake up baby oh hi did I wake you well now that you're awake...

That's why we fuck so much, and when we're not fucking we're masturbating and if not that then we are thinking about fucking or masturbating. Or we are watching a tv show in which people either presently fucking or in the process of securing a person with whom they can fuck. Because sex is not just a recreational past-time: it is a defense mechanism. Because the evolution that is corsing through us is telling us that we need to procreate and so when we are having sex we have tricked our brain into thinking that we are actually achieving something.

And despite all that practice, we all think we're dissatisfied with our sex-lives; but we're really just dissatisfied with life. The whole mechanism. We say that we're unhappy with our sex life because we can fix that. We can buy another toy, call up another friend, try doing it on the roof in the rain...

Catharsis is a term that is thrown about a lot in the theatre. As a good thing. As a thing that cleanses us. A thing that makes us feel like we have achieved something just by watching a play. Like we have achieved what the actor has achieved even though we're just sitting there. Like when an asshole character gets his comeupins, we feel like we gave it to them. We feel like justice has been served and that we somehow served it. Or some character in need got helped, and we feel like we helped them.

But then we don't give any money to the homeless guy outside trying to sell you a Streetwise. Catharsis is the queengoddess of all distraction because you feel like you’re the opposite of distracted: you feel like right now at this very moment you are hyperaware of all of the realities of truth and beauty because it has just been presented to you in an easy-to-digest coated blue pill on a silver-spoonful of sugar. Like we were in a cave and we had been looking at shadows, but we can now turn around and look at the candle. And we are so happy, so fucking gleeful, that we don't even think to look past the candle outside the cave.

Or maybe we do look past it, but it's too fucking dark out there to see anything.

It’s not just cathartic for you all either. When I experience something up here, I almost really experience it. It’s like life without the risk of death. I can't die when I'm up here. (DEATH comes up behind him/her) My character can die. (S/he dies) In any number of ways (S/he dies again). But I will always (S/he dies again) come back (dies again). It's like a shield. Or like a bodyguard. And as long as I have my guard up, I'm safe. And this stage is safe because we made it

The lights hiss and pop and go dark as if a fuse just melted. In the dark, ACTOR remains basically still. Then ACTOR improvises. S/hee can wait a while if s/he wants. But then s/he tries to strike up a conversation. Maybe about her/himself. Maybe about the festival. Maybe about some local bit of news that everyone knows about. S/he is making small talk because if s/he doesn't then s/he will start freaking out...the improv should end with the following line:

The irony of it all is/

All the lights burst on and during the darkness as many DEATHs as you can costume have slipped into the audience, in the aisles, in empty chairs, standing directly in front of people. Hopefully there will be screaming. And no catharsis.

End of Play

Torn 2008

2007-12-01T09:48:00.000-06:00

Just when I thought I was positive I was going to vote for Obama:

It was anybody's guess what Barack Obama and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg were talking about when they met for a breakfast date in Manhattan Friday morning — but Obama picked up the tab. Judith Perez, a waitress at the New York Luncheonette on East 50th Street, said Obama picked up the $17.34 check and left a $10 tip for the early riser nosh of coffee and eggs.

Hilary goes and does something that makes me think that she wouldn't be that bad:

During the standoff, Eisenberg had three conversations with CNN staffers in Washington and Atlanta, Georgia, during which he said he had mental health problems and could not get the help he needed. CNN and police refused his requests to speak with Clinton. "As a tactical standpoint, that would not have been wise for us to do that" because it would have reduced negotiators' bargaining leverage, Rochester Police Chief David Dubois said. Clinton said she made it clear to authorities that she would "take their direction" in deciding what to do.

Can you imagine GW in this sort of situation? Would he even show up? Or would he phone in a "we don't negotiate with terrorists" from his ranch? If he did show up, or if anyone from his administration showed up, do you think they would take direction from the Rochester Police? Or would four cars full of NSA experts flank him and take over?

Maybe this isn't fair: he's the President and the stakes are different. I should have worded everything in the past tense: When GW was running way back in '99 when the world didn't hate us and our military wasn't spread out like that last little bit of peanut butter on a piece of honey wheat and we were not buried beneath $9,142,461,538,254.04 of debt and so on and so forth, do you think he would have shown up?

The secret of the non-existent secret lives of dorks who want secret lives.

2007-11-28T22:34:00.000-06:00

I have been having this urge to dork-out and write a fan letter to the writing teams of Pushing Daisies and Chuck because, well, they make me smile on a regular basis and not a lot of things make me smile on a regular basis. This is not to say that I am not a happy guy, but I am certainly not a happy-go-lucky guy and hopefully the distinction is clear because I have no idea how I would explain the difference in less than 3000 words and 20 hours of research in the Newberry's collections on philosophy and etymology.

Pushing Daisies is easily the "better" of the two shows: beautiful, fun, witty...great. It has been flawless except one moment in the second or third episode that only someone who wore an eye-patch for a year and a half of his life would notice...I had a lazy eye...the school nurse caught it...I'm not blind in my left eye because of her...they called me pirate boy...

I cannot conceive how anyone could not be addicted to Pushing Daisies and so I don't really see a need to defend it. Check it out. It is its own defense. Because it is brilliant. It is brilliant. It makes me want to write for television.

If you are reading this writing team of Pushing Daisies, I want in...Please...please.
Chuck, on the other hand, probably could use some friends. The basic story of Chuck is ridiculous: a very-smart-but-basically-regular-Joe gets a whole system of government secrets downloaded into his brain through some shaky hypnosis thingy that is sent to him through his email by his ex-best-friend-turned-CIA agent. So he is now a walking computer that the NSA and CIA have to protect and use on missions, which are all conveniently local. Sounds pretty stupid right? But the characters are, again, brilliant and whoever cast the show should probably be given a medal. F-ing hilarious with just enough action to make it somewhat thrilling. And all the actors are really pretty. I mean REALLY pretty.

But more than the eye-candy and unapologetic-no holds barred-we-are-going-to-entertain-the- shit-out-of-you-attitude, Chuck is tapping into the secret dream of every single dork, pseudo-dork, and semi-dork: to have a secret power, or a secret life, or a secret. Do we all want to be spies? No. Because dork fantasies maintain a certain degree of logic and being a spy would be pretty lame. Chuck knows this. He's not thrilled about having a super-computer inside his head. Who would? I already get migraines.

But we do all want to be heroes. Superheroes wouldn't be bad either. Depending on the power of course: there is a lot of literature out there right now about how being a superhero would probably suck too. And, likewise, Chuck is tapping into an interesting angle of the escapism of the hero-fantasy: we can all become heroes overnight if we just receive the right email or we just get bitten by the radioactive spider or get doused in the right combination of crime-lab chemicals during an electrical storm.

But when that happens, we are not going to stop being dorks. We are just going to be dorks with super-powers.

I am searching for a day job, and finding a day job is kind of like searching for the right secret identity: you probably won't love it, but you should at least try to find one that doesn't make you miserable. And if you are really lucky, your day job will be helpful to your secret life. The Flash: Barry Allen, police detective; probably hated the paperwork, but he was always in the know. Spiderman, Superman: work for news organizations. Do they like taking photos and writing articles, maybe. But it's probably not as interesting as soaring through the air.

Batman runs with the social elite. Do you think the brooding obsessive Batman, enjoys brushing elbows with those boring suits? Of course not. He would rather be down in his cave eating the souls of all the weirdos running around Gotham as he feverishly pushes his super-computer to figure out who the hell killed his parents and psychologically scarred him for life, but instead he has to sip champaign and hear about how Eleanor's poodles just won nationals and about Simpson's dissatisfaction with his new caddy. No wonder he is so irritable.

Ideally we could all be like Mr. Fantastic or Aquaman: merge our two lives into one. Not have a need for a secret identity. But I don't think that is going to happen for me anytime soon. So I need to find a kick ass cover. Because I don't want to be irritable. And I get irritable...

Writing for Pushing Daisies would be nice. Please...please.

Regarding a fictional conversation with Will Shakespeare:

2007-11-27T23:14:00.000-06:00

Sometimes dramaturgs need to save playwrights from pirates.

Nantes (from the Flying Club Cup) - BEIRUT

2007-11-27T08:31:00.001-06:00

Hermit

2007-11-27T01:15:00.000-06:00

There is a man
On the coast of Antarctica
At Dumont d'Urville
Living in constant fear
That the French will show
And ask for a passport
he does not have.

Dramaturgy in motion

2007-11-27T00:09:00.000-06:00

I am at a table with very smart people. Smart in that way that I have never been smart -- heads full of random facts and semi-important names; remembering everything they ever heard, saw, read -- but also smart in that other way. The director has found the only extant biography of the Canadian playwright that American production teams can get their greedy hands on without ordering from Amazon.com, and has copies of T.S. Eliot poems that he believes are subtly alluded to in the script. Gold. The sound designer suggests the nostalgic music of Beirut -- "Think Amelie" he helpfully offers to those of us who look lost (but only half of us are, because these people are smart in that way I have never been smart) -- would help us as we are finding an appropriate soundscape. Gold. The Artistic Director explains how the play fits into the larger goals of the company and why it specifically was picked for this season: Gold. I have to be reminded that I have two photographs -- results of a Google search of the word verdigris -- that might provide some insight. I sheepishly share.

I ask questions. I play devil's advocate. I remind people of what they said the other day. I try to keep up. We are in the back of a restaurant in a section that is outside when weather permits and under a tent when it doesn't. There is a space heater frying my ass. Literally. Jess moves my coat because she thinks it might be burning. I am hot, but I am having fun. I love conversations like this. It is Autumn 2003 and I'm in the back of someone's car driving back to Advanced Playwriting from a preview of The Goat, or Who is Sylvia. And we are talking about it, and I am deciding I cannot stop talking about it and all I want to do is talk about it.

Autumn 2007 is quickly feeling like winter in the back of this tented pub with good cheap dark beers, and questions of "do these smart people need me" quickly evolve into "how do I step up my game so that these smart people need me." Maybe this is dramaturgy: smart people helping smart people be smart...

It took me four years to learn how to ride a bike and that was only after I rode smack into a huge blue wall in the middle of a completely empty space

2007-11-19T22:27:00.000-06:00

Late Night Break Up

I love you.

No you don't.

How do you know?

Because I don't love you.

Oh.

I'm not sorry either.

Oh.

I love your father.

What?

You're dad.

He's, like, 70.

He's a real man.

He's 70.

Don't tell him.

Why would I tell him.

Why wouldn't you.

He's married. To my mom. For like 50 years.

She's old though.

So is he.

And men cheat.

I think you should leave.

Loads of men want to cheat with me. I've had offers. I, like, remind them of something.

I need for you to leave now.

Is your dad home?

Where's your coat?

He's probably asleep. Is he a light sleeper? Lighter than your mom?

Here.

I wonder if I just lightly knocked on the door...

I want you to leave right now.

Or if I just slipped in next to him...

I'll call the cops.

She laughs.

Oh come on.

I will.

I'm not serious. (Beat) You think I want to do your dad. You're mom's like the sweetest person on the planet.

Ok.

I mean, your dad's fine and all.

Yeah.

But he's, like, 70.

He is.

Probably couldn't even perform if I did jump him.

73 actually.

I mean, it would be a thrill for him no doubt.

Sure. Sure.

I mean when you're 70.

73.

I bet you'll want your son's friend...

Girlfriend.

to make a pass at you.

I don't think so.

Oh come on you'll take your jimmys were you can get them.

I don't think so. And it's jollys I think.

I'd probably give him his first hard-on in years. Maybe decades.

I think I still want for you to go.

It was only a gag.

No. It's fine. But I think I still...

I mean except for the part about old men wanting me. That's true. I don't know why. Maybe they want all the girls. Oh god here I was thinking I was special but what if they make passes at everything walks by them. Jesus that's embarrassing.

It's getting late and I have to get up in the morning.

Would you want me if you were 70?

Not if I was married.

No, no but say you weren't married would you want me?

When you're 70?

No like I am now.

But I'm 70?

Right.

Probably.

Really?

I mean, I want you now; I don't think taste in women changes. But maybe it does. I guess it does. It must, right? Or else old people would be chasing around young people all day. So I don't know. Maybe I'd want you.

Maybe.

Or maybe I'd want you only I'd want you-at-70.

You want me to be 70.

Well not now, no, I...

There's a word for that. For the opposite of pedophile. But I don't know it because nobody talks about it because it disgusts people. Not that it disgusts me. But I'm a girl. And girls find older men, maturity, sexy. But it disgusts men because Mrs. Robinson and Maud aren't real. Men want firmness more than they want maturity. And I'm firm.

Yes.

And you like that I'm firm.

...yes...

But I won't always be firm.

...no?

I think we should break-up.

Okay.

Because I don't love you and you love me and I think that's going to make things awkward because there is all this expectation, all this pressure for me to fall in love with you now and I don't think I will because I really don't do well under pressure. I resist it. I run away from it. Kind of like I think I am going to run-away right now. Maybe that is why I find older men attractive. They're going to die soon. I tell you I love you and, wham bam!, we're married and then we're 70 and we have spent 40+ years together wanting to screw other people but remaining faithful out of politeness even though we want to be chasing around all the firm 20somethings; but if you're 70 then the pressure is off because even if we do end up married, it won't be for the rest of my life. The rest of your life, sure, but I will have a life after marriage. A safety net.

I think we should break-up.

Oh. You're sweet.

Okay.

You don't have to.

I know. But I think I do. Think that.

Oh.

You're freaking me out.

And so you're breaking up with me.

I'm agreeing with you.

That we should break up.

Right.

Because I'm freaking you out.

Yes. No...Yes.

You're so immature.
She opens door.
And you wonder why I'm sleeping with your dad.
She leaves.

no fate but what we make

2007-11-17T21:46:00.000-06:00

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.

exploding lightbulbs

2007-11-16T20:31:00.000-06:00

Eventually you probably get over the hump and stop writing about thinking and stop writing about writing and just write. I'm troubled that the most appropriate lines that come to mind are from The Matrix when Morpheus instructs Neo how to fight -- Stop trying to hit me and hit me -- and Star Wars when Yoda instructs Luke -- Do or do not. There is no try -- but I guess movie references are the allusions of our generation and there is no need for embarrassment.

I had ideas today. I have been having ideas all week. Ideas are problematic. At least mine are because my ideas always seem fun and lovely and economically impractical. Not impractical. They don't cost much; they just don't make anything. I'm not bad with money; I'm just not good at making it.

Like on the bus downtown two days ago (was it?). I'm on the 134, that lovely (word of the hour) little express that skips over half the commute and transits along the lake. The lake is beautiful and I am looking right at it but I'm not: it's earlyish and my mind hasn't yet popped into second gear. I don't know what I am thinking about, but not about the lake. And I think about not thinking about the lake and think about how anybody looking at me would say I am looking at and thinking about the lake (these are how the conversations in my head usually unfold) and to these theoretical voyeurs I would cleverly reply: what you look at doesn't matter; but how you look at it...

or something like that. It felt like a deep philosophical thought at the time. I was proud of it. It gave me hope. But I didn't write it down, and minutes later when my mind had moved through about seventeen different topics I was saddened to learn I had forgotten that thought that had filled me with a certain amount of creative glee. The 134 was turning off of Lakeshore and onto Wacker and I tried to convince myself that it was enough that I had thought the thought at all: that simply thinking it was evidence that my mind still had "it" and that "it" would come again when I needed "it" to.

I don't remember when I remembered (if hermeneutics is the study of interpretation, what is the memory of remembering called?). It might have been the same day that I decided I wanted to open my own literary agency for midwestern playwrights (and dramaturgs; and directors). Another idea! That would have put it at about a week after the dramaturgy blog. Another idea! Oh, and I have plans for a new works program for New Leaf if I am asked to move into the position of literary manager...

The job hunt goes poorly because I am stubborn and full of ideas and the Medici are all dead and even when they weren't they lived in Italy...

I just laid on the couch for the last hour listening to This American Life. The one radio show that I don't mind when it plays a repeat. What a great idea...

Why Birthday money rocks!

2007-11-10T17:44:00.000-06:00

What Dan bought with his Birthday money.

Postmodern Museum of Bastardization

2007-11-02T23:27:00.001-05:00

Postulations about dramaturgy examined through metaphor.

2007-11-02T21:05:00.000-05:00

Most people...well at least some people...well...at the very least I hope you have heard of the Sistine Chapel debate: to clean or not to clean...To clean and restore the work to its original splendor or to allow the soot and the dirt and the mold of time that has accumulated to remain, well, accumulated. Most would probably agree that it would be nice to actually be able to see God and Adam touching pointing at each other with recognition

ADAM: Hey, hey. I know you.

GOD: Yeah. Yeah. Weren't you that...guy...

ADAM: Hey, yeah. Didn't we meet like at

GOD: I think it was...

ADAM: Hey. Yeah! That's right. That's where it was! Yeah. Hey, man, you look great.

so few would argue that light maintenance is inappropriate. But once it is visible, what about reviving the colors? Revisiting the details. Do we deny history her due? Or do we deny the audience of today what the audience of yesteryear enjoyed? How does one maintain this allusive thing called authenticity when time does not give a shit.

My friend put to me an interesting question that is similar. Kind of. Well, it's an art question. Sort of: it was actually an art metaphor to talk about theatre. I am defining what I think the role of the dramaturg is, and I am lucky to have found a friend who disagrees with me at the very core. Disagrees with me in a way that fills the air between us with a violent electrical current.

The question: Would you allow a curator of a museum to hang Vincent Van Gogh's The Starry Night upside down?

I started to think how cool it would be to have an exhibition in which numerous masterpieces were flipped upsides. How we would see the pieces in a new way. We would see elements of the paintings we never saw before. This was not my friend's intention. I started to think of the marketing side of it too: purists would be enraged by the prospect of disrespecting the art while a small faction of revolutionary post-modernists would gleefully praise the reinterpretation. Fireworks! Arguments! Heated arguments that can only happen between people who believe they have found the meaning of life. One side has found meaning in an authentic beauty that reaches deep down into them and phenomenologically moves them; the other side has found meaning in the endless potential of interpretation and in the evolution of meaning itself.

The ticket sales would boom!

And people would go see the art again. And one intention we can safely assume about every artist -- possibly the only intention we can safely assume -- is that they wanted the work seen.

But would this audience see the art the way that the artist had intended? This was my friend's point. Are they seeing the art or are they seeing the interpretation of the art? I think this was her point. When we view The Starry Night upside down, are we seeing Van Gogh's painting or the curator's project?

I would go see it, and I think a lot of people would. And I would enjoy it (and I think a lot of people would). I also think that a lot of people would also view the painting how it was originally angled: I would wager that many patrons of the exhibit would crook their necks uncomfortably downways; I would hypothesize that many of them would peruse the merchandise in the giftshop on the way out to remind themselves (but do you think they hung the posters upsidedown when they got home?); and with whole museums our our fingertips, I would guess that many a Google search of The Starry Night would occur before, after, and during (iphones, you scare me).

But what if this was it? What if this was the moment that you would see The Starry Night for the first and last time? What if no one was around to tell you that it was upside down? That it "wasn't supposed to be viewed this way." What if there was no context?

These final extrapolations from the original question are what irk me the most. I don't know. A temporary exhibit viewed in the context of a world of easily accessible information is easily excused. A permanent entry in the museum of the mind is less so.

Maybe this is the compromise: there are works of art -- as there are works of theatre -- that have reached a level of contextualization. And this context protects the piece from any one exhibition -- or production -- defining it. I would argue that The Starry Night is protected. I would argue that Death of a Salesman is protected. And since they are protected, why not screw with a little bit...so as not to get bored with them?

Cornelia Parker's 2003 The Distance (a kiss with string attached) at the Tate Modern

Clearing the Throat

2007-11-02T21:04:00.000-05:00

A really bad movie makes you realize how easy it is to allow your life to amount to absolutely nothing. I am talking a movie that has absolutely no redeeming value other than to distract you from your ordinary day. To distract you from the fact that your ordinary day is ordinary because in the time that you could take to make your life extraordinary, you happen to be watching this movie. This movie that is mind-numbing. This movie that is a sedative. This movie that is Lara Craft Tombraider Search for the the Somethingorotherwhogivesafuck.

And yet I cannot turn it off. It is on as I write this. Angelina Jolie just jumped off of somewhere and shot someone in the head without looking because she is just that good at shooting people in the head. And there's that guy who is in 300 but he is like 30 pounds smaller and 30 times less badass -- Spartans! Tonight you dine in Hell!. It is on because it is not only a distraction, it is also an ambassador. Not Lara Croft per se (although with Miss Angelina "UN" Jolie...), but the television. Alone in my apartment with two loving but sleeping cats, I can reach my hand through the television and hold yours, the other poor sap who has been sucked in to watching the Tomb Raider jump through break away glass as thousands of bullets whiz by her pretty head. Our silent lazy go-between. I am communicating with the other people watching AMC at 8:40 on a Friday night. I am saying the same thing they are saying: I had a busy week. I want to unwind with something mindless.

But I don't.

Time to turn the TV off...or at least pause it. Thank you TIVO.

Intolerant

2007-10-30T23:05:00.001-05:00

I knew I couldn't digest avocados. Turns out, can't digest nutella either. So: find out the common ingredient in both of those most-disparate-foods-ever and I am that-intolerant.

(Production) Dramaturgy defined: attempt 1

2007-10-28T17:00:00.000-05:00

I am waiting1 for a call2 from Libby, the Greasy Joan director of The Misanthrope, to discuss who she thinks the characters in the play are and how they fit into the world that Moliere (see also Jean Baptiste Poquelin) and, more importantly (objection: argumentative!), she is wanting to create. She is wanting to create a futuristic dystopia (google search: futuristic dystopia movies) akin to that found in the film Brazil. I had never seen Brazil. I have now seen Brazil. Some major translation is going to be necessary, and I am not talking the kind that can be resolved with the help of a French-to-English dictionary (n. dictionnaire m.).
1. Consider sharing that lovely bit from the Noah Haidle play in which the old Colonel refers to his book on how to do most everything in order to reteach himself how to wait.
2. "Mr. Watson--come here--I want to see you." (Alexander Graham Bell, March 10, 1876)

So it seems that now is as good a time as any to try to define what dramaturgy is. For myself as much as anyone. Because I consider myself a dramaturg. I also consider myself a playwright. Soon I might consider myself a literary manager, and eventually I hope to consider myself a scholar and call myself a professor, but not yet. Right now I am a dramaturg and a playwright and as such I hope I can speak to both with the same freedom and frankness that Dave Chappelle uses when he makes black jokes and Jerry Seinfeld makes Jewish jokes and Howard Stern makes asshole jokes.

The old takes-one-to-lampoon-one theory.

Because ultimately the only people who are going to be happy with my theories on Dramaturgy are directors.

Dramaturgy is tricky because dramaturgs are -- while helpful -- ultimately unnecessary. In order to produce a play, one needs a script and actors. (For performance art, even the script is an unnecessary luxury.) In order to have a good production of a play, one needs a director: the voiced manifestation of a consistent understanding and vision as seen from the perspective of the audience. In order to have a smooth production of a play, one needs a stage manager. In order to have a production that is both visually and aurally pleasing, one needs designers and the crew to implement their designs.

And a good smooth visually and aurally pleasing show has often been enough.

The least necessary voice in the room is the playwright. After the first production of the show, after the playwright has lain (laid? I was a writing instructor?) the script to rest, after she has made her vision as clear as she can with the words of her play, after she has kissed it on the forehead and sent it off into the world -- "don't forget to write sweetheart. let me know what you're up to" -- the playwright is no longer in charge. She was before this moment. Of course she was. It was her play. New Play Dramaturgy will be the subject of a later post.

But now it is the director's play: the playwright is dead. And here is why: the play was written with a set of intentions to communicate to an audience in a specific context. And that specific context has dissolved into the recesses of time. It is a new time with an audience with new needs. Theatre is lovely because it is organic and it is organic because it is a collaboration between the past (as it has been captured in the text) and the present (as it is understood by the director). If the playwright dominates the direction of a production, it's growth and applicability is stunted. Literature consists of time capsules, while the theatre is constantly renewing itself.

This is not meant to sound pretentious: I like time capsules. I just don't think theatre should be one (historical fictions and, maybe, documentary dramas excluded).

And none of this is to say that the playwright should not be involved: but her voice shouldn't have any more authority than anyone else in the room, and certainly not more than the director.
The dramaturg is the second most unnecessary voice in the room, which is why many productions do without. There was a directing professor back at school who "didn't believe in dramaturgs" because they simply do the work a good director should be doing for himself.

Well yes and no: it is true that if a dramaturg does the basic research surrounding a play -- production history, contextualization, looking up what a ookpik is -- this frees the director up to concentrate on what is seen and heard on stage. And in a pinch, one cannot argue this is a bad deal.

But to say that a dramaturg is useless is to say that the field of consulting is useless. I used to resist defining dramaturgy as a form of consulting because I did not like the implications associated with comparing art to business. But it is basically comparing research to research. A consultant is one who is hired from outside a company to look inside a company(and at the environment surrounding that company) to tell that company how to improve, usually with the goal of making money. Likewise a dramaturg is brought in (though not hired in my experience as of yet; how to make money as a dramaturg is something I have yet to figure out) to help the director realize his goal: producing the best production of a play as possible under the circumstances given.

This unsatisfying definition is vague, but is has to be; the requirements of every show are going to be different. But I think I can simplify it -- unfortunately without adding much to the explanation -- by saying that a production dramaturg keeps the director honest to his vision. And he can do this in a number of ways: understanding the play, understanding the original context, understanding the playwright, understanding the present social climate, understanding the social climate the director wants to create in the play, understanding the director's vision and helping the director communicate his vision to the actors and designers with your cumulative understanding.

Theatre does not need dramaturgs. There have been brilliant productions without them. But I am guessing that many shows have also been saved by an astute dramaturg. And dramaturgs can add a level of consistency and complexity to a production that would otherwise be absent.

Okay. My head hurts. It feels full and empty simultaneously. I think this is right. It is right for now. Deirdre being a genius once dramaturged a day in her own life (which is a different kind of dramaturg all together: lets call that Creative dramaturgy with a capital C because she is creating a new work through dramaturgy; that said, it probably already has a name; I will have to look that up). I will probably dramaturg this entry later to make sure it is consistent.

Until then: fellow dramaturgs and playwrights, if we spirits have offended...it was not my intent.

His name was (is) Oliver! (See last post)

2007-10-25T19:09:00.000-05:00

This image is blurry. There isn't much I can do about it. So oh well. It's kind of like a chuck close painting. Or one of those pictures that you stare at and then you see something else (like a sailboat!) but only if you let your mind go or let your eyes relax or something having to do with relaxation or release.

On Tuesday I found a 30 day pass on the bus much like the one you see above. Only much crisper. It had been started and it is only good until the Halloween, but it is pretty f-ing sweet all the same. It's basically like finding 20 dollars. Or like finding a 20 dollar gift certificate to a store that you like to frequent multiple times a day but only spend 2 dollars at a time. I felt guilty for finding it at first: there are some schools of thought that when you get three wishes, your wishes are granted but at the expense of others and they never turn out quite like you expect them to. The rules of wishes are a bit shaky. But I didn't wish to find someone's lost CTA pass, and what am I going to do? Post a Craigslist ad?

That's just dumb.

It couldn't have come at a better time. It has been a busy week with two callbacks for the two shows I am turging. I continue to define what a dramaturg's* role actually should be and to whom a dramaturg's allegiance should be: the director or the playwright. His allegiance should ultimately be to the play but what the hell does that mean? Whose play is it? I had a...debate about it tonight with a dear playwright friend...she says our friendship will continue, but we will have to wait and see.

*Dramaturg in the context of this entry is shorthand for research dramaturg and not new play dramaturg; new play dramaturg's are clearly present for the sole support of the PW. **

**I realize that most of you*** really don't care.

***Screw you.

Dramaturgs help playwrights kill babies. -Old Aztec Saying

glimpsed memories

2007-10-20T21:18:00.000-05:00

I started work on two shows today with two different companies that open the same week in March.

A long time in high school -- which it is safe to say was a long time ago because a) I just turned 26 (jesus) and b) I have very few actual memories of high school; I do have echoes of memories that have been distorted and colored from bouncing off the walls of my brain for the better part of a decade (jesus), but all specificity of those years has been bumped by more recent memories and more recent relationships; I once had a girlfriend who told me that people fill momentary moments in other people's lives, and once they are gone let them go. I guess I remember that. -- I used to do too many things.

I don't remember why.

I played drums in a garage band with my closest friends, but I never practiced -- to their chagrin -- because I was busied by Spring Musical rehearsals when I wasn't at practice for soccer (first waterpolo: those pictures have thankfully been burned), or tennis. I think at various times I was associated with various other associations: the art club (I think I was VP? Maybe? I don't think we did anything.), the environmental club (I think I joined for the babes? I don't think we did anything), that one club that met in the morning before school (I have no idea what that was or what we did), NHS (we didn't do anything), and yearbook (which wasn't a club, but a class, but we still had to do stuff after school...didn't we...).

They were social gatherings that had names that reflected well on college applications. If you are going to hang out with your friends anyway, call it a club (was I in chess club too? did we have a chess club? maybe it was math league...but only for that one competition because they needed a substitute...) I think I genuinely enjoyed most of them...some of them.

In college I slowed down. Didn't I? Wow: it's already getting blurry. Scents and senses. Shapes and feelings. I can hear Andy's voice but not what he's saying. I can tell you the configuration of my Freshman dorm room but not what Freshman year was like. Good, right? Art classes. Shopping carts. Andy. Mike. Kim. My first martini. Acting I. The Spring Musical. Jami Ake's Shakespeare class. Sophomore year: Andy. McNiell driving to crack church in his gas guzzler. 9/11. Stacking our furniture to have stadium seating in our common room. Dauten. Jacob. All Student Theatre. Medal of Honor. Blueberry Hill. Junior Year. Andy. McNiell painting his room in our apartment blood red. Jon the Mormon. My closet sunroom of a room. School work. Never having time for Andy. No cell phone: talked to Rachel long distance from land lines and free phones at school. Woodcarving. England. Amy. England. Five weeks around Italy and France and Spain. Alone and lonely. The 40 year old Californian lesbian from Ireland who told me I had an old soul in Barcelona (what is the Spanish word for old soul?) Angel. Ginny. Chaucer. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Sussex library. That one friend I made...what was his name...from Emory...what was his name...Amsterdam. Senior year. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Carter. Playwriting. Jon. Ginny. Andy. Julia. Stephanie until Travis came back (bastard). Cruddy cheap off-campus housing. Playwriting. Blueberry Hill. Andy knocking on my window to get me to hang out, me ignoring him because I had work to do. A thesis to finish.

It comes in a rush, and I see so many holes that were filled with school work rather than friends. Studying rather than conversations. At the graduation party, Andy's folks came up to me and said I was a good influence on their son, getting him to focus more on his school work.

My papers were good, and I remember none of them. All my time in the library blends together into one peaceful memory. But that night when we taped Mike to a chair and pushed him to Schnucks in a shopping cart where we were stopped by a rent-a-cop ("not a cop; hate cops")...the night in Steph and Julia's apartment watching 24 (one of the decent seasons) when I told Pedro his girlfriend was incredibly attractive moments before she walked in the door behind him...walking through the gated neighborhood with Andy and getting told we were not allowed to be walking through the gated neighborhood...

You call old friends to catch up, but it's never like it was and every conversation reminds you of that. Every conversation is an exercise in interactive nostalgia. Once they are gone let them go.

This was an entry about beginnings and it turned into an entry about loss. My apologies. I started work on two shows today with two different companies that open the same week in March. New projects. New associates. New friends.

But I miss you guys. For the first time, I wish I wasn't allergic to cameras.

I want to say his name was Doug. The guy from Emory. He wanted to be a writer.

Quick Sand Glass Houses

2007-10-15T21:09:00.000-05:00

There is dust in my pocket watch. Maybe it is sand: sand from glass rubbing up against the metal frame...oh wait. Sand doesn't come from glass.

I am sitting at auditions for The Boys are Coming Home. More accurately: I am sitting outside the hallway outside the auditions for The Boys are Coming Home checking in eager actors awaiting an open call. It is a lot like hosting back at Blueberry Hill except the patrons are nicer. They have to be nicer. They don't know if I am taking notes. I am of course, not that anyone can read them:

An actress asks me about the call-back procedure. Another asks me which accompanist is in which audition room. Another asks me, "what are they looking for." Eventually I explain, I'm the literary intern. I spend most of my days reading scripts. I have no idea. I'm here because they needed bodies. I do not detail how I will spend the remainder of my day completely reorganizing the Goodman's library. Logging in a series of plays from the '50s, none of which I have heard of (save Auntie Mame). Questioning the need for our Encyclopedia set in light of that merry little innovation, the Internet. Lamenting the boxes full of random photos from random productions and wondering what the hell to do with them.

I went biking in the rain yesterday. Not wise considering I was fighting off some bug; I am fighting off that bug a little harder today. Low-grade fever. Head full of fuzz. No fun. I hate being sick. Usually I can wrap my mind around it; come to terms with it on an intellectual level; level with it; see it eye to enzyme. But for some reason this one is blocking me. It won't let me in, and so it persists.

There is thunder outside? Fireworks? Sounds kind of like a soft bombing of a not-so-far-away city, but that is probably because I can barely hear it over the Journey that is coming from Rachel's computer. I wonder if that kind of war will ever come here. Liz brought her Venezuelan friend to our taco & tequila party Friday night. Conversations turned politely political. She explained how Venezuelans take an interest in their neighbors -- ten points if you can name one of them -- and their leaders. "Do you know who the Prime Minister of Canada is?" she asks. "Mexico's President?"

I know it was Fox...

All this information at our fingertips...the problem with being always connected, what do you connect to?...I bookmark Canada's globeandmail online newspaper and Mexico Daily...

Do you think the Internet will ever get full? Or will we simply get sick of information piling on top of information piling on top of information...

wine glasses on an empty table: a quizzical examination

2007-10-10T22:48:00.000-05:00

Do critics go straight home?
Do they stop at a bar first? Lube the synapses?
Do they go out with people and talk about the play to confirm their own suspicions, or do they shelter their precious opinions away from the ruckus, the hubbub of chittering little theatre birds who like too much and too often?

How quickly do they process? Do they know the moment the applause stops whether they are moved, whether they will be moved tomorrow afternoon on their drive home from their editor's office? Or do they let it all sink in; marinate?

Seven wine glasses with some cheap cheap red sit on the unused tablecloth covering a thoroughly used table. The stage empties, and the actors are gone. The lights quickly dim, and the glasses are gone too. This moment has been a long time coming; it has been earned, as they say in the biz. But it is over too quickly. The actors speed off. And the wine in the glass has barely settled before the room's gone dark. We want it back.

"This is not a play about dishes, or food, or costume changes, but rather a play about people in a dining room" -- A. R. Gurney, Jr. Preface

Jess in her genius -- or the genius of her artistic team, she will tell you -- simply get rid herself of the dishes and the food. No newspapers. No tea-cups or birthday cakes. But through the soundscape, there they were. Perfectly timed movements to perfectly simple sounds: the snap and shuffle of the morning news, the clinking of china. The groundlings would say, on their commute through the plague-ridden streets, "we are going to hear a play."

Nothing throughout the show, save a table and chairs. No props to lean on or hid behind.

And then these glorious glasses with shining wine. In the final scene, the materialization of a dream: the simplest dream of reality. But so quickly gone. I want them back. Wait. Please. Just a little longer. Hold that cue...

But maybe that is the point: the vignettes of The Dining Room are -- if not straight memory scenes -- always nostalgic. Always about longing. Always about the past. A past we can never get more of. The sands in an hourglass slipping through. The last glance at a wine glass before the rose fades to gray fades to darkness.

I wonder if critics feel regret? Do they think of their reviews like referees think of calls? Snap judgments under pressure; under a deadline? Do they ever go back and look at the feed and say, wow, I really fucked that up. I should have stopped at a bar on my way home.

I hug Jess on the way out of the theatre. I think about mentioning the wine glasses. I wanted more of them, Jess. Just three more seconds alone with that image. Please? But I didn't say that. I'm glad I didn't. I'm glad I let it marinate.

Well, Jess. I wish you happy reviews, well-deserved. I smiled at a stranger walking her dog on the walk home from the bus, and for some reason I know it's your fault.

2007-10-09T19:05:00.000-05:00

SIR G
A long time ago, God told me when I was going to die.

LADY B
Is it today?

SIR G
I don't remember.

Beat

LADY B
That seems like the kind of thing one would write down.

Day Off

2007-10-08T12:46:00.000-05:00

Day Off may be a misleading title as I have Jerome Fellowship applications to review for The Playwright's Center. The problem with not having a 9-5 like job -- one of the few problems with not having a an 9-5 like job -- is that your non-9-5 job follows you home; but I have so far done an alright job at keeping the Goodman out of my home life. Or I was doing an alright job before the New Stages Festival started two weeks ago. Six staged readings of six new plays were what the public saw; but behind the scenes was fifteen hours of rehearsal per play plus the prep work. So it wasn't that the Goodman followed me home so much as I never went home.

But New Stages is over! A fairly successful undertaking, I think. I heard an audience member (some one from the industry) comment that it is telling that the Goodman can fill their smaller Owen Theatre for a reading while some off-loop theatres are struggling to get people in for an actual show. Sad. Very sad considering that three of the six readings were not very good. Well I guess this is more accurate: two were pretty awful, two were unsuccessful but show promise (one more than the other), and two were great.

One of them I spent doodling just to keep awake:

Act I:Act II:
And one of them I just straight up skipped after sitting through the final run at rehearsal. There are so many great writers out there who are talking about new ideas in new ways, why do we pander to big names? Tanya gets up in front of the audience every night and explains that all of the plays are works that we are excited about or playwrights who we want to start or continue a relationship with. Maybe she is lying? Maybe this is a nice little PR plug? Or maybe this playwright has just not brought his/her best work to this festival? I don't know. I sit in the dark corner of the theatre, writing down the problems in my head as I sketch out my complaints in the code of a doodle. Silently diplomatic.

That is the problem with being an intern: you are there to facilitate the process but not necessarily the work so you are quiet most of the time. You write down notes that you never show anyone and quietly rejoice when the same advice is given an hour later by someone with a voice. You learn from Odysseus: slip in criticisms as compliments or asides. Undoubtedly a good lesson for one who is often too critical: of twenty thoughts you can choose half of one to share on the elevator ride up to the offices. Pick the most important. Pick the one that no one else is likely to see.

Two plays were great though. Naomi Iizuka's Ghostwritten -- a reinterpretation of the Rumpelstiltskin story and the relationship between America, Vietnam, cultural identity, and food -- was playful and poignant. And Mickle Maher's Spirits to Enforce -- in which superheroes telefundraise for a production of The Tempest, which they eventually perform for a house of supervillains -- is one of the smartest and best written plays I have seen/read in a long time.

Day Off. Right. This is why I usually do the title last. The apartment is clean and the dishes are done. I had a Blueberry Hill flashback as I was handling the cleaner: I almost put the 409 down on the floor instead of on the counter because of health code violation. I read Diana's blog to catch updates: "a successful staff party, hirings and firings, wars fought with managers from other staffs." I miss them. I miss the gossip. I wonder who was fired. I wonder what the battle was over and who won. But I guess I'll have to wait until Thanksgiving to find out.

Shit: still have to rent a car.

Karma

2007-10-07T22:20:00.000-05:00

In was thinking about writing this play about two weeks ago now: on a man's bikeride home from work, he is struck by a car door and the entirety of the play happens as he is flying through the air before he dies. The play opened with this interestingly cinematic focus on the biker (sorry, cyclist) as he pedals around the staged and then somehow glides through the air after he is hit. And then he stops in the air. Floats. I have no idea how this would be done. Strings, no doubt. But that is what is lovely about being behind the script: you don't have to figure this shit out.

Of course then I wrote about punching that one patron in the face. And I wrote about the eternal war between bikers and taxicab drivers. I am sure I sinned little sins throughout the week. So I should not have been surprised when a mother of two with a yappy mutt in the back of her SUV swung her door open right into my wrist and handlebar, flipping my bike to the side and sending me sprawling.Maybe the body knows when it is going to die and when it is not, and maybe it only entertains the almost-certainly-doomed with that fabled flash of a lifetime in the mere flicker of that last second. Because NOTHING flashed before my eyes. One minute I am up and going 15 miles an hour; the next minute I'm on the ground. There is no in between.

I have recreated what happened from my injuries. The most apparent is the bruised scrape and lack of skin on my left elbow and arm along with a bruise down my left thigh and a scrape on the outside of my left knee: the street. Little indentions and a bruise on my right wrist which aches: where the car door hit me and swung me. A bruise on the inside of my left shin where my bike must have landed on me. A bruise near my right shoulder. Where is that from?

I am on my feet. Checking my wounds. Pushing everything to make sure nothing is broken. I check my bike, which is an old heavy mountain bike: the Volvo of bikes. The woman is freaking out. Cursing. Jesus. Oh Jesus. Oh Jesus. Oh shit. Oh shit. Replaying it in her head. I am going to say something nasty -- I feel the need to say something poignant and lasting on behalf of all the cyclists of Chicago who save money, time, and the environment by biking downtown everyday; the cyclists who are closer to the road than any save maybe the taxicab drivers -- but then her two kids get out, and I replay it in my head. Mother in front seat. Sons in back. Sons getting out. Be careful. Wait for mommy. Head turned backwards to make sure they are ok. Dog yapping in her ear. Quick. Need to get out before they run off: boys will be boys.

No time to check the side mirror for bikes.

Sigh. How can one stay angry?

She offers me a drink of all things. My elbow is bleeding pretty freely. I cannot tell yet if my wrist has a hairline fracture or some other thing that I have heard from one of many doctor-oriented television shows. I am fixing my headlight which has popped open. A drink? No, no, I'll be fine. Just some scrapes. I'll just need some bandaids. I have bandaids, she offers. Not big enough for this, I think. But I simply refuse. She walks away.

When you cannot put any weight on your elbow, it makes you realize how god-awful your posture is.

The resurrection of the ghost of the noble Sir Gawain

2007-10-04T00:38:00.000-05:00

Three years ago, I convinced myself that there was a dramatic structure that could house Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Seeing The Mikado in June made me realize that the poem is about the desperation to live; seeing Passion last night made me realize that it revolves around the bedroom and unrequited love and rejected advances. And now, three years later, with absolutely no time, I know what it will look like.

Sir Gawain seems to awake in a lavish lonely room.

Everynight
The same dream.
Everynight.
The slightest of changes
to the smallest of details.

A Christmas festival.
A night of merrymaking,
interrupted.

A giant
all green:
a green knight
enters on a great
green
steed
and presents my king a challenge.

A beheading game.
A Christmas game:
hit for hit
blow for blow
wound for wound.
Head for blessed head.

My king.
Our court.
My sacrifice.
I will keep my words plain
I ask for this battle to be mine.
What is the life of a knight
next to that of a king?

The ax is heavy --
steel and gold.
Lopping off the knight's green head
is easily done.

All done, I think.
The dark deed's done.
The mad dog's down.
And even now
in my dreams
I sigh.

But his green blood
Stains my clothes.
It stains the stones
and the tapestries.

It stains memory.

And then that thunderous laugh.
The deepest laugh of the oldest tree
buried beneath the greenest moss
hidden in the darkest corner
of Britain's most unholy forest.

Videos of stick figure fighting - Xiao Xiao 3

2007-10-03T23:44:00.001-05:00

On punching the guy next to you, and why it is okay.

2007-10-03T17:38:00.000-05:00

I feel my elbow bend and the muscles tense like my cat when she is about to pounce her brother. And then it springs: one swift punch to his temple. I feel his consciousness crack. He's out. I catch his head and quickly balance his chin on his chest. His date doesn't even notice. Thinks he has simply fallen asleep. The play isn't that entertaining, so it is plausible.

It is this plausibility that may be the culprit: the play isn't that entertaining, and the gentleman beside me (seat F2) is letting the surrounding patrons know this with his exaggerated sighs. Exhaling: hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. He has a little bit of mucus in his throat. A little cold maybe. So every third or fourth hhhhhhhhhhh ends in a chunky cough.

Counting the three New Stages staged-readings, this production of Sondheim's Passion -- hhhhhhhhhhhh -- is the sixth show I am seeing in five days. This number is also counting Pat McCurdy's genius set at the Beat Kitchen which he performs almost every Monday night, which might be a little unfair. Pat is on a level all his own. And one can drink beer in the dark back room of a bar while singing along to hilarious songs. But of the five playz: one was great (definition: well-crafted, well-executed, intelligent, pleasing), one was fun (definition: silly, entertaining, maybe would have paid for it if I had to and if tickets were cheap), one was pleasant (definition: glad I saw it; gladder it was free), and two were chores (definition: chores).

Some plays are chores. And you go. And you feel older when you leave. You want those hours of your life back so you can do something more worthwhile such as pretty much anything else you can think of. But, like your mama taught you, your chores need to get done. And your chores are someone else's pleasant experience. Your pleasant experience may be some one else's great. And I found Passion pleasant.

And so I feel my elbow coil and the tension build. hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. I try to remember that place on the neck that you can karate chop someone so that it knocks their adam's apple just so. hhhhhhhhhhhhhh. I begin to wish I had watched Star Trek so that I would know how to execute the Vulcan pinch. hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

But of course I do nothing.

I think maybe people become playwrights because they are too cowardly to enact some of their more socially-unacceptable, morally-ambiguous, physically-improbable fantasies, like walking over to that asshole over there who decided not to turn his cell phone off -- even though he is in a theatre and even though he was reminded by the usher and by the house manager -- and taking said cell phone from his hand and, raising it high like the Spartans lifted their unwanted babies skyward before hurling them off Mount Taygeto, snapping it in half for all to see.

But then maybe that is why people go to the theatre as well.

hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. POW! BAM!

Taxicab v. Bicycle

2007-09-28T22:00:00.000-05:00

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

2007-09-26T18:18:00.000-05:00

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

2007-09-25T22:48:00.001-05:00

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

2007-09-25T21:34:00.001-05:00

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

2007-09-25T21:13:00.000-05:00

...
...
...
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

2007-09-10T20:15:00.001-05:00

blue skies the earth's on fire

2007-09-01T22:09:00.000-05:00

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.

Vacuuming Cats

2007-08-26T09:52:00.000-05:00

Rachel is vacuuming. I wonder if I can write my first entry in the time it takes her to vacuum our whole apartment. I already did the dishes, so there is no guilt in sitting on my ass while she exhumes all the cat hair out of the carpet. Cats are funny. Linus is such a baby. He's two and knows all he needs to know about vacuums and yet he runs to me for protection from that strange mechanical beast that grunts and slurps. It's a pleasant sound, no? Methodical. Humming. Not too loud, but loud enough to overlay the rest of the world around. Soothing. Meditative. But not for Linus. He cowers.

Mabel, the fat and the beautiful, is bolder. I once thought she was retarded. She would look at the simplest of opportunities with such quizzical uncertainty. Now I know she's a genius. Manipulative even. She is the feline case study on why beautiful people never have to open their own doors and why they get the best tables and why they get reduced sentences when they drive wasted or facilitate dog fights. They just look at you and purr. Or in Mabel's case, she sits on her fat rump and lifts her front paws up in a swift praying like movement. At once demanding but with an element of supplication.

That balance: confidence and humility. You can't teach that. Especially to a cat. I'm quite proud.

Mabel leaps onto the coffee table (Ikea, yes. We have given in to consumerism at its most succinct.) and struts boldly towards the dragon of dust and lost crumbs. She looks at it quizzically and struts away with the absolute certainty that she cannot manipulate another bowl of food from this thing. Linus dashes down the hall, fast like furry lightening, likely to hide under the bed. As soon as he regrows some balls (I guess that's our fault) he will come out from his fort with renewed vigor. I was never afraid, he will assure us with his noisy mews that I cannot help but think are words in his own customized vocabulary. He will begin to order us around: throw my toys! Chase me! Throw me! Let's box! He will quickly become his regular exuberant self; but he will eye the vacuum as we put it back in its closet cage. Just to be safe. Just to be sure.