All's Well

I'm back in Chicago after one of the best Christmases in recent memory. My mother decided to stay home this Christmas and invite the rest of the family to see us (which raised some unexplainable anger from the rest of the family), which meant that, instead of rushing off to New Jersey on Christmas morning, I got to sleep late and then help my mother cook dinner all day long, then sit down for a meal with my brother, my sister-in-law, my mother and her husband, my step brothers, and my grandparents. More or less everyone I wanted to sit and have a meal with. Which was great. We had squash ravioli for an appetizer, followed by pork loin that my mother and I stuffed with apricots, using our combined medical knowledge to realize that using a process of peristalsis would be the most effective way to work the stuffing into the center cavity of the loin. Imagine my mother and I standing around and chatting, while we feed apricots to a giant esophagus, and you have a pretty good image of what we were doing.

Yeah.

The rest of the vacation was uneventful but fun. I made it up to NYC with my brother. We saw The Life Aquatic, which was profoundly disappointing (a fantastic title, fantastic concept, tacked on to a long, winding, and incidental film that wasn't terribly funny; except for Bill Murray dancing in a wet suit...that made me giggle out loud) and wandered around for a bit. Received some bad news from a friend (her grandmother died) and then spent a great evening wandering around the Village and SoHo with her while New York gave us a night full of snow, moonlight, and an irrate cabby.

All in all, it was the best Christmas in recent memory and I can't wait to do it again.

Now I'm back. In the brilliant cold. In my city, having experienced my other cities. They're like friends, cities are. I spend a great deal of time with Chicago, and I love its character and I hate some of its quirks, but I miss my other cities and long to be back with them. So. Joy.

The absinthe is steeping with the flavoring herbs now, and is a beautiful forest green. Which it is supposed to be. In a few days, we'll see how it tastes.

Rejections

Heading for home, today, which has me in high spirits (although I'm a little afraid that I'm going to experience delays on the way home. Never good).

Received a rejection letter from Fantasy and Science Fiction Magazine, which I posted on my wall next to the others, though the curtness of the reply and the swiftness of the rejection left me feeling more--well--rejected than the others. So I'm a bit low.

There's a few things that I find cheer me up when I read rejection letters. The first is posting them on my wall as a reminder that this is part of my body of work. Rejections mean someone has looked at my work, even if they didn't see fit to pay me for that. They mean I've been looked at by an editor. In some cases, the editors have been very helpful and kind, too, which I appreciate. So there's that. The other thing is everything contained within this article. To explain--no, that would take too long--to sum up: no matter how bad it feels when you receive a rejection letter, it isn't personal. Never ever ever is it personal. This is what I keep in mind, and it really does help me. Just last week, I sent a letter to the brother of a friend of mine, saying pretty much "Rejections suck, but they're a part of the life of a writer, and all you can do is buck up and move forward." And they do. And they are. And you must.

So the adolescent boy in me is saying "Screw you, buddy!" and the determined business manchild in me is saying "Alright, so I'll send it to someone else" and the editor in me is saying, "It's nothing personal. Just a matter of tastes. How can we make this story better?" but the writer in me is saying "Ah well. Keep writing."

Which is what I did last night. And I'm happy with the way my new short story opens. So here it is:



1. Morning

He woke beside his beloved.

The sun rose sideways into the room, neatly drawn and quartered into rhombuses by the sash and grill of the window. Light trickled across the books in the library, casting long faint shadows from the ziggurats of literature piled around his love’s bed. The books in the shelves grinned out at him like great sets of teeth, smiling because they knew they were a part of history. The whole room in which he lay beside his beloved smelled of it. Decades of bohemianism, revolution, art for the sake of art for the sake of beauty for the sake of decadence hung in the air, as palpable as the dust in the sunlight, carried on the scent of mushrooms. He rose amid this—twisting his head until, much to his delight and with an audible pop from his vertebrae, the tightness that had taken residence in his neck through the night freed itself—and wagged his nose at the ceiling. Stories written in mildew across time-moistened pages, told in a voice as sweet and tender on the taste buds as truffles, traveled their old vaporous paths into his nostrils. In one breath, a book of poetry bought for a lover on the day the bookstore opened, later bought back, dog-eared and worn by a lifetime held close to the woman’s heart. In another, oil from the fingers of a great playwright, days before he would begin writing two plays—one a brilliant parlor drama, the other a play that would redefine the art of theatre—grazed across the pages of a philosophical essay, turned to for inspiration. In another, long dried, set into the margin of a history book, these words scratched in India ink in terse loops belonging to a traveler who passed through the city, like so many others, looking for the poetry locked in its walls and cobblestones:

Love is pure, and poison, too
Liquors of bliss and blindness both
Distilled from the heart and the water hemlock
Mixed in phials of morning dew
For the taking of spirits
When other faiths fail us

Other stories in other sips of breath. His nose cluttered with each of them, all of them competing for his attention. His attention turned toward his beloved.

Sylvia. Ah, Sylvia. Beautiful porcelain Sylvia, bound under sheets of white linen. How his heart leapt at the mere sight of her face, at the thought of her body hidden under the blanket, her nightgown just covering her, revealing just the slightest curve of her buttocks, the barest shadow of her sex. He inhaled again and drowned in the scent of her. Lilac bath oils, sandalwood incense, fine jasmine perfume, and musk—inescapable and pungent—musk, blended together in an effluvium called Sylvia. He watched her roll over in the bed and turn her face toward him, making slits of her eyes.

“It’s morning isn’t it, Jamon?”

“Past morning, dearest. Into midmorning by now or, dare I say it, late morning,” he said, turning to her.

“But not noon? Not yet?”

“No, no. There have been no bells to indicate noon.”

“Good. Then I needn’t be awake,” she said with a small smile. And she turned over in the bed, taking the blanket with her to cover her eyes from the invasion of light.

He returned to watching her, listening to her, inhaling her, and smiled because he could do so. Because he was close to her. His beloved.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
And that's what I have so far. The title is something like "Parisian Decadence," or "Parisian Delight" (because it's written as a Decadence story and the Decadents hated that term for themselves...so would they use it in the title of a story?)

Happy Christmas, all. Pleasant New Year. The next two weeks are going to be fun. Going to NYC sometime over my time home, getting to see lots of old friends, and then a week of Amanda, drenched in rum rolls and absinthe.

Fuck you and all that you have done to this country

History will remember this as a time when villains no longer fought heros, but fought other villains for control of the theiving.

Taxation, Representation, Etc.

I keep trying to wrap my brain around exactly what my problem with the whole "let's make a Constitutional ammendment forbidding them homos to marry" thing. Aside from the fact that its properly "those homos" and the fact that making a Constitutional ammendment barring a group of people from expressing love seems just fundamentally wrong, I've been probing myself (so to speak) for exactly what is wrong with it. Barring freedoms isn't fundamentally wrong, of course. Most laws bar freedoms. Such as the freedom to kill, the freedom to drive at 500 mph on open highways, the freedom to forcibly remove someone from their home and declare that home yours. These are all freedoms that the law has reasonably barred. So why not this one?

It comes down to this: one of the fundamental principles of this nation, the principle that, arguably, launched the American Revolution is "No taxation without representation." Roughly speaking, that means that nobody can enact a law that affects you and only you unless someone in the government represents you. Which is why it was wrong for the English to make laws affecting the colonies, and why it's wrong for a bunch of White people to make laws restricting the rights of a bunch of Black people. If, for example, a law were enacted allowing White people to walk around wherever they want, sit where they want on buses, attend whatever schools they wanted, and eat at whatever restaurants they wanted, while Blacks had to go to specific schools, eat at specific restaurants, and sit at the backs of the bus--well everyone would say that was madness...eventually.

There are freedoms that belong to everyone and there are freedoms that belong to only a select group of people, and whenever we try to restrict the freedoms of a select group of people without restricting the freedoms of everyone else, we are not just on a slippery slope, we are already sliding away from everything that makes us the land of the free. We cannot reasonably enact laws affecting one group of people without representing the will of those people within our legislature. Gay marriage: where are the homosexuals in the House of Representatives? Who represents queer issues in the Senate? Where are there gay people in the Oval Office? In the Supreme Court? In the lives of the people trying to fuck up the lives of people not like them? We can't allow it. We can't. It's this, then the removal of the right not be fired from a job for being gay. Then the ghettos. It's a backwards step away from enlightenment and it goes against the principles of our Revolution. America isn't just founded on the Will of the People. It's founded on the Will of the People and the rights of people who stand reasonably against that will to live their lives in peace.

The Absinthe Drinkers

Ah shit. I've been seriously remiss in my blogging duties over the past week. Mostly because I've been spending evenings at home, getting actual work done on short stories and on that novel that's been sitting around on my hard drive, twiddling its thumbs for the past--oh--six months. It sits there, taunting me. Actually, it sits there, telling me to get off my literary ass and write the fucking thing. Because I know how it ends! At least, I think I do. As I've been writing, I wonder if it actually ends the way I think it ends. Anyway. Point is, I haven't been going out and pretending to work while actually perusing the Internet quite as much as I used to do.

But I sat down and blocked out where the novel has been these past couple of chapters and where chapter five might be going. Which is good. Chapter five has felt a bit aimless to me, which is generally what frustrates me and makes me stop writing it.

Finished the medical story. Have started another.

Oh, and I bought an absinthe kit from this guy (I find it disconcerting that the first part of his URL is "deadflesh.fear"), which arrived in a timely five days. I began to macerate it on Sunday, and so I now have a decanter full of 151 rum and wormwood macerating in my linen closet, slowly turning into a familiar forest green. A few people have wondered, "Why are you making absinthe? Doesn't that make people go mad?" And the answer is no. Absinthe doesn't contain enough of its active ingredients to make people go mad. Wikipedia has a good article on absinthe, which describes some of the conditions that caused absithe to eventually become illegal and some of the reasons why some brands were so dangerous (competitors of Pernod absinthe added industrial-grade alcohol and other horrible things to their blends to cut corners and add color).

In my experience with the drink, absinthe has little of the effect that people ascribe to it. It's just a nice warm sort of drunk. With some synaesthesia to top it all off. Very nice.

So that's all. I started a new story in a sort of Decadence style. About a pig.
Oh...and as nearly as I can tell from this post in Jeff Vandermeer's blog, there is further evidence that I'm a medium for the zeitgeist. A story about a stripper stripping her epidermis? This sounds almost exactly like my story "Pornography," in which a boy can't get off with his woman unless she strips her skin off (because his first experiences masturbating was to Gray's Anatomy).

Happy Holidays, if I don't blog before then.

Korpervelt

Had a good writing night, last night. I've been working on a story that takes the form of a scientific/medical paper, and have been wrestling with how to bring elements of dialogue and characters other than the person writing the paper into the story, and last night solved it by adding footnotes to it. I'm not sure why that didn't occur to me sooner. Footnotes can be kind of gimmicky--and it's a done gimmick, too--but in this case, it really frees the body of the text from the choppiness of switching back and forth between the scientific voice and the narrative voice, and it also opens up room for a lot of explanation and parenthetical commentary that was tanking the story. So I went to bed feeling happy and productive last night.

This morning, I was very excited to see this article in the Sun Times:

A controversial new exhibit of human body parts, which has fascinated millions in Europe and Asia but appalled and infuriated others, is coming to the Museum of Science and Industry..."Body Worlds'' features some 200 body parts, including 25 whole figures, that have been preserved through a process called "plastination." Created by a German scientist and artist, the procedure replaces body fluids with resins and polymers.

The article goes on to describe a little of the controversy surrounding the exhibit, which, frankly, surprised me to read about. I got to see "Body Worlds" when I was in Berlin a few years ago. I found it weird and wonderful and right up my alley. At the end of the booklet that accompanied the exhibit were quotes from some of the dozens of people who donate themselves to the doctor/artist who makes the sculptures. Some said it was in the interest of science, but many--and this is what interests me--were doing it for religious reasons.

Anyway, the last time I saw the exhibit, it sparked a great flood of creativity in me, which included the story I was working on last night, so this is clearly an omen. Rest assured, I will be at the museum. Possibly many times.

Feb. 4-March 20
$21 for adults,
$11 for kids 3-11 and
$17 for seniors.

Pie Interruptus

How I Met My Neighbors

Last night I was in the middle of making two dozen or so hand-held chicken pot pies for consumption over the next weeks (I'm not sure why, but winter always makes me want to make pie...any pie, really; just pie), when I heard a knock at my door. Which was odd, because I never hear anything from my neighbors. The last time I received a knock on my door, I opened it to a pair of Baptists from Indiana who wanted me to come to their church. So I asked who it was, and the response was, "It's your neighbor, Dan. My apartment's on fire. Which, naturally, made me open to door. Smoke billowed in from the hallway, and I stood in the doorway for a moment, trying to figure out what to do. After a second, I grabbed my coat and ran to knock on doors to get people out of their apartments, before the fire department called up the stairwell and ordered both Dan and I to leave.

As I walked outside, barefoot, into the cold air, I glanced up at the window of Dan's apartment. Fire belched out in big swirls. Fire engine lights flashed everywhere. The small crowd of interested neighbors that always appears at these sorts of events had already begun to gather on the sidewalk. Some out of sheer curiosity, some to see if there's anything they can do to help, some to be nosy and poo-poo the poor soul who accidentally started the fire.

I stood outside in my socks and winter coat for an hour, watching the fire department work, chopping away at my neighbor's windows, raining glass and water down to the street, until there was nothing left but the shell of an apartment. A square space where an apartment once lived, it's eyes hollow and black and unframed. When they were ready to let us back in, I made sure Dan and his wife had somewhere to go, and then went back in to see what had become of my apartment. Everything was fine, but it reeked of smoke. So I opened up all of my windows and placed fans in them, called my friends Bonnie and Darcy, and went back to making pies, while my neighbors evacuated their houses and their pets.

A while later, Bonnie and Darcy showed up and sat with my while I made pie in my winter coat, and we drank moscata and lit scented candles and nag champa and just generally enjoyed the best of a bad situation. Every so often, someone would knock at the door--first the curious friends of a downstairs neighbor who wanted to make sure he was okay (everyone got out okay, as far as I know) and then my upstairs neighbor, who was away during all of this and came home to her apartment wide open and her dog locked in her bedroom. I explained everything to her, lent her a fan, and then spent the night at Bonnie and Darcy's house, just in case the carbon monoxide levels were dangerous.

Today, the apartment next to mine is all boarded up, making it look even more like a ruined shell. My front hallway is cold and dark and smells of the most horrible, acrid, chemical mixture of smoke and fire-killers that I could ever imagine. The hall outside my door is dingy, grey, as though it won't even let light brighten it. Black, mildew-like tendrils run up and down the walls where the smoke and water infiltrated the paint, the wood, the carpet, the air. Everything has a current of smoke and burning running through it now. Even my apartment, which was relatively untouched, reeks of smoke still. But it's getting better and it will be better.

People are generally good natured, I've decided from this. Most people, anyway.
And I'm okay and so is everything I own. And I'm thankful that I can sit here and write this over a cup of hot cocoa and everything's really pretty cool.

A Warm Winter's Day

It's another grey, damp day in December, with temperatures not much lower than the forties or fifties and a veil of moisture in the air, dulling the line of the sky. Last year around this time, I remember walking out into the cold air, feeling it hit my skin and solidify my mind into these neat little crystals of thought. Last year, I remember walking around a cemetery in snow drifts, struggling just to breathe against the wind, and skies a permanent blue because the air wasn't warm enough to hold clouds. That's proper winter.

This year, it's just grey and moist. Good weather for a sinus infection. Yay, global warming.

Despite that, I've been very content over the past week, due in no small part to the fact that a friend I love very much is coming to stay with me soon. And because we've actually both taken a proper amount of time off to enjoy each other's company, so we're not rushing to cram a proper visit into a short period of time. Makes me smile every time I think about it.

Also, the benefit went well. We raised about a thousand dollars for Tantalus, and more just keeps coming in. If you haven't been able to donate or whatnot, please do. So we can do brilliant theatre.

Wandering Books
While tooling around on the Web today, I visited Jonathan Carroll's site and was happy to see that he has been updating it and even has a blog, which is, like most of what he writes, really good. On it, I found a link to bookcrossing.com, whose goal is, "to make the whole world a library. Book Crossing is a book exchange of infinite proportion, the first and only of its kind." The idea is to leave a book that's moved you in a public place for someone else to pick up. That person does likewise and so on and so forth. You can track your book's progress via a sticker that the site provides. It's a brilliant idea; I think I'll start doing that, at once.

For those of you who don't know him, Jonathan Carroll is an author. His books are largely slipstream fantasies--dreamscapes glazed upon ordinary life. They're about the magic of true love and imagination, philosophy, talking dogs, and heroes/heroines who eat far more Sachertorte than is probably healthy for any human being to consume. I can't recommend him enough. Especially his book White Apples.

Luck O' the Irish

I locked myself out of my apartment this morning. Almost the instant the door shut behind me, I realized I hadn't brought my keys with me. My apartment door doesn't lock automatically, but its handle doesn't turn from the outside unless you have a key in it, so for all intents and purposes, I was locked out. I swore at myself and then marched myself outside to see if the back door was open, propping the door to my foyer on the way, so that I could get back in if I needed to. The back door wasn't unlocked and my back window, though unlocked, was so covered in years of paint and swollen from rain and other weather, that it would take a three-foot pry bar to open it. I swore again and wandered back over to the front door to see if I could jimmy it with a credit card, only to find that some diligent soul had unpropped it. Thricely, I swore. I was about ready to give up, when I noticed that there was a group of workers across the road from me and that their truck contained none other than a three-foot pry bar (actually, it contained many other things, as well...but the three foot pry bar is what caught my eye).

I walked across the street, explained my situation, and asked them if they would mind lending me their pry bar, to which one man replied, "Nobody's ever come up to us and asked us to use our crow bar before," in a heavy Irish accent. Which made me nervous, because--I suspect like many people--whenever I'm around someone with an accent, I tend to pick the accent up, myself. Rather, I tend to pick up a hideous bastardization of the accent that invariably makes me sound like I'm making fun of the person with the accent. Fortunately, I managed to avoid calling anyone "mate" or slipping accidentally into a jig long enough for them to provide me with the crow bar.

It worked. I managed to pry the window loose from the geological layers of paint that were holding it in place, slip through it, nab my keys, return the pry bar and thank the kind workers, and then head off for work, keys in pocket. Oh, and I closed the window, too. And that was my morning.

Tantalus Benefit

If you've already received this, feel free to ignore it.
But if you're one of the few people in my life who read my blog, but who I don't talk to regularly and who I don't e-mail, read on.

It is Tantalus Theatre Group's distinct pleasure to invite you to our annual Winter Gala. Come support theatre, enjoy live music and cheap wine, and most excitingly, be privy to an exclusive sneak peak of our upcoming world premier production,
RAGNAROK!

Ragnarok is a company-created piece, rooted in the stories of Norse mythology. You are invited to a party thrown by the gods on the cusp of Armageddon. We tell the stories and sing the songs of the world as all that is hurtles towards its
fated destruction. We invite you to join with us as we make merry and laugh in the face of death!

Winter Gala
Saturday, December 4th
From 8 p.m. until we can't move nor party no more (performance is at 9 p.m. when we will still be able to move)
The Munki Haus
1278 N Milwaukee Ave, Loft 4W
Chicago, IL 60622

$25 Regular Admission
$10 Student / Senior / Industry with headshot or resume
Feel free to forward this email and bring friends!

To reserve your ticket, simply call Artistic Director Glen Cullen at 773-960-2066. Walk-ups will be taken as well, but
it is best to reserve your ticket.

I recommend coming. It's going to be a blast. Munki Haus parties always are.

I'm getting sick and should probably go home and drink a cup of tea, take a nice bath, and go to bed early. But I have rehearsal to go to, and lines to memorize, and exhaustion to endure. What a life. How could I have it any other way?

Late News on Budding Mythologies

When I was in college, my first directing teacher (I should say "our first directing teacher" because he really was the department's first directing teacher--I only personally had one directing teacher--but to avoid people thinking I'm using the royal we, I say "my first directing teacher. But enough digression...) once commented that someone really ought to tell our paper that the operative syllable in "newspaper" is "news". After two or so weeks, which is when the paper generally opted to review our plays, it no longer qualifies as news. It is, in fact, olds.

That said, I probably should have posted this a week ago, when I first found it on Neil Gaiman's blog, but I procrastinated. So it isn't news anymore, and it doesn't qualify as ephemera anymore, either. Still, how cool is this? To summarize: an entire mythology has sprung up among homeless children in Miami, which merges Catholicism, Santeria, and basic childhood boogiemen like Bloody Mary with the ills and dangers of street life. The basis of the mythology is that God has fled Heaven after an attack from demons. In his absence, the angels are fighting a war and it is up to humanity to fight with them by finding the moral path. What amazes me about the article, more than anything else, really, is the weight that it places on the children, and the strength they seem to find despite or because of that weight. Also, the fact that it doesn't promise a good afterlife if you live a good life. The most the children hope for is to get to join the angels in their fight. It's a gorgeous article and a gorgeous mythology, genuinely frightening and real.

Thanksgiving was a blast. I spent it at the shore with my father and that side of the family. And my grandmother, who, though she is getting older and older, looks genuinely pretty good and was fairly engaging once you made eye-contact with her and spoke at the requisite volume for her to hear you. The hardest part about going home is always getting family to understand just how real and good what I've been doing out here is. None of them have ever seen a Tantalus show, and our shows don't really translate well into short descriptions (Well, you see, it's about the final battle in Norse mythology, in which Loki and Odin fight to the death, and Odin knows he's going to die but does nothing to stop it. But it's also a game, and the game is the battle, and the audience is going to be part of the game. But no...seriously...it's going to be really cool), so whenever I go home and start talking about what I'm doing with Tantalus, my parents kind of fade off. It's frustrating.

The same is true of my writing. Whenever I start to tell my mother about anything that has happened with my writing, I get, "You know, your old friend Lee David published an article in Such and Such magazine." And I realize she means well by saying, essentially, "Why don't you write something the complete opposite of your writing style?" but I find myself just wishing for some vindication. Which, I suspect, won't come for a while. Not because I don't think I'll be published. Just because I think I won't be published anywhere she's heard of.

Moral of this story is, I think, no matter how supportive your parents are, they're still people and have failings, just like you do. I think that's the moral, anyway. The other moral could be buck up, write, act, and create theatre for yourself and nobody else; and quit your whining. It could be a lot worse. That's probably closer to the moral.

Anyway, I'm off. Going to drink some water and talk to my friend Bonnie about the cruise she and her girlfriend are going on.

Web Slingers

My Web site is finally up, and it looks fantastic. Just sheer gorgeousness on a plate--er--screen. Thanks to Ian Knox for doing all of the programming and to my brother for desiging the site. With this development, I might finally pull ahead of the other Matthew Rossi in Google searches.

Victory is in sight!

Greetings from Marrakech!

I'm currently sitting in the new Morroccan internet cafe that just recently opened in my neighborhood. So far, I love the place. Their Morroccan coffee is delicious; bitter without being painful. Very smooth on the tongue. And their Internet is really and truly free, which always makes me happy. If they had hookahs to smoke here, I think I would be in heaven.

Ever since I disconnected my apartment from the Web, I've enjoyed the experience of communal Internet. It isn't fundamentally different going to a cafe and checking my e-mail on a computer than it was when I could check it at home, but there are subtle differences. It gets me out of the house more, for starters, which is the largest part of what I like about it.

The other day I met Bonnie for lunch and she handed me a copy of Fuck the South. I have to say, I found it very apt, but as someone who lived in the South for five years, I also feel a need to defend the people there. The South is a strange place; they never entirely have gotten over what happened after the Civil War (as evidenced by the fact that it's called the War of Northern Agression down there), and I can't honestly say I blame them. A thriving economy was destroyed by the war, and the North did near nothing afterward to help repair it and bring them into an economy that worked for them. And the Northern attitude that the South is just populated by a bunch of hicks doesn't really help to make them feel as though what we say is good for them. We are, in a lot of ways, a very divided country. Yeah, the North is arrogant. Yeah, we have a right to be, but that doesn't really mean that our arrogance is going to do anything other than further divide our country.

In the week and a half after the election, I was party to a series of e-mail conversations between a group of my former professors. One of them made the point that the Liberal attitude that everyone who isn't Liberal is an idiot and that we're morally and intellectually superior to them is just going to force the nation further to the right. No matter the fact that this attitude is correct--I will happily and loudly call anyone who believes that they have the right to make laws that will take away the freedom of everyone but themselves my moral inferior, and I will be right to do so--it does nothing to root out the problem of why they have a worldview that focuses on bigotted things. Instead, we condemn them, and in doing so we further divide the country.

I have no idea what the answer to this problem is. More listening on both sides would be my suggestion. More willingness to accept that bigots aren't created in a vacuum and that it is just as ignorant when one of us refuses to listen to them as it is when one of them refuses to listen to us. More humanism, less other isms. Man, I'm a hippy.


My continually failed efforts with the laptop hunt have finally come to a close with the purchase of a new IBM T20. It's a very nice computer, faster and smarter than my desktop, with a DVD drive that I can watch movies on. Well...I will be able to, anyway. I'm currently downloading a DVD codec for this very purpose. Hopefully, if all goes well, I'll be able to watch Eternal Sunshine... by the end of the night.

That's it. And happy Thanksgiving, one and all. In a few days, I'll fly home and celebrate the yearly ritual slaying of man's only natural predator: the turkey.

Pranking Steve

I received this in my mailbox today:

Hey, I'd like to enlist your help for a project I'm working on. Okay, it's more of a prank than a project, but with the best of intentions. Here goes: I am currently working at a company called Wextrust. Everyday, for the past two months, Steve has called and asked for Patty to sign his 401K form. And everyday, Patty blew him off. Till today, when his persistence paid off. He showed up here at office, she signed it, he did a little dance. So here is my plan: I'd like to get as many people as possible to send him a congratulatory email. The more people the better. Just let him know that he's a good man and your thoughts and prayers have been with him. And if you want to pass this on to anyone, feel free. But, I'm guessing it's only going to be funny for the next day or two.

CONTACT STEPHEN AT saffarewich@yahoo.com

I'm generally a fan of a good joke, and I'm always a fan of anything that makes someone's life just a little strange for a few days, so I sent Steve a letter as Rev. Matthew Rossi, explaining that my church's congregation has been praying for him and that he's inspired my next sermon.

I recommend you send him e-mails, too. It's great fun and will make his life delightfully weird. Also, he's an improver, so he's trained to handle these situations.

Thing One and Thing Two...Or...My Poor Ignored Produce

Not two days after I blogged about the joys of organic farming and how wonderful it is that I can now get huge amounts of produce, I opened my fridge to make some yummy stir-fry to the sight of such wilt, such squishiness and rot as would make even the sternest heart weep. Poor green beans. Poor red peppers. Poor lettuce. I really did mean to eat you, back a month ago when I saw you in the produce section, so multicolored and inviting. I had such plans to roast those peppers. Such great plans for steamed broccoli with rice and chicken. I'm sorry produce. I failed you. If it's any consolation, the tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwich that I cooked, after I threw away the completely inedible stir-fry I made with you, made me feel like a horribly cliched bachelor and a waste of culinary talent.

It's a problem I think I'm going to have with these coop people--a half bushel of produce is a lot of produce, especially for someone who is almost never home and rarely has time to cook. I'm anticipating making lots of soups and fruit juice punches in the coming weeks. If anyone knows what to do with a pepper squash, please let me know. Seriously. I've got one on my shelf and it keeps staring at me, challenging me to make some new and wonderful recipe with him, and I keep having to back away from him, afraid. Snide little punk-ass squash.

I've been trying to buy a laptop again, having realized that my current laptop can't display this blog screen correctly, and it's not going well. I've e-mailed two people on Craig's List, practically begging them to let me buy their computers from them. "Please," I say, "I'll pay double--triple for it. Just let me buy a computer!" And they haven't e-mailed me back, except to taunt me with the knowledge that the computer is still for sale, without telling me how I might buy it. It seems fate has willed that I not have another laptop. At all. Ever.


Life has been fairly well absorbed in workshop lately. We're writing a lot, which is fun, but a very different process than I usually work in. I usually work alone, and working by committee can be tiring and frustrating. And the play has diverted my from a story I really need to finish about asexual reproduction and memetics. I'm rereading the stories about mitosis and meiosis in Calvino's T Zero, in the hopes that they'll inspire me and get me back on track.


Thing One and Thing Two
Ian (my former roommate for those of you not in the know) walked up to me a moment ago and said, "Two things."

"Thing one?" I asked, looking up from my desk with my usual nonplussed expression.

Thing one was that he thought I might like to make a graphic for my Web site. An icon to appear in the address bar when you sign into me. Um...my site, that is. Nevermind the fact that I have the artistic talent of a clam wearing shoes. I can make a sixteen by sixteen pixel graphic.

Thing two was that I haven't posted his blog anywhere on my blog. And this is true. The reason for this is that I'm desperately insecure and worried that if anyone saw there was another blog they might read, that would divert their attentions away from my blog and I would lose all my friends and wind up alone in the gutter somewhere with nothing but a bottle of Jack Daniels and my old teddy bear from childhood to keep me company.

Yes, my mind really can come up with these scenarios. No, I honestly don't see any need to seek help. Honestly. Yes. Honestly.

Consider yourself posted, Ian.

Also, a thing two of my own. Theresa Nielsen Hayden has some very good suggestions for a way to buy traditional Indian garments directly from thier makers in India, without having to go through a wholesaler or any other middleman. Alas, if only I was a woman or lived in a climate where I could get away with wearing such lightweight fabrics. I may have to buy something, anyway.

update on my peace of mind...

whew! I heard from my friend today. She's alright. Made it home safe and sound after a cabbie with far more sense than I had picked her up. Thank God.

I'm an idiot.

Mud's Queens and King's Hill

A week after the election, and I have to admit I do feel better. Mostly because, as it turns out, the whole thing was just a horrible mistake and Bush isn't really our President. Thank God for small miracles and Howard Dean!

The other day my friend, Jessa, suggested the thought that the Democrats really need to start bowing more on the moral issues. At first my mouth gaped and I stared at her like she had gone completely mad with postelection grief. But she made a pretty good point. Her logic goes as follows:

The Democrats can't be left enough to support a truly progressive agenda, but because they won't bow on the moral issues--issues that they don't really support wholeheartedly anyway--they keep losing the votes of mid-liners who are opposed to Bush on social issues but with him on moral issues. If the Democrats would let go of the moral issues that keep holding them back, they would gain immeasurable support from groups like the Black and Latino communities, which they often lose in moral issues because those communities are largely Christian. The end result of this, continues the logic, is that the truly leftist Democrats would have to stand against their party because of the moral issues, eventually creating a third party that would have some strength; the Republicans would have to start shaping up their stance on social policies to avoid losing power altogether; and the Democrats would be able to maintain better control over the government, but with the pull both left and right from the other two parties, would have to keep a stance that was both morally moderate and socially responsible. To me, this seems like a reasonable prediction.

But then, it was about two in the morning when I was listening to all of this, after a good night of partying. So my perceptions might have been skewed.

Life has gone on, though, and that's at least half of what's important. Friday night, I went and saw a friend play at Cosmicafe, which was fantastic. The space was wonderfully warm and cozy, and the music was just right; it reminded me of evenings in high school and college spent in the company of good friends, feeling safe in the world and valued among people, evenings when everything is just right and nothing upset at all.

After the show, a few of us went off to catch a mud-wrestling match by the Mud Queens of Chicago. The Mud Queens of Chicago get together every couple of months as a fund raiser for the Young Women's Empowerment Movement, which is a brilliant marketing strategy. I watched scantily clad women writhe around in mud, and was actually helping to empower women by doing so. It's fantastic. The match was held in a warehouse out in the western parts of the city, and was great fun to watch.

Unfortunately, I ended up missing most of the matches to help a friend get a cab. We walked to the closest main street we could find and called a cab. Then she insisted I leave her, which I did, stupidly. So I'm worried now, because the last time I saw my friend, she was sitting on a bench in a not-great area of town, late at night, waiting for a cab, and she hasn't returned my phone calls since. Which means that, if anything happened to her, it would at least be half my fault. Luckily, my friend is a big girl--in the empowered emotional sense, not the size sense--and she can probably take care of herself. Yeah. I think I'll keep telling myself that.

In lighter news, my friend Bonnie turned me on to King's Hill Farm, which is an organic produce cooperative out in Illinois. They have a delivery program for people in the city. Last week, Bonnie ordered thirty dollars worth of produce and had pounds and pounds of good apples, squash, potatoes, and--most surprisingly--pomegranates. Where the hell do pomegranates grow in Illinois? I have no idea how they did it. I signed on today and can't wait to see what I get in my first shipment.

This eliminates about half my grocery problems, too, since really produce is mostly what I like to get (because it's cheaper than meat and goes a longer way). I'm very excited.

That's that. If you happen to be an attractive young Jewish girl who I stupidly and drunkenly left sitting alone, please contact me, if for no other reason than to let me know you're okay.

How Quickly My Links Lose Their Poignancy

I just updated the opening link to my last post, so that it leads to somewhere real, only to find that the somewhere real that it leads to has changed into something completely new. Um. Which just goes to show that life is ephemeral by nature, as are most of the things worth having in it.

Actually, it probably doesn't go to show that, at all. It probably doesn't go to show anything but that I need to learn to use blogger a little better. But I can pretend.

Since Wednesday, I've been seriously looking into viable ways for me to skip town...and country...and find myself a nice little job as an expatriate somewhere. Unfortunately nobody is hiring expatriates anymore, even slightly curmudgeony ones with keen senses of humor. So barring that, I've been looking into teaching English abroad. Which led me to, So You Wanna Teach English Abroad? which has some seemingly good advice for people looking into teaching English abroad.

Sadly, I think that I'm going to be here for a little while. I've been trying to convince the others in my theatre company that we should get up and move to Prague--if the price of beer is any indication, we could probably buy a whole theatre for a thousand dollars. Maybe ten. So far, they haven't bought it.

My friend Bonnie, having more or less (and more more than less) made up her mind to get out of this country, sent me this article. It contains lots of advice on how to expatriate, my favorite of which (and the sole reason Bonnie sent me the article) is this:

Imaginary nations
Perhaps the most elegant solution is to join a country that exists only in one's own-or someone else's-imagination. Many such virtual nations can be found on the Internet, and citizenships in them are easy to acquire. This, in fact, was the route most recently attempted by Kenneth Nichols O'Keefe, the unfortunate ex-Marine.

In 2002, my roommate and I, having realized that the U.S. government didn't really stand for anything we stood for, declared our apartment a new nation, called Xsnania (don't try to pronounce it...you will only fail). The basic idea with Xsnania was that all nations are imaginary--they only occupy the territory that groups of people have agreed upon, and their government only exists inasamuchas people agree their government exists. The only difference with Xsnania was that we readily accepted and embraced our imaginary existence.

Becoming a citizen is easy, by the way. It only requires drinking from a cup and repeating an oath after us. And it comes with the title of your choosing. Which is more than you can say for most citizenships of the world.

My Nation's Legacy

This is who we've voted for. This is what we decided was best for our country. Anyone who sees this, this is your children, your brothers, your husbands and wives, daughters, grandchildren. This is nobody who he knows. This is nobody who he has ever cared about. We were supposed to care about these people and we didn't. We failed.

All eloquence has fairly well fled my mind. So I'm reduced to just a flight of rage.

Fuck you, John Kerry, and the sincere thanks you sent me this morning. You conceded before you even counted all the votes. And fuck you, George Bush for fucking up my country. You've given me four more years of ulcers. And fuck you everyone who voted for that rat bastard, who voted your wallets instead of humanity. Fuck you people who voted FOR the gay marriage ban last night. Did you realize that there were actual live people whose lives and dreams and loves you were ruining? Damn near desstroying? Did you think you were just playing rhetorical games with levers? And fuck you, everyone who could have voted and didn't.

And thank you to the people who voted and who helped and who cared and who continue to care and who will continue to fight, just fight, just don't give up. This is our country, not theirs and they don't get to have it.

Okay, now that I got that out of my system, my day thus far:

I woke up at seven feeling perky enough from my two hours of sleep to go to work for an hour and crash, so I opted to stay home instead. Work up again at one and went toward the Grind for a cup of coffee, some food, and to see if I could connect to the Internet and find out who my President is. When I was across the street from Bonnie's house, she called me and told me Kerry was conceding, so I crossed the street and caught Kerry's last few minutes of speech and a room full of my friends in tears and the beginning of what can only be a bad day for my country.

Sigh. I have nothing left to say just now. I'm scared. Genuinely scared. And I'm considering moving to France or Spain or Germany or some place where I can teach English and flip my finger at Chuckles the Monkeyboy President.

And I'm sad, now, and worried for my friends.

It's two thirty in the morning, and the map is bright red and my hopes for an American election going smoothly are slowly whittling away. What the fuck is up with you, Ohio? The economy is shit. Your people are in jeopardy and it was largely the fault of the smirking monkey. Why haven't you comprehensively get rid of the bastard?

It's been 249-225 for at least an hour. Don't know if I'll be in work tomorrow. I suppose I have to, but it's really dragging on. Longer than I thought, but I don't know why I'm surprised. I can't sleep until it's over. Bonnie and Darcy are hosting and I think they're worried, and rightly so, and so am I.

Fox declared Ohio hours ago, but it isn't decided. It's 2:30 and it isn't decided. Fox is fucking shit.

I'm glad I don't have a television so I couldn't be watching this alone at home. And I'm glad that I'm here with friends who I want to be here with, otherwise I don't know if I would have the means and will to stay up watching this. But I want to watch. I have to watch. This is a moment in the history of my nation. If they take this one, what then? Anyone can do it, if they can do it twice.

Off to make tea and then spend some time with my friends.

Low Tech Election Night

I just spent a half hour or so trying to get to this page so I could update my blog, and it seems my browser suffers from the same problem as my dad's browser: no toolbar. Some updates to my software may be in order. And me no longer living with a technical wizard.

But it's election night, which makes me very unconcerned with posting links at the moment. I'm stressed. After I voted this morning, but before work, I was in Kopi cafe getting a scone and a latte for breakfast when I overheard a guy say, "I just hope the election is decided tonight. Even if Bush is elected. I just can't handle the trauma of another fiasco like we had last time." I thought about it a minute and turned to him and suggested that, perhaps the trauma of another election fiasco would be significantly better than the trauma of four more years with that chuckling frat boy in the Oval Office. But there were intelligent conversations today. A few months ago, one of the guys who panhandle on my way home from work called out, "Support a Democrat. Give some change." I gave him some change, because I appreciate a clever panhandler (perhaps too much) and didn't give it any thought. But I passed him today on my way home and stopped to ask him if he had voted today. He had. In fact, he told me that he was among the only ones voting in his precinct who got his ballot right on the first try. Anyway, we chatted for a bit. He told me he almost voted for Bush--which made me bite my lip bloody--but that he went with Kerry in the end. It was a good conversation, devoid of the usual panhandler/giver dynamic. A conversation between two Americans about their experience on Election Day.

I'm off to Bonnie and Darcy's house, to gather with some comfort food, some good wine, and some good friends to pray to whatever gods we can muster and sway this election to our favor. Tomorrow a new day dawns, no matter what happens tonight. I have to remember that.

A link or two...

Goths for Bush make possibly the only good case for voting for Bush that I have ever seen.

We are forming this Goth Republican Band to help elect George Bush to continue the sadness. His actions facilitate our morbid fascination and the beauty of enduring pain. Many people lead unhappy lives and that is sad. Bush will continue the sadness.

Still not a great reason, but it's the best one I've heard. Certainly the most true to life.

And for continued Bushisms, there's the Drop a Brain in George Bush's Head game. It's giddy good fun.

And finally, because I can't have everything be about Bush, I've recently made random friends with an L.A. Based photographer named Alex Gibson. Here's a link to her Web site. I really love her pictures of Paris. Makes me want to be back there. But alas, I am stuck in rainy Chicago, where it's cold and sad...I think I'll go dress in black and vote Republican...

VOTE! TOMORROW! OR ELSE!

Because, if you don't, you don't get to participate in the best part of American politics: griping about what a bad job your president is doing. Imagine four years not being able to comment on how stupid President Kerry's stance on homosexual marriage is...or, you know, whoever wins tomorrow.

Yourgrau, Huckabees, Synchronicity

I woke up this morning feeling just zonked, which is a medical term that means someone had flipped my autoplilot switch and I couldn't get myself back to normal. Workshop's got me exhausted, and my body is punishing me for wearing it down (or giving me permission to rest, depending on how you look at it) by making me sick. So I'm playing hookie tonight.

I saw I Heart Huckabees on Tuesday. Fantastic movie--I can't recommend it enough. It starts out like an absurdist play and then slowly moves into something much more human and worldly without violating the world it's created in its opening scenes. Anyway, I thought it was wonderful, fun, beautiful, inspiring.

And Barry Yourgrau has a new Web site, which should have information about where he's doing readings. If you're not familiar with his work, Barry Yourgrau writes flash fiction stories--maybe a page or two in length--that read like someone narrating his dreams to you. My favorite description of his work, so far is:

"reading barry yourgrau is addictive, like putting peanuts in your nose & they turn into these spaceships or something"-- roy blount jr

And that's really him in a nutshell. His writing has inspired mine a great deal. In my senior directing class, I tried to create a play, based on his book, The Sadness of Sex (the film version of which is on IFilms, and you can see my pale attempt to imitate his style in "Plum Wine". My Korpervelt series of stories (which will be on my Web site when my Web site is up and running) takes a lot of what I get out of his writing and superimposes my own fantasies, dreams, etc. onto it. At least, they came from a place that was very much inspired by his works.

Anyway, check out the link to his site on my sidebar. There's lots of links to articles about him and where and when he will be reading. If you live in NYC, I recommend you see one. That means you, Kim.

Life's had a weird synchronicity to it recently. I've been dreaming lots of dreams about my Amanda, not fun dreams either. I keep having dreams where we leave each other. Or tell each other to go away. But there's always some sort of warmth in all of it. And while that's happening, the Universe has been answering my request for new people and for people who knew the old me by sending new people to me left and right and sliding people from back in Philly into my life here. Which has made me happy.

I still have no Internet at home. Soon, hopefully, I'll have my WiFi up and running but until then, I'm limited to writing at work. Which means I'm not going to be entering as much as before.

It also means I leave at five. Which is what I'm going to do right...now.

A Brief Hiatus to Move

On Saturday at 1:00 a.m., my friend, Matt Lang, and I spent a half hour chatting about politics with a CTA security guard and a cop.

"Those are the issues," Matt turned to me and said as we stood on the platform afterward, "Abortion, the war, and gay marriage. That's what's going to determine our next president."

The security guard and the cop were both against the war. They were both prochoice (although the cop was only for abortion in the cases of rape and such...but still, that puts him against Bush's extremism), and all for gay marriage. I hadn't expected that, and it made me very happy to hear.

Last weekend, I moved into a new place, a spacious and pretty single-bedroom in Lincoln Square. It's a very me place—a bit old and falling apart in places, but generally very nice and well-lit, with ceiling fans, a good kitchen, and a bedroom that's dark enough that my eyes have to adapt to it every night when I go to sleep. This beats the near-daylight I had in my last bedroom.

So far, the only problem I've had with the place is that there isn't a phone. I spent two hours on Thursday on the phone with AT&T, trying to work out what the problem was, and when they finally told me I was going to have to pay at least a hundred, fifty dollars just to get it working, I finally broke down, cancelled my service with them, and got a cell phone. For years, I have resisted them, but AT&T convinced me it was high time to get one. Bastards.

This leaves me without Internet access for the time being, so for now, I'm writing from work. And I'm going to see about getting WiFi for my laptop, so I can make use of one of the dozen or so free WiFi cafes around where I live.

National Novel Writing Month
I was reminded, as I logged into blogspot, that this month is National Novel Writing Month. What is National Novel Writing Month, you ask? National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo, since my fingers are getting tired typing out the full name of the holiday) is an experiment in writing a novel, not based on quality, but on quantity. More than that, it's an attempt to get people past their initial fears and woes about writing, and just write something for the fun of it. In the words of their Web site:

Make no mistake: You will be writing a lot of crap. And that's a good thing. By forcing yourself to write so intensely, you are giving yourself permission to make mistakes. To forgo the endless tweaking and editing and just create. To build without tearing down.

It's a great idea, as far as I'm concerned. One of the hardest things about writing, for me, is getting the inner editor to shut the fuck up for a little while and let me write. I find having a deadline helps. Anyway, I invite everyone to write a novel in this month, stop worrying about whether it's good or not, and just write. If you can't write a novel, write a short story or a piece of flash fiction. Send it to me. I'll post it.

links...
While I've been digitally incapacitated, people have been sending me links left and right, and now I'm going to post the ones I have in a single mad URL purge. Enjoy.

In addition to war, abortion, and gay marriage, the link between sex and voting seems to be a common theme this election year. My friend, Lara, sent me a link to Votergasm, a site dedicated to getting people laid for the act of voting. Which, just like getting people laid for voting Democrat, I'm all for (actually, I'm for getting people laid in general—they always seem so happy afterward. But these are particularly good reasons for it).

Also on the political front, a coworker sent me a link to Slap the Candidate.

Finally, there's the story of Wergle Flomp and Poetry.com. The year after I graduated college, when I had no money and too much time on my hands, I came across Poetry.com, and found their contest for—I think it was $5,000. So I wrote a twenty-line poem over a beer or three and then sent it to them and was all sorts of thrilled when they wrote me back saying that they liked my poem and wanted to publish it in their anthology. It wasn't until a little while later that I realized they would publish anyone in their anthology. So the story of Wergle Flomp made me grin, and checking their Web site, I find that my poem, "Man Melts the Sand so He can See the World", my twenty-line little gem, still sits there as a Mark of Cain, just to remind me not to be a sucker, and also to remind me that I know more now than I did then (you can find it, if you go to poetry.com and enter my name into the search engine).

(Incidentally, when Mudlark offered to publish me, their acceptance letter was so similar to the acceptance letter Poetry.com sent me that I responded to them somewhat angrily. The editor, William Slaughter, wrote me back saying that I had made him laugh—this was the first time a writer answered an acceptance letter in anger. Embarrassed, I apologized and explained myself. He was very understanding and kind about the whole thing.)

Another Grey Day in Bizzarro World

The weather is absolutely perfect tonight. Sky clear with a hint of clouds, mild wind, chilly without being oppressive about it. I love it.

A couple of days ago, I found an alternate history, entitled "What if George W. Bush had been Elected President?" on novelist Will Shetterly's blog. To quote:

With the election only a few weeks away, I've decided to take a break from wondering whether Gore's bigger threat is McCain or Nader and instead indulge in a little speculation, inspired by Patrick Nielsen Hayden imagining the horrors of a hypothetical Bush presidency.

I wrote to Patrick Nielsen Hayden, because I couldn't find the post in which he wrote the alternate history to which this refers anywhere on his site. Patrick wrote me back and told me what everyone has probably already figured out for themselves: that there was no such post. He was very polite about the whole thing and explained to me the joke on Shetterly's blog—which, to be fair, I already got—and I deleted the e-mail, feeling generally like an idiot. Which ought to teach me not to e-mail prominent editors while I'm at work, and therefore not at my brightest.

Possibly to cheer me up from feeling like an idiot, my roommate directed me to The Horror of Blimps. It succeeded and I was cheered up.

Tomorrow is moving day. Everything I own, I found out, fits neatly into about twenty miscellaneous boxes and packages. This doesn't count things like furniture and paintings, of course, but all the rest of it. There's something kind of scary about considering that all your worldly possessions and your little mementos of the past and your knickknacks and clothes and everything else that gives your outward appearance to the world—all of it boils down neatly into twenty odd boxes and packages.

Food calls. It says, "Come eat me..."
Masochistic food...

The Clock Keeps Ticking

a quick addition before I forget
Perhaps you have heard about the mysterious bulge seen on Bush's back during the first debate. If you haven't, here's a Salon.com article, and a follow-up (you'll need a Salon.com day-pass to view the articles; they're free, though, and all you have to do for them is view an ad). The Republicans have outright stated that Bush isn't wearing anything under his jacket in that photo, which is just obvious bullshit. But hey, let's give them the benefit of the doubt. Maybe Bush isn't wired. So I want everyone to leave me their best speculations about what the lump could be, other than a radio receiver (so far, my favorite is my neighbor, Jim's, comment that it's either a wire, or Bush's enormous, rectangular T1 vertebra). Begin speculations...now!

debates and moving...
I keep feeling like I ought to comment on the election and politics and be clever about them. But the truth is, I have very little to say about the election or the debates, at this point, that hasn't already been said better by the Daily Show, or by NOFX. My boss sent that to me and to my entire department by e-mail, today, which meant that all day long I got to listen to "the idiot son of an asshole..." blasting through tiny computer speakers. And it made me chuckle every time. Don't hate Americans...just hate our government.

Mostly, at this point, I'm just waiting for the clock to run out. I'm waiting to see if these four years have made my countrymen any smarter, or if we're all still morons. Tick, tick, tick...

Last night, I was riding home from the Tantalus workshop when, at a stop light near the Jewel next to my house, I saw my friend Dan--who has been in NYC for the last three years--walking across the street. So I said a quick goodbye to my friends and bounded out of the car at him, flailing my arms. Luckily, he doesn't carry mace and I was able to give him a big hug. He had just arrived in town and was on his way to see another friend of mine from high school, who had also just arrived in town. So instead of being good and going to sleep early like I planned, I went out and had a drink with a pair of my oldest and dearest friends, along with a few new people. And I walked home feeling like this was just another part of a string of cosmic events, and where was it leading me? And why?

Tonight was my night off, and I spent it packing up my things. It's strange to leave this apartment, but I'm off to bigger and better things. A place of my own to sit and write in. A magnificent kitchen. A bedroom that doesn't face the 7-11...

Right. It's my bedtime.

Should I Worship Rabbit Christ?

While I was walking down the street today, the Rabbit Jesus walked by me again with followers, this time reincarnated as a woman in a red dress and listening to Prince's "Let's Go Crazy." It seems there was a religion tailor-made for me.

The week went by without too much event, with the exception that I was mildly and persistently depressed for most of it. A combination of lack of sleep and work frustrations will do that to me. But there were perks. For example, on the subject of work frustration, Jeff Vandermeer posted a set of his former odd jobs, my favorites of which are numbers 4 (because, as an editor, I can wholly understand harassing someone to the point of grammar-related violence) and number 5 (because it's just a damn good story). Until I found my present job, I worked as a temp/freelance theatre technician (i.e. functionally unemployed guy/novelist) for a few years, and the one thing I remember was consistently wondering why nobody else seemed to notice that the office was crazy. It was never anything particularly glaring--with the exception of the job in a medical-records office, in which the woman just above me had less than a high school education, couldn't organize records by the alphabet, and regularly everyone marveled at me because I could turn on a computer, or the time I was fired from a job for doing precisely the thing that my supervisor had asked, or the...okay fuck it, there were lots of things glaringly wrong in these places. Mostly, though, there was just an overall sense that something had to have gone terribly wrong in people's lives before they would accept sitting at a desk under buzzing fluorescent lamps, staring at sheets of paper so white they were blue, as normal. I never accepted that this was normal, which is why, I'm proud to say, I never made a very good temp.

In my current job, lots of things are glaringly crazy, but the people I work with all seem to recognize this; so I at least have the comfort of knowing I'm sane.

The workshop for the next Tantalus show started this week, directed by my friend, Glen, and his roommate, Devin. I worked with Glen last year on Dreadful Penny's Midnight Cavalcade of Ghoulish Delights (say that five times fast, and win a prize), but my role in that was more as a writer than as an actor. This time, I'm an actor, and it's a little strange having Glen and Devin direct me. But the workshop's been fruitful the past couple of sessions. On Wednesday, I came to the workshop and promptly realized I was supposed to have brought an image that I felt summarized the show. I told Glen I hadn't done that, and he handed me a magic marker and some paper and said, "Well, draw something." I did. A single-page, four-panel cartoon, summarizing the entirety of Norse mythology with stick figures. I was very proud. I think rightly so.

Theresa Nielsen Hayden, who writes the Making Light blog, wrote a blog the other day on lamps, which included several pictures of paper lamps. They are gorgeous, and they inspired me to a new project. When I saw the last Redmoon show (which is what sparked my week where life felt like theatre), I was captivated by the paper lanterns that they used at the end (in which boats sailed by us on the river, joined by Death bringing the soul of one of the characters with him. The image was beautiful. The lanterns were beautiful. And I figure, since I'm moving soon, it might be a fun thing to try to make a paper lamp to light one of the rooms in my new place. My mind is already all abuzz with possibilities.

I work tomorrow, as a journalist at Graph Expo, which is much less glamorous than it sounds (or much more, depending on how glamorous you think a printing trade show would be). So I should go to bed soon. I leave you with "An Open Letter to Hummingbirds."

Off to drink some tea out of my dragon teapot. And then sleep.

a few links...

My friend, Cat, sent me a link to this little rant on the part of the American Family Association, condemning Proctor and Gamble for their support of the "homosexual agenda."

Suppose I told you this ad, which leaves the impression that homosexual sex is normal, thrilling and exciting, was created by P&G and run in a homosexual publication called Xtra.

For starters, I've asked a couple of friends of mine who are gay and they have told me that it's true that homosexual sex is definitely thrilling and exciting (and they are generally of the opinion that it's normal, too). So the AFA can't say Proctor and Gamble is engaging in false advertising. I wish I could say I was shocked and outraged by this ad, but really it's more or less the kind of thing I would expect from a conservative family organization in Mississippi. What did surprise me, though, is that the link the AFA used to show people an example of the P&G ad no longer shows the ad. Instead, the people who run the Commercial Closet site have chosen to use that page to launch a counter offensive and give people a chance to support queer rights. At the end of the AFA rant, they suggest you call Proctor and Gamble and complain about their little ad. I, for one, think that anyone who thinks that Proctor and Gamble's support of homosexual rights (see this article for some information on that) is dead-on what they should be doing should call them at the number the AFA has so kindly provided and tell them to keep up the good work.

On the other hand, I have to admit that, upon reading an article on Neil Gaiman's site, which described Catholic outrage about sexually explicit candy wrappers, I had to at least half agree with the Catholics. Look at them! There's no denying that the lime is giving head to those cherries and the cherries are digging it.

And finally, we have an article on Making Light, which scared the shit out of me. I doubt anyone who reads this blog is planning to vote for Bush, but in case you were, read this. Can there be any doubt how awful he is?

This post is a lot heavier than I wanted it to be when I started. So to end it on a high note (and since hipsters have come up in conversation recently), I bring you hipster bingo.

A Tale Told By an Idiot, Full of Sound and Fury...

I saw her tonight on the train, just a little heap of filthy clothing and deep brown skin, curled up into a little ball--a balled-up skeleton--on one of the seats. I didn't even notice her until she spoke. She said:

"Irma! Every day they raped a woman, every day a woman and a child were raped and tortured. Every day, Irma. Just so that your sweaty ass could have sex with Carlos. And you act like you're above it. A woman and a child were raped and murdered, Irma; that's the significance."

She spoke with an odd lucidity, as though she were reading lines from a play, or a poem that she had written. As though it were a performance for the rest of our benefit. And she stared at us with tired slits of eyes and spat at Irma, who was the seat in front of her. Or Irma might have been her, for all I know...she might have been crazy from guilt.

I'm sorry, little skeleton girl, for whatever memory--real or imagined--brought this on.

I don't know why I see things like this so often, but this sort of thing happens to me all the time: moments in life that are like little scenes, little bits of theatre. Since Saturday I've felt like I'm being led through a play, from one scene to the next.

Here's the scene where you talk with the canvasser and you make friends and get to see each other as more than money. Okay now on to the scene where the man in the bunny suit walks by and then the crowd of people following him like he's Jesus. Was that inspiring? Good...now we move forward to you getting your hair cut and meeting with a group of kids selling everything they own so that they can take a bike trip to California. See that glass head? Buy it...

I sometimes think there's a cosmic significance to it, that the Universe--or whoever governs it--has some reason for showing me these things that I just don't understand yet. But I really think the answer is more simple than that. I think I get a life that shows me these little snippets of theatre and magic and connection because I travel alone so often, as a result of which I'm always paying attention to the world around me, as opposed to paying attention to my traveling companions. But, like the weird correspondences from around the world, I like this aspect of my life.

Today I met with Steve at Ennui, which is always great. He's very warm and has a great deal to offer to people, and everytime I hang out with him I end up with a kind of warm fuzzy, because he reminds me of who I am when I'm not busy trying to be what this city wants me to be. Tonight we shared stories of how we each came to Chicago, and he introduced me to his friend, Renee (This is the scene where you meet Renee, the photographer with the blue, blue eyes and the hood, who is making a film in Roger's Park). We discussed acting, and art, and the curiously budding artistic scene in Roger's Park. And the way that, when you start working on an artistic project, artists seem to come out of the woodwork to help.

Anway, this is Renee's Page. Some good work on it. And here is a link that she provided to Inpatient Artworks, which has several other photographers on it, as well as links to a literary journal. When it isn't my bedtime, I think I'll have to go check it out.

Strange evening. My dreams will seem mundane by comparison.

Story: Plum Wine

"Plum Wine" is a story I wrote several years ago as a project for a creative writing class. I'm still fond of it, though, so I'm posting it here. When my Web site is up, I'll post my stories there, but for the time being, I think I'm going to put a few up here. Comments, criticisms, and admonishments are welcome. Oh, and if you're someone who can publish my stories somewhere, the answer is probably, "Yes I do have other stories you can look at." Right. That was mildly cocky. Enjoy.

**********************

It’s a hot day. The sun has been beating down for hours on the outside wall of my apartment. The bricks absorb the light and cleverly transform it into heat, effectively turning my three rooms into an oven. I have no air conditioner to cool me; the ceiling fan only circulates the hot air without changing its temperature at all, or providing any relief from the stuffiness. It's becoming difficult to breathe. My skin is crisping to a golden brown. I decide I need to leave my apartment, but the temperature outside is just as bad, just as all-enveloping. The entire city has been transformed into an oven.

What I need is something Japanese. My father once told me that the Japanese are always very cool-skinned, no matter what the weather is like, and I have absolutely no reason to doubt the truth of this statement. I leave my apartment and resolve to find a bottle of plum wine.

In the city people look as though they have melted. They wallow limply in the shade, toweling their heads with cloths soaked in river water. The streets are crowded with cars whose owners have abandoned them in favor of juice bars and ice cream parlors, or to congregate along the banks of the river. I can see them down by the water's edge, stripping down to their underwear and splashing each other, like children. I walk down Main Street, periodically dabbing the sweat from my forehead with my sleeve, marveling at the emptiness. This heat wave is the apocalypse, I think, the breakdown of civilization as we know it. Soon we will have to abandon the cities and make our way back to the trees. I shake my fist at the sun. The bright yellow eye stares back, nonchalant, and burns my scalp.

At the wine market, I search for my drink, but bafflingly, there is none. The man at the counter grins at me giddily and summons me over to him. He tells me they cannot keep the plum wine for long. He is a plump Frenchman whose lungs have been destroyed by a years of smoking. With each breath, he wheezes, having to force the air past layers of tar. He clutches his great belly, as though wrestling against its further expansion. He explains that the plum wine is too delicate to keep. In such hot weather, it sours if it stays in their storerooms for more than an afternoon. Every day they have to drink their stock or they'll be stuck with worthless bottles of vinegar, and they have just finished with the last of it today. It's the reason he's in such a good mood. He tells me I can take an empty bottle if I like, and that I should wait by the river for nightfall if I want to cool off.

I take my bottle and thank him, then I leave the wine market and make my way to the river. At the edge of the banks, I take off my shoes and hop like a coal walker across the burning sand toward my relief in the cool water. The mood of the people around me is one of friendliness and relaxation, or community and fun. Neighbors who haven't ever spoken to each other in years swim together and splash water. Rival shopkeepers sit on the banks, dabbling their toes in the water and talk about their childhoods and make plans for their mutual benefit. I realize that if this heat wave will bring about the end of all civilization as we know it, it will also bring about the beginning of a new community. I smile at the thought, as I strip off my clothes and wade out into one of the pools.

An elderly Asian man who I recognize from the wine market wades up to me in the pool and greets me with a courteous nod. I nod back to him, and we strike up a conversation and float on our backs in the river, staring at the sky. We talk about our days, about the apocalyptic feel of the city, about the freakish heat wave that has hit us and rendered everyone unable to work. I tell him about the wine and my thwarted plans to cool off with a bottle of plum wine and he tells that his sister makes plum wine. He apologizes immediately after, saying that the recipe is an old family secret, which he would not dare betray. Mostly all that is involved is patience, he explains.

Suddenly there is a loud hush over the crowd. The setting sun has hit the water and been extinguished. The once blazing orb has settled into a minor hue of lavender. In the water it bobs for a moment, then begins to sink. As it settles to rest in the gravely riverbed, its purple skin tears on a jagged rock, exposing the pinkish pulp within. Fluid leaks into the river from within it, and the water turns pink with the juice. I dip my bottle into the reddening water and sip the excess off the top. It is reminiscent of lemon drops and honey. I drink deep from the bottle and fall back against the bank with my head in the sand, feeling cool, ecstatic, drunk.

Cat Stevens: Public Enemy Number One

I spent Monday feeling generally very sick. I cooked a bunch of cod fritters for International Talk Like a Pirate Day, and apparently the cod wasn't very fresh. Everyone who ate the fritters came to me to tell me that they'd had weird dreams, and to ask if I had mixed a little of the wacky rosemary into the batter. I didn't suffer from weird dreams, though. My stomach just summarily rejected the fritters and refused to let me eat anything the next day. The large amounts of rum I drank probably didn't help the matter at all (what's the old rhyme: Cod fritters before liquor, never sicker; liquor before fritters, never bitter? Something like that.)

My friend Eliza sent me this as a sort of belated Talk Like a Pirate Day present: The Pirate Keyboard. It made me chuckle.

One good thing about my job is that there's plenty of down time, which means I can surf the Web. My friend Bonnie led me to the Brick Testament, which is the Bible illustrated in Leggos. It had me giggling for an hour or two today, particularly the picture of God smiting Judah's son Er. It's the hammer, I think. Anyway, there's plenty of blood, sex, and violence—just like you'd expect from the Bible.

An e-mail appeared in my inbox at work on Monday with the subject line of "Holy Shit! America's Crazy," and it contained a link to this CNN article. To summarize the article: former pop-singer, Cat Stevens, is now Muslim, and apparently as a result of this and antiwar leanings (he is opposed to ALL war, by the way, not just the war in Iraq), he is considered a threat to national security. There was a surreal moment while reading the article when I came across the line, "Federal officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, identified the individual as Islam," and I thought, "Well, of course they considered him a threat. We've considered Islam a threat to our national security for a long time." Beyond that, I have nothing clever at all to say, except "Holy shit! America's crazy."

Avast Ye!

I just finished writing a magnificent and long post full of links and other fun information, and then my computer froze and I lost it all.

"Fuck!" I hollered.

"What?" said my roommate, annoyed.

"I just lost my post."

He said nothing. He understood.

Tomorrow is International Talk Like a Pirate Day, the international holiday in which thousands of people around the world talk like pirates. If ye be one o' them land-lubbin bilge rats who have no idea how to begin to talk like a pirate, the Talk Like a Pirate homepage has a helpful glossary to keep you from gettin' run through. You can even learn how to talk like a pirate in German (Bei meinem Hacken, meine Papagei ist tot!"), and the site is structured like a haggadah, which made me wonder if there might have been a large Jewish pirate population. If my Google search is any indication, there were none. I welcome anyone who can tell me otherwise (to be fair, I don't think pirates were ever particularly religious...although voodoo).

Random Correspondence from Poland
A few months ago, a Polish artist named Paul Katon e-mailed me randomly to ask me if I knew anyone who could help promote his documentary I Am Not a Pygmy (here is a link to a press release about it). I wrote him back and explained that I was just a poor artist with no connections to anyone, but that I wished him luck. We corresponded briefly and shared stories and thoughts about our respective arts, and then the correspondence petered off and I more or less forgot about it. Yesterday I was pleasantly surprised to find another letter from him in my inbox, and this time I was able to suggest to him that I could post a link to his homepage on my blog and he could post a link to my blog on his. His site is neat; it contains links to his various photo galleries, as well as a link to a short film of his, called "Heaven in My Mind." Based on our correspondence and his Web site, I think Paul is a pretty nice guy and a really talented artist. The link to his homepage is in the "Links to Other Artists" section of my sidebar here.

When I told my roommate about randomly receiving a letter from Poland, he said, "Does this happen to you a lot?" Yes, it does. I don't know why, but for some reason I get an inordinately large quantity of e-mail from people who aren't spammers, but who just decided to contact me for one reason or another. Some of them have gone on to become good friends of mine, enriching my life, even though I have never seen them in person. Others engage my mind and my imagination with letters that contain phrases like:

I'll add some spiced insanity to this conversation. The Bedouin say that down in Oman there is a mountain with caves in it where dragons live. They say that you could play a flute which will inebriate {SP?} the lizard and he will crawl out of his den. A few men have been known to ride on the backs of the beast but this is all nonsense isn't it?

I don't know why this happens to me so much (sometimes I suspect that I'm a hub for people, a sort of conduit through which people meet each other), but I hope to God it never stops happening. It's made my life very interesting.

Finally, my roommate showed me these:
Woot! is a place that sells one thing every day (I should say one type of thing, because they actually sell many of them...I mention this because it took a very long and complicated conversation for Ian and me to figure that out). And for those people who really love coffee and really love computers, and can't bear to be away from the latter long enough to get a cup of the former, someone invented the Caffeine Machine. As Calvin (the cartoon six-year-old, not the theologian) once said , I'm sure this just goes to show something...I'm just not sure what.

This post has been fraught with peril since I started it. So I'm going to stop before I lose it again. Yarr...

Around the Coyote

My time playing uncle to a pair of small tigers has come to a close. Bonnie and Darcy got in last night, looking much relaxed and very happy. Which made me happy, and I'm almost certain made Franco and Elliot (the two kittens) very happy. Every time I told them "no" or picked them up by the scruff of the neck, they gave me this look that said, "Who are you, and why do you think you can pick me up by the scruff of my neck?" And when I sprayed them with water, I generally felt bad enough that I pet them shortly thereafter. I have a feeling that if I'm ever a dad, I'm going to be one of those pushover dads.

I spent this weekend at the Around the Coyote festival, which is a fringe theatre and arts festival in Chicago. Tantalus performed Sinister Puppetmen of the Fabrication Gallery, our outdoor summer show, on Saturday and Sunday night. The folks who ran the festival, Lynn and Cynthia, were fantastic—they were peaches. They ran the festival efficiently and cheerfully, which is a rare combination in theatre festival managers (they are, in my experience, either cheerful or efficient, but rarely both simultaneously), and they continuously thanked us, every time they saw us throughout the weekend, for helping them put their sign up. Anyway, they were lovely and I thank them heartily for helping to make the festival exist and be great fun.

I saw two shows on Sunday, one of them fabulous, the other kind of meh ("meh" being a technical term, which means, roughly, "not so very good at all, but not so awful that it made me regret having seen it/been involved with it/giving an hour of my life to it"). The fabulous piece, called From Tel Aviv to Ramallah: a Beatbox Journey, was a one-man show which told the story of two people living in Tel Aviv and Ramallah, a Jew and a Muslim, respectively, and of their lives and the tensions in Israel. Aside from the fact that it was a compelling story and script, what made it fantastic was that the performer started to beat-box (if you want a definition of beatboxing, here is one...it's just a lot easier than writing one, myself) from the moment he stepped on stage and, aside from two water breaks, he didn't stop until the show was over. Not just simple spit-and-thump sorts of beatboxing, either. No no...the man essentially created a disco on stage, before our very eyes, all the while acting every character—from a Russian immigrant, to an American Zionist Jew, to a Palestinian nationalist, and all of them extraordinarily well-defined— and setting each scene with such precision, such amazing energy that there were times that the sounds of cars on the street outside the theater were jarring, because I had forgotten I wasn't actually in Israel. In every festival there is a show like this: one which redefines what a good piece of theatre should be and makes everyone in the audience remember what they love about their art. And I was blessed to get to see it this time around.

Which might have had something to do with my disappointment with The Madman and the Nun, which was presented by Experimental Theater Chicago, and was (inexplicably) the critic's choice this year. The staging was dull and stiff, and the acting was so flat as to actually make declarations such as, "I love you," or, "I'm completely mad," seem as important as saying, "Yes, I'd like a taco." The actor playing Dr. Gruene, the psychoanalyst who knows everything about the madman's mind, chose to play him as a sort of Wallace Shawn styled good-natured idiot, which robbed his character, and subsequently any and all power-play between him and the madman, of any strength it might have had.

But what was particularly irksome to me is that Experimental Theater Chicago, whose mission statement says they stand against traditional styles of doing theater, chose a sort of Dr. Kaligari Expressionism (in the set and costumes, not in the acting, which was played very straight and true to Realism) to present this play. I generally don't like what ETC does, partially for personal reasons (my few dealings with their artistic director and principal member have consistently left me feeling as though someone just patted me on the back and said "You're cute kid, now go away."), but mostly because there isn't anything experimental at all about them. Their shows are Expressionist, Absurdist, Surrealist, nonlinear, abstract, Dadaist, and so forth, but although these styles are outside the realm of Realism, they aren't really experimental; indeed, by virtue of the fact that they are definable genres, they are actually tried and true. Experimentation requires risk. It requires stepping out of what we know to be good, what we know will work, and stepping into places where it's possible—even likely—that we will fail. ETC never does that; while they stand against American Realism, they aren't standing against it by testing any new boundaries. Instead, they're standing on the ground conquered by artistic revolutionaries decades ago and declaring the already-abandoned ground thereof new territory for the conquering. I for one, find that kind of cheap, and I find myself wondering when they are actually going to start living up to their company name and experimenting with something new.

My bewilderment and annoyance with ETC aside, though, the festival was magnificent and we plan to put a show together for their winter festival.

Tomorrow: links to an important holiday.

"What Matters Won't Change; What Changes Don't Matter"

I finished reading The Chess Garden last night, and it was just fantastic. The title of this post comes from a quote from one of the characters. I like it, because in the past week, it's helped me to realize some added peace while being back in the thick of things that worried me before, and because it is, I think, the perfect expression of how I am living my life when I'm happy. I'm not worried about what could be; nor am I worried about what was. There is only what is, and faith that the stream of life will take us where it will and that wherever that may be, it will be wonderful.

There's a moment in the movie Michael, in which the angel Michael is seen standing in a field across the street from a motel that everyone is staying at, and under his breath to the tune of "Auld Lang Syne," he sings, "We're here, because we're here, because we're here, because we're here..." and onward to himself, ad infinitum. A moment later, lots of Hollywood nonsense come and encroaches, but for just a second or two, the movie touches on something like a correct philosophy, or the philosophy of life I would have if I had to have a philosophy of life. Just the other day I read a quote by Goethe, which said (paraphrased here) that the important thing in life is to live. The Chess Garden puts it differently, that the metaphor of Christ on the cross comes in the crucifixion of the here on the now, the containment of the eternal and the divine into a single moment that stretches out forever (or the containment of infinite time into a single place that stretches out forever). That the best communication with the divine is to realize that divinity speaks to us when, instead of struggling to make things as we want them, we look at things as they are.

I'm a little sad, now. In the way that I'm always a little sad when a story that has touched me deeply comes to a close. In the way that characters can be like friends and guides, and that last page can feel like a very final farewell. I think I'll go for a cup of coffee, and maybe commune with some of my real friends for a bit.