Typical Day

Diary

So far as i can tell there's no such thing as a typical day in New York City.  I imagine that only ladies who lunch and agoraphobics have managed to safely insulate themselves from the cacophony of events and influences buffeting this pulsing city.  For those of us lucky enough to dive daily into said pulse no day is typical.  Picture it if you will: early afternoon, a summer hot day in September and i'm huffing and puffing my way down one of those lovely, surprising little anachronistic thoroughfares below 14th St., late for work and worried about it, furrowed brow guiding me, swiftly marching forward, pushing my way past commuters left and right only to be halted by the sight of an angel and something in my heart swooned at the sight: crown of curly golden hair, marble skin, ethereally blue eyes and, not but a second later, suddenly an erection fills my vision, an erection pressing itself against the inside of dark gym shorts belonging to one incredible specimen descended, i imagine, from Achilles himself (yeah that Achilles, the one with the heel trouble), said specimen striding right towards me and behind him, lo and behold, a midget.  That's right: a midget.

Then there are the really strange days.  Riding the perpetually crowded 6 train, rocking out to a particularly rocking bootleg version of Iieee, and all at once a commotion at the packed end of the train (over what i can't tell) and i hear a voice (after i take off my headphones, of course): "I am the Earth Angel.  I am an angel of the Earth.  This is a not a joke.  Men, please stand back, only women may be near or you will run the risk of past life regression and your heart will be faint in your chest.  I am the Earth Angel."  Craning my neck on my way out of the train i glimpse him and he looks like Danny Devito with a mullet, playing an Oompa Loompa (yes those Oompa Loompa Doompity Doos of Willy Wonka fame), carrying a long white card, bordered in red and painted with rune-like characters.

When i get to work Milton is sitting outside and asks me have i seen Sharon (my co worker)?  I say no; he says someone stole her bag and she chased after him.  Now one of the only things i love about the restaurant is that it closes 3 - 5pm.  It's 3:30 at this point and usually the place is dim inside, white socked feet sticking out from booths and shining in the darkness beyond the sunlight (nap time, how charming).  No feet today though, today there's been a theft.  Some bum had taken Sharon's bag into the bathroom, she saw him come out with it and set it down: 'what were you doing with my bag?', she stops him on his way out, she's pawing through her bag, discovers her iPod is gone: 'where's my iPod?', he runs, she gives chase and two customers join her, they catch him, iPod is retrieved, police never come.

Meanwhile, i go to change into my work clothes and my backpack is gone.  This is more annoying than costly, i wished him well with my sweaty, masala reeking clothes, my apron with pens and a wine key, and the stick of deodorant that i'm sure he'll find useful (if i may draw the worst possible conclusion of his personal hygiene without ever meeting him).  And then i had to take the damn train home during rush hour, change clothes, and take the damn train back again (i don't normally refer to it as the 'damn train', but at the time i did).  Later my bag was discovered in the bathroom trash (why hadn't i thought to look there?), missing only the apron, which i'm glad he found empty of cash.  I hope he was very let down at the discovery and i also hope he had to smell and touch my dirty socks digging through my bag.

Three Things I've Learned About New York

Diary

1. Go before you go, unless you enjoy public urination, which i don't (not that there's anything wrong with it!).

2. Don't speed walk on the metal grates when it's raining.  They're slippery, cold, and hard and the puddles nearby are dirty and wet.

3. If a strangely dressed, sleepy woman with a leathered face asks you the time on the train, ignore her.  If you answer her she will then obsessively ask you every five minutes for the time in what will appear to be an ill-conceived, pathetic attempt at human contact that will make you feel very uncomfortable.

Is November 4th Too Late for a Halloween Blog?

Diary

It wouldn't have been a gay bar i was in Halloween night unless some silly homo held up the coat check queue fifteen minutes to strip down to shiny pink underwear adorned with a powdery pink, puffy bunny tail adhered to the rear and secured with suspenders.  He wouldn't've been a true homo either unless he capped the look with a bunny ear headband, plucked from his purse and prissily propped upon his head.  And, of course, it wouldn't've been New York unless he had thrashed about while stripping and digging around his bag, flinging elbows into my face and chest, forcing me to press backwards into the winding line packed into the tomb-like hallway behind me.

Shoshi tells me that here in New York people lose the boundaries of their personal bubble after a while.  I wonder if i could ever lose mine.  It just doesn't seem possible, even though i've already officially lost half of my winter accessories somewhere in Central Park by now.  Actually, she says 'you just get used to it'.  Again, i question whether this is a possibility for me.  I imagine the removal of my boundaries will require something a bit more than forgetfulness ('oops where'd my boundaries go?') or acclimation (i'm not, after all, just slipping into a pool here).  I imagine my boundaries will be sucked away by the wind-tunnels whipped up by the twenty or so trains that churn past headed uptown as i stand, sweating, waiting for one single, stupid train to stop by and finally take me downtown to my station so that i can almost wet myself between the station and home.  So while i'm happy to report that after nearly two months my spatial boundaries are hanging on strong, i can't help but wonder if i'm behind schedule.  Is it merely a matter of time before they desert me completely?  I really can't say, but i do hope they stick around although i also hope Shoshi's wrong that you're destined to leave New York in exasperation if your boundaries don't adapt.  I do love it here even if i can't relax as other New York gays can in bars with the elbow room and ambience of cans of vienna sausage.

So, i spent fifteen minutes in line, ten dollars at the door, and another fifteen minutes waiting for bunny boy to finish his not so quick change so i could check my bag.  All this to spend twenty minutes being jostled around in what seemed less like a crowd than a sea of sweat and appendages before desperately shoving my way through the crowd to escape.  To be fair though, i did get to enjoy the sight of three hard pricked porn stars dressed as demons bumping and grinding each other on a stage the size of a soap box, their erections peaking out of their waistbands, threatening an unexpected, though likely not unwelcome, moisturizing treatment to the tiny crowd salivating two feet beyond the 'stage'.  Add to this the sight of three guys getting serviced on the second floor landing and it's probably fair to say i got my money's worth though maybe it wasn't worth the wasted minutes of my life.

A lot of trouble could've been avoided had i not been carrying my bag.  And i wouldn't've been carrying my bag if i hadn't been stuck at work, or as i like to call it, my own private corner of Indian food hell, for the first part of the evening.  But i was and i had been, which is to say that work officially ruined my first New York Halloween not only because of my bag, but also since i didn't get to see the famous Village Halloween Parade.  Although, considering the steadfast and vigilant nature of my as yet to be compromised safety bubble, being stuck in a swarming crowd probably would've ruined my night anyhow.  I mean, even Shoshi, whose bubble is fully shrunk, recoiled in disgust when i suggested attending the parade.  'I'd rather die', is, i believe, what she said.

The Best Laid Plans, or Whatever

Diary

I'm proud to report that my mission is nearly accomplished.  Three months of slinging fried fish and frozen margaritas on Cape Cod have been a boon to my bank account and i'm now on the cusp of my New York move, i.e. the big one, i.e. the moment i've been anxiously awaiting for my entire life.  I'm about to fling myself into the unfathomable whirl of my dreams, about to begin climbing the towering ladder of my aspirations, and all sorts of other hyperbolic metaphors.  Romanticization aside, i'm moving and there's work involved.  Work that i've barely begun thinking about.  Work like planning an exact move date and renting a U-Haul.  Important things like finding a place to live and a job.  Oh sure, i brought out the boxes and mentally packed them, deciding which box would be for what.  And i've perused Craigslist.  And i gave my notice at work.  And, i know what needs doing.  (That's an important step!)  Unfortunately, i'm facing a bit of a catch-22 situation.  I need to live in the city to have a job and it seems as though i'll need a job before i can find a place to rent so that i can live in the city.  Fun, eh?  I'm not worried though.  My friends Shoshanna & Kyle have benevolently offered me a place to crash for a time and i'll just have to begin the job seeking and house hunting once i get there.  Plus, i think destiny may be at work, or something.

I'm not a complete slacker though; i have been preparing myself in other ways less tangible, but, i think, equally as important.  I've begun spiritual preparations.  Laugh if you must, deride me if you feel the impulse, but this move is more than a milestone.  Living in New York City is what i've spent the past decade dreaming of, writing about, & toiling towards.  The U-Haul, boxes, & endless to do lists may be necessary to deliver my possessions to the city, but my aim is not to merely reside there, but to exist there, to fully inhabit my New York life, an endeavor which requires far more than planning, an endeavor which requires Poetry.  So i've revisited Angels in America, queued up New York on my Netflix, & picked up some Walt Whitman:

Others will enter the gates of the ferry and cross from shore to shore,

Others will watch the run of the flood-tide,

Others will see the shipping of Manhattan north and west, and the heights of 

Brooklyn to the south and east,

Others will see the islands large and small;

Fifty years hence, others will see tham as they cross, the sun half and hour 

high,

A hundred years hence, or ever so many hundred years hence, others will see 

them,

Will enjoy the sunset, the pouring-in of the flood-tide, the falling-back to 

the sea of the ebb-tide.

3

It avails not, time nor place -distance avails not,

I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations 

hence,

Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt,

Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd,

Just as you are refreshed by the gladness of the river and the bright flow, I 

was refreshed,

Just as you stand and lean on the rail, yet hurry with the swift current, I 

stood yet was hurried,

Just as you look on the numberless masts of ships and the thick-stemmed pipes 

of steamboats, I looked.

As with any burgeoning love affair, i've flung my self fully into the fantasy & history of my new lover, to consume of it as much as i might before it consumes me.  And it will.  It has already begun.

Update:  I began this post last week, but injured my back and couldn't complete it till now.  Don't worry, i've since begun planning the nuts & bolts of my move.  Sept 12th is the date–somewhat ironic, no?

Eulogy

Diary

Christmas at Patricia’s, this is the first thing i think of when i think of Uncle Georgie; that and the sound of walnuts cracking.  Entering into Patricia’s warm kitchen from out of the cuttingly wet Cape Cod cold we were always greeted by the aroma of wonderful foods roasting in ovens.  Being Marcelines we never failed to linger, sneaking nibbles out of this or that as the ovens’ warmth thawed our bones–gods know there was rarely an overabundance of warmth between us.  For me, my yaya’s  absence was always sorely felt (she was my surrogate mother).   We’d stand around bickering about this and that and Uncle Georgie would take advantage of our distraction, making a silent bee line for the couch and the dish of mixed, shelled nuts on the coffee table.  In the kitchen, Patricia would shoo us out of her way with a good natured show of maternal bossiness.  In the living room, we’d find Uncle Georgie, covered in walnut crumbs, relishing his victory.   He’d worked his way through every single last walnut in the bowl.

He was actually my Great Uncle Georgie, but the Great part never stuck for me.  Not that he wasn’t a swell guy, but because of his almost adolescent naivety.  At first i was terribly frightened of him.  He was the spidery old man who sat all day behind a door at the end of the hall of my Grandmother’s house.  A door which leaked the scent of cigarettes and snack food.  To say that Uncle Georgie liked to keep to himself would be an understatement.  Uncle Georgie seemed to make solitude his life’s mission.  He was like some kind of perverse twentieth century anti-Narcissus, perpetually bound to smoke religiously, kneeling before his television screen and eating Wise potato chips.  This read as sinister to my seven year old psyche; today i pause to wonder how it reads in retrospect.  Was he content or hiding?  It’s likely he suffered ridicule, after all.  He was a mentally challenged child of a Greek immigrant family growing up on Cape Cod among Wasps and Baptists.  Maybe his withdrawal was a survival strategy?  It seems likely, but i’d like to think he just didn’t really care one way or the other, that he was satisfied with his life, that he didn’t need other people the way i seem to.

He was a kind man, in a put upon sort of way.  He could never say no; he could never not complain about having to do whatever had been asked either.  I was an attention starved, nightmare of an adolescent who never hesitated to ask a favor.  During the summer he’d give me rides to work in exchange for gas money.  I’d always commandeer the radio with contemporary Christian music and gospel, which he hated, but i was bratty enough to out scream his protests.  I feel bad now for treating him so badly and i regret never thanking him for helping me to execute my escape plan.

As a teen i had a fairly common fantasy: save money, get car, save more money, move out and live my own life free of my parents’ abuse.  I did escape and have, but for one or two rent free months living with my father and stepmother, managed to support myself for a decade as of this June past.  I have also managed to put myself through college and write some plays.  I wonder if i could’ve achieved as much without Uncle Georgie’s help.  How would i have made any money if i couldn’t find a way to work?

In late June my aunt called to tell me that the lung cancer he’d ignored since it was diagnosed in the 90’s had now metastasized to his brain, liver, and bones.  He had three to six months to live.  I promised myself i’d go see him in the hospital, but his death came in only six weeks and my promise was thwarted.  Well, thwarted is the wrong word.  I procrastinated away my chance to say goodbye and thank Uncle Georgie for his forbearance and aid.  This i regret since what kept me away was fear, not of death or of sickness, but of opening the door to the past.  You see, in my mind i had said goodbye to Uncle Georgie a decade ago as i fled from my painful familial ties and my tempestuous relationship with my father, as i began my quest to extricate my identity completely from the clan i had never really felt a part of in the first place, an impossible quest which required avoiding any and all contact with my past.

I wonder if Uncle Georgie was attempting a similar feat by hiding away the days of his life in his dark, smoky room.  I also wonder if he'd care at all if i had gone to see him, but that's something i always wonder when it comes to my family.  My escape was, after all, more of a retreat.  A retreat from my family, yes, but most of all a retreat from my own self-loathing doubt that my family cares for me at all, a painful doubt which i learned could be numbed by fooling myself that i was, in fact, rejecting them even though it was i who felt rejected.  This illusion could only be maintained by pretending they didn't exist at all and, even though i've vowed to stop running, i still find myself striving to maintain my illusions of familial liberation, most of the time quite unconsciously.  This very same subconscious compulsion kept me from fulfilling my promise to myself.  The fact is that Georgie would have cared, he had always cared.  I wish i had let him know that i cared too.

Pathways

Diary

We had bonded over a mutual friend.  Well, maybe bonded isn't exactly the right word.  We had met online, after all, and through Manhunt (essentially a seedy internet gay bar, for those of you not familiar).  Nevertheless, he knew Andy, the Andy of the past five years, the Andy of whom i have barely any knowledge at all.  So, i looked past the fact that the guy was unfortunate enough to be named Gene and was a little league pro wrestler.  I tolerated his cocky attitude too.  Having gotten his number wrong on my first attempt at real life contact I went back online to double check if i had the right digits.  This made him defensive and he quickly put me down for my egregious mistake.  "Learn how to dial a phone?", he answered when I finally got through.  The conversation continued its descent into stereotypical banality.  "The only thing gay about me is that i suck dick," he boasted in his conspicuously macho growl.  Nothing gets me going like stereotypical thinking, so i dropped the subject.  For some men his sort of attitude is a turn on, but not for me.  Yet we made plans to meet.  He knew Andy.

The Andy I had known was an exuberant, friendly freshman in high school.  He lived down the street from me and, like me, went to a fundamentalist, Jesus loving church (though not the same one).  We spent a lot of time bonding over Christian pop music on the bus and both fell in love with this little ditty:

Yes, i actually loved that song (it's not so bad) and even had a little dance routine to it.  (It was a strange time.  What can i say?)  Another quality we shared was our conspicuously friendly interest in females.  My memories of this period are elusive, but i remember that he was my best friend, my only friend, and it's possible that Andy was merely too nice to reject the bossy fat kid showering him with attention since, as with many things, i was relentless in my pursuit of his friendship.  It's more likely though that he felt as much of an affinity for me as i felt for him.

My path in life has often felt remarkably lonely.  A loneliness relieved now and then when i look to my left (or right) and see that there's someone traversing a path parallel to my own.  My path and Andy's aligned in ways far deeper than christian pop music fandom.   Both of us felt like outsiders and were haunted by troubles at home.  I had not had been cared for by my mother since I was seven; his mother suffered crippling chronic migraines, a malady she seemed to use as an excuse to shrink away from her children.  She often relied on Andy to help care for his many siblings; I was often saddled with caring for my step-siblings since my manic depressive father and stepmother were too busy rapidly deteriorating.  While our camaraderie of dysfunction failed to save us from our families it certainly made my path feel far less lonely.  It's nice having someone to wave to for a while, especially someone lovely as Andy was.  His handsome face and bubbling charm, his good natured openness were to me what the moon is to the tide.  What i really wanted was to hold him in my arms, but instead i strove to hold him accountable for his sins.  As his path veered away from mine, away from 'the lord', in a direction i feared, i strained to keep him near me by struggling to 'save him'.  In retrospect, my desperate attempts to keep him near likely pushed him further away.

The gay wrestling wonder's account of the Andy of today sounded familiar.  It seems that Andy is a bit of a party boy now.  Apparently the G-dubya Dubya and Andy lived together for a time, a time marked by theft, drugs, and discord, and were no longer in contact.  The story reminded me of Michael.  My best friend from age nine to fifteen and also my boyfriend.  Last time i saw Michael he was a strung out, homeless punk rocker standing before me, his black denim and leather cutting a slice of night out of a luminously sunny day, casting a bleak shadow upon the glowing, verdant Hyannis Village Green.  In the background a slick quartet of singers, a sort of gospel version of the Temptations, were belting away to a sparse, but enthusiastic, jesus loving crowd.  Michael had watched me introduce the singers on the bandstand.  And he appeared out of nowhere as i walked away from the podium.  I doubt i'll ever quake as furiously as i did in that moment ever again.  We hadn't seen each other for more than a year.  Our paths had diverged.  I had spent the summer of my seventeenth year planning a Christian cultural event called Cape Cod Outreach for Christ, an ambitious and grandiose thing for a seventeen year old.  Michael had spent his summer in the psych center, or so i'd heard.  We didn't speak for long, no more than ten minutes, probably far less, and i remember only but a single thing he said.  "I always knew you would be on stage someday."

I never saw him again.  We had been thick as thieves, but the gravity of our shared experience flouted its promise to keep our orbits aligned.  And if such gravity was not strong enough, our deep, but inexperienced love was certainly not either.  Though it did manage to hold a place for him within my heart.

I'm not sure why it upset me so much when G-dubya Dubya made me drive twenty minutes to meet him in a parking lot only to ditch me as quickly as he could, but i found myself foaming at the mouth.  I shouldn't have been.  I've experienced this before, not rarely, in my interactions with other internet personas, but this misfire aroused in me an immense rage, with an undercurrent of grief.  I reacted like a angered child, calling to leave a particularly nasty message and running home to 'block' him before he had the satisfaction of blocking me.  I am often shocked at my propensity for regression and this was a doozy.  But why?  Could it have been the crumbling of the bridge to my past our conversation had constructed that occurred as he drove away?  Or was it the cost of gas i had spent as i reasoned during my race home, the past and present roiling my mind?

Political Dress Code, No Flip-Flops allowed

Politics

Is anyone remotely surprised the Right Wing is once again breaking out the flip-flops? The halls of Congress and the RNC echo chamber are alive with the sound of rubber slapping skin, the sound of futility. This time they're on about Obama's supposed 'flip-flop' on offshore drilling and even some of Obama's posse are taking up the Republican war cry.

What does Obama have to say?

"My interest is in making sure we've got the kind of comprehensive energy policy that can bring down gas prices. If, in order to get that passed, we have to compromise in terms of a careful, well-thought-out drilling strategy that was carefully circumscribed to avoid significant environmental damage - I don't want to be so rigid that we can't get something done."  

"The Republicans and the oil companies have been really beating the drums on drilling, and so we don't want gridlock. We want to get something done."  

Does that sound like a policy flip? I don't think so. This is the sound of pragmatism, people. This is the sound of a candidate who knows, that come January 2009, a storm of Republican cries for offshore drilling will be deflated by a Democratic congress. Anyhow, the real issue here isn't offshore drilling, but the tone of America's political discourse, which, if the Republicans have their way, will once again devolve into a rancorous din rather than evolve into a reasoned discussion.

The right wing is attempting, once again to paint an unfavorable caricature of the democratic candidate rather than offer us a clear picture of their own, using the exact same strategy that worked against Kerry: 'All right now', says Rove, 'everyone cry flip flopper on the count of three!' And then they do and they scream and scream in the hopes of starting a fight, because they fight dirty and if they can shift the tone from discursive to combative they know they can win. It's imperative that Obama defuse the issue, which he appears to be doing, because whenever something like this turns into a fight, the Republicans end up looking like democratic heroes, i.e. their little protest, to a good portion of the voting population.  

Obama knows he's insulated against the flip-flopper label if McCain wants to toss it around since McCain actually did 'flip-flop' on offshore drilling. By showing a willingness to compromise and making it clear he's not going to get into a fight over the issue, Obama is essentially taking the issue out of the ring. Hopefully, Obama will come across looking like the pragmatic leader he is as opposed to a hardline lefty ideologue, which is how the Right aim to portray him. This is a good thing, right? Aren't most Americans weary of ideologues? I know I am.  

In the end, to even talk about policy shifts as 'flip-flops' feeds into the Right Wing political model of taking multifaceted issues, rendering them in black and white and turning what should be a discussion into a political wrestling match. Instead of diving into the mud pit with them we should be setting a round table for discussion with a strict dress code: no flip flops allowed. This seems to be what Obama is doing, which is consistent with his calls for a 'new kind of politics'. We should be proud of our boy, put on our finest shoes and head for the table.

Exacerbating Idiocy

Politics

I think you may be onto something here, Connie M. Meskimen. Those goddamn lilly white liberals. Their so called seasonal affective disorders have nothing to do with lack of sunlight, but with all the time they spend curled up in a closet worrying about the so called Global Warming theory of the liberal wing of the liberal sciences. But, really!, it's their damn ikea sun lamps, liberally leaking artificial UV rays and gamma radiation that are warming the atmosphere, not my friend Joe, the oil tycoon. He's a real good guy. Oh, yeah, and i hear that farms that grow arugula, for which there's a huge demand in the liberal section of whole foods, release three times as much CO2 in a year as all humankind!!!

(I found the preceding gem on My Inflammatory Writ)

Driving

Diary

It's far too easy for me to get in my car here.  In Northampton i'd scoff at driving anywhere.  If someone suggested meeting for drinks in Amherst (barely fifteen minutes by car) i would respond with shock: 'you want me to drive WHERE?'  I walked everywhere and was more than happy to let my car sit unused for weeks at a time.  Now i'm on Cape Cod though and i find myself turning the key in my ignition more than ever, this despite raging gas prices, despite my depleted bank account, despite having a perfectly good bike and everything i need just a five minute ride away.  And i don't even go anywhere!  I put on Tori Amos bootlegs and rove around, aimlessly.  I've been back barely three weeks and already i've regressed to my teenage self: angsty, restless, and addicted to driving.  Yes, addicted.  Driving can be quite narcotic.  The forward motion is soothing, the velocity thrilling, and it’s comforting to know that no matter which direction i drive in i will always end up at the ocean.  I don’t have to decide which way to go and the lack of freedom provides the illusion of safety, but it is all also stiflingly familiar.

I was raised on Cape Cod, but it's not home.  There's no family homestead and i have barely any family here, just an aunt and an uncle.  Yet everyone seems to think i’ve gone ‘home’ for the summer.  The distance between my reality and theirs is striking.  I grew up here but without roots.  My father never managed to build a life for himself never mind one for my me or my sister: no real estate, no career, no respite from instability.  And mom?  Well, after the age of six mom became little more than a memory.  Still, whenever i tell someone i’m from the Cape the response is predictably positive.  “How amazing!”, this person will say, his or her brain filling with images of JFK on a sailboat, suntanned and serene.  The truth is, my childhood was more than a little stilted.  As a teenager i was too busy working to find time for the beach and too obsessed with escape to bother with it.  So i would spend what little free time i had driving around, sometimes with friends, mostly alone, thwarted on all sides by ocean, vast and deep.

Attention Whore

Diary

In my younger youth (nearly 28 is still fairly youthful, right?) i would scoff whenever anyone complained about the weather.  "ugh, what a stupid thing to bitch about.  i'm not going to waste my energy kvetching about the weather!"  I felt my energy was better spent on disdain and self righteousness, apparently, and that letting the weather get to you betrayed some sort of character defect.  It's funny how quietly i've changed though, because this morning, as i sat in bed, staring with seething displeasure at the snow swirling outside my windows, i was shocked to realize that my mind was filled with weather related complaints and i wondered to myself, "when the hell did i start complaining about the weather?!"  All i know is i've been doing it for some time now and that, pretty much every morning for the past several weeks, i've been dreaming of packing up my car and moving to L.A.

Weather is an attention whore, a big fucking drama queen, like that girl in college sticking her tongue down her best friend's throat any time the boys were around.  And as Weather gets colder, she gets moodier too and she wants EVERYONE to know how she feels so she starts crying frozen tears and screaming icy blasts of wind.   She likes to watch rabid packs of elderly women crowding the grocery stores, clutching at bottled water and loaves of bread, because it makes her feel super important and seeing cars skid, slide, and fish tail into one another makes her panties moist.   Watching motorists play musical cars during winter parking bans reminds her of her childhood.  She lives to give you seasonal affective disorder.

I'm not sure when it happened, but i'm pretty sure i started complaining about her when i stopped being a bigger attention whore.  I'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad one, but i do know it still feels like a big waste of energy.  Energy that would be better spent planning my move to California, where the weather is friendlier and too busy sun bathing to want anyone's attention.

Dear Blog,

Diary

I cannot tell you how sorry i am to have ignored you for so long.  No!  Don't look away!  Please.  Allow me to explain.  You see, and don't take this the wrong way, but i'm a little ambivalent about our relationship.   No, it's not you.  You're beautiful: your wallpaper, your layout, your name, each is perfectly suited to my tastes and proclivities.  However, the potential exposure you offer is intimidating, which makes me want to make each post really count.  I slave over every verb and punctuation mark and surely that can't be good form for a blogger!  A blogger should be impulsive and incendiary not careful and painstaking.  Right?  It took me three hours to write my last blog!

There's something else that has kept us apart too.  You see, for a few weeks i was engaged in a face off with a certain question, put to me by a legendary institution of higher learning.  This institution wanted me to state my purpose and each time i sat down to try to do so i felt like Atreyu trying to pass the laser eyed Spinxes.

The power of such a tiny question is impressive.  I know without doubt that i want to write plays.  I know without question i want to work in the theater.  But as soon as i was asked to explain myself my knees buckled and my mind took to flight.  After endless hours of procrastination i produced an answer.  Tell me what you think.

I write because I have stories to tell.  I do not have to hunt for the stories; they permeate the world around me.  I find them in images, in songs, in situations.  They make themselves at home in my subconscious and set about traversing my imagination.  They sing and shout, hum and whisper waiting to be heard, yearning to be explored.  They are there even if I never put a single verb or noun to paper.  In fact, the only choice I have is whether or not to write them for my imagination is almost constantly occupied with images and conversations, with human relationships in times of conflict and crisis.

I write for the theater because I crave community.  For me the wonder of connecting to a global community through the internet and mass media cannot compete or compare with the powerful and life affirming connection generated by the energy of humans gathered together, of audiences and artists communing to conjure collective dreams and nightmares.  Theater is where we tell ourselves stories about ourselves in order to explore all the promise and possibility of our lives and to confront every problem and threat we face.  No other medium rivals theater’s potential to transport and transform, or tells its stories in a manner as immediate and primal.  No other medium comes as close to life in its temporality or in its vitality and danger.

I understand that to be a playwright today I must face a daunting milieu.  Today’s theater is one of diminished cultural prominence playing to dwindling, aged audiences.  Most of my peers think of theater as something they did in high school; to them it feels irrelevant and inconvenient.  Our challenging, thoughtful, pricey art is in competition with myriad facile, cheap, and often thoughtless entertainments cluttering the cultural landscape.  After all, how many daily choose a fifty dollar journey to the theater over a free visit to YouTube?  Who today opts for a challenge in a world of conveniences?

I have always welcomed a challenge.  It is clear to me that to capture the public’s imagination I must write plays which are not only immaculately crafted, but which also tell stories so essential to who we are as humans that they cannot be ignored.  I can imagine no greater reward than to surmount such a challenge.  For while a theatrical renaissance may be little more than a pipe dream I cannot even conceive of accepting it as such, because I have far too much faith in theater’s power and importance.  And, because my yearning for the community it can create is relentless, I also will be relentless in refining my craft and digging to the core of humanity’s struggles.  So I will choose to write, not hoping to find solutions, but to relish the questions and the beautiful potential for change and renewal that they present.

Pressing Matters

Diary

It's taken me some time to perfect my method for pressing these shirts.  That these shirts needed pressing was, in fact, something of an unpleasant surprise to me.  I had been searching for some cheap white shirts to replace the increasingly tamari stained batch i'd been wearing to work for several months.  They're really one of the most annoying aspects of my job, these shirts.  They have to be white, which means that, inevitably, they quickly end up stained by various food products and need replacing far before their stitching has lived a full life.  It's due to this that i can't bear spending much for them.  So when i found a whole rack of them for eight dollars each i yelped with glee and hurriedly grabbed up an armful.  This was not the first occasion where joy silenced sense and i doubt it will be the last.  You see, i had intended to remember not to buy 100% cotton shirts; i recalled my intent only after i pulled the shirts, wrinkled beyond recognition from the dryer and, with an exasperated sigh, laid them out on the board to press/punish them for all the troublesome ironing sessions i foresaw.  I imagined the iron as an instrument of torture and the steam's slight squealing to be the shirts shrieking for mercy.

"Oh, if anything of mine needs ironing i just throw it out," said Timi, my boss, when i shared with her my dilemma.  "I have better things to do with my time than ironing..."  I found her philosophy very tempting, but i'd spent forty dollars on the damn things and couldn't see fit to discard them.  The money wasn't the only matter on my mind though; my own philosophical underpinnings were at work as well.  In our society convenience is king.  We spend our time inventing things that'll do things for us so we'll have more time to invent things to do other things.  The goal, so far as i can tell, is to eliminate all tasks that pilfer our pleasure to make more time for activities that augment it.  Behind this endeavor is the belief that there is always some option more pressing and pleasurable than the options which are presently before us.  So far as i can tell such an attitude leads only to distraction.

We all love distraction though, don't we?  I know i do.  I live for it.  It's my drug of choice.  If only someone could bottle pure liquid distraction we could all stop trying so hard, sprawl out on threadbare red velvet sofas, and sip and sniff our way out to sea.  But what about taking pleasure in the task at hand?  What about inhabiting our present; taking care to make each moment count no matter how banal it may seem?  You see, some time ago i decided to be wary of recipes prescribing shortcuts to satisfaction and to challenge myself to go against the grain of conformist convenience.  Remembering these convictions i began to see my clump of creased cotton as a Zen challenge of sorts, and, more importantly, as an opportunity to live up to my own quasi-ludditical creed.

My mind, it seems, is permanently preoccupied with a perpetual juggling act of tasks, timing, and to do lists.  I rarely find myself engaged in an activity that precludes multitasking; at present only two such pursuits come to mind: intercourse and ironing.  To compare the two may seem facile, but there's more than steam shared between them.  Ironing, i've discovered, is a task requiring great care and attention to be done well, especially ironing shirts.  Even the slightest lapse of attention can leave one's garment with a deep, glaring crease more stubborn than the several smoothed moments before or a burnt brown triangle shaped brand.  Though not quite sensual, it is sensuous: the searing sound and smell of steam the climate of a tactile topography of seams, buttons, and textiles.  Seemingly tedious this task so absorbs my senses that it stills my mind's ceaseless shifting and this is a rare accomplishment indeed.  Not that ironing deadens thought; quite the opposite.  It' something of a game and to win requires adherence to a unique set of rules and ordered steps.  With this particular batch of shirts i've even invented my own rules to add a dash of ease; it's taken me some time to perfect them.  After varied dryer temps did nothing to help the shirts emerge less wrinkled i started ironing them damp, straight from the washer.  But since the climate of my apartment is somewhat similar to that of the Sahara i can only iron one or two before the remaining three or four dry while waiting in line to be next on the board.  So now i either wash them in batches of two or set the board up near the washer to take the shirts out one at a time.

The process has become something of a ritual, one which i appreciate and at times actually enjoy, when i can forget all the other distractions i might otherwise be engaged in.  It is also a ritual i feel brings me more fully into the reality of my life, reminding me of where i actually am and of all that must be achieved/endured for me to arrive at where/who i aim to be.  Most importantly, it reminds me that there are, in fact, as Timi said, more important things i could be doing with my time than ironing, which, ironically, i don't always remember when i'm not ironing and i lose my time to distractions instead.

Inaugural, seminal, initial or something like that...

Diary

This is the bottle broken on the bow of the boat; a tendril slithering from within a seed pressed in a moist paper towel; the lock of a door clicking for the very first time and inside the door: a frame on a foundation waiting to be filled in and furnished.

'Let love elevate your self to excellence.'  Does it amount to anything beyond brown print on white paper attached by twine to a tea bag?  Jennaway is obsessed with these pseudo spiritual platitudes, or so she told me yesterday as she scrounged a tea bag for me from her purse.  "I'm obsessed with the Yogi," were her exact words, if i remember correctly.  I'm not so obsessed.  My first response, in fact, is one of dismissal.  For while the words sound nice they seem to mean next to nothing.  I have trouble imagining love as a force.  For me love resides in verbs, not on paper, but in action, which perhaps is the point.  It's simple to assign love agency as if it were somehow autonomous from our deeds (a dangerous angel as Weetzie Bat called it in Francesca Lia Block's stories) but if our self consists of the deeds we do then to let love live in our every act may elevate after all.

Could there be truth to this?  I intend to find out, or aim to at least.  For i aspire to fully inhabit every moment of my life and to act with patience and kindness towards my self and all those i meet along the way.  Aspire is the key word here lest you think i'm bragging.  I'm no yogi nor do i delude myself that i'm anyone to be offering spiritual advice.  But since this blog is seminal i think it's important set forth a creed of sorts with which to light my way.  Don't you agree?

Now don't get me wrong.  This blog won't be some silly Oprahfied squeefest; there'll be, in fact, plenty of sass and sauce–don't you worry.  But i hope it will, at its core, be an honest and sympathetic attempt to reflect upon my experiences, impressions, and aspirations.  a brave attempt to explore, via the world of my imaginings, the questions, fears, and challenges i face every day.  And, since human relationships are central to my experience of my self and of society, i hope also to pay tribute to all the wonderful and not so wonderful humans i know already and possibly to those whom i've yet to meet.

Take Jennaway, for instance, who in handing me that bag of lemon ginger tea offered my throat a reprieve from the nasty cold scraping it with its hard, cruel nails and offered me as well a doorway to step through, a seed to press, a bottle to break upon the bow.