Happiness is having a very bad cold and NOT having to walk three blocks in freezing weather to a bloody subway platform, to be crammed into a holiday-stuffed car with the multitudes of other sick folk, the whole train like a travelling TB ward... rather, happiness is having a very bad cold and picking oranges from a neighbor's tree on your way to the mall so your future mother-in-law can buy you pants for Christmas ("slacks", as the adults call them), which you desperately need to avoid looking perpetually slept-in while teaching (like you did last semester).
Extreme distaste for supermalls and suburban sprawl and Floridian smugness notwithstanding... people with colds need love, sunshine, vitamin C, and slacks. Yes they do.
See you in '05.
I just blogged two days ago but I'm feeling lonely and procrastinatey and I just got off Raymi's site and she always makes me wanna blog, but she also makes me feel fat.
I had this long miserable rambly medication-induced post up a few moments ago, but luckily my reason got the better of me. But the post still lingers somewhere, hidden... if you're interested and/or crafty.
Merry.
PS- Chuck Mee's amazing actress wife Michi was in a reading of mine the other day, and I was complaining to her about how I lost my gloves, and she just gave me a pair of lovely mittens that she happened to have on her person. I love them (click it). I really really do. And I love her for giving them to me. That is the nicest thing someone has done for me in forever. Thank you, beautiful Michi.
PPS-Has anyone else besides me been tracking the unfolding Google holiday narrative?
Good. I thought I was Superloser for a moment.
One recent balmy afternoon when I had so much work on my plate that all I could do was surf the net in an anxiety-riddled daze, I went a-stalkin'. This time it was a cutie-patooty soccer-playin' boy from junior high. Thought I found him here, but if you scroll down you'll see he is actually now a piece of sporting equipment.
I'm in a cafe in my 'hood and the young gal working the counter just said, "I'm so surprised I got an A in anything... I'm such a slacker it's not even funny." Moments ago I wanted to be her best friend because her dreds are cool and she has a pretty face. Now I want to tell her to try harder because she's disappointing her professors and her family. I'm getting old.
Do you ever feel like this?
I do, sometimes. Not today though. You know I almost Photoshopped a string of saliva connecting the tongue to the teeth, to make it look more authentic. I think Jamil would have liked that.
... it's like this: I want to stop being personal here because originally I conceived of this as an AUTHOR's blog, somehow a record of the turnings of a semi-literate art-driven existence, but too often it's just another repository for psychic runoff and I wonder if sending more damage out into the cosmos is ultimately bad for the planet, just more toxic gas, or are we too poisoned already and no amount of badness will curdle humanity because it's already gone sour, or maybe I'm just feeling ambivalent about my own position bobbing in the waves of cyber-nausea produced by the millions and millions of public mourners on the internet... and while I think public mourning is actually a very beautiful cultural practice it is something far different when the mourning is being sent along a cable underground rather than from our throats on our knees in the streets. So.
But I bring this up because I want to say something very personal, very private/public, to someone. But I've said quite enough already.
In other news... To the anonymous person who reads this: right now, I'm deeply in love with you. Please don't leave me.
One of the fun-est (and trashiest) bits in this week's New Yorker can be found in the late Robert Lowell's mopey letters to the late Elizabeth Bishop... Lowell complains bitchily about Alan Ginsberg, flaming his work and recounting a mildly scandalous visit by Ginsberg and co. to his home. Quite juicy.
On a related note, I spent a good hour this morning in the dungeony adjunct office at LaGuardia poring over texts for my Spring course, "Writing Through Literature." It made me GIDDY. Giddygiddygiddy. I freakin' *HEART* lit-crit. The 'lit' more than the 'crit', though... makes me dreamy. (Note: Woman in photo is not me.)
I've had this repeated vision of myself, or my dream-self, since I've moved here... me in a blowing country dress, with long bamboo-colored hair lashing at my back... it's a view of me from behind, and I'm tall, and my feet are bare. I'm on a road and on either side of me are round humps of dirty grass stretching forever right and left-- no ramshackle barns or melancholy moo-cows in sight-- and I'm not walking, just standing, maybe leaning to one side, and the road is black and wet and the yellow line is freshly painted, and everything seems very expansive and far away, and a storm is in the distance, but too far off to be threatening... the colors are smoky and moody like a Wyeth painting, and it's got that muted drama to it.
Instead of thinking of a beach or a childhood safe place or a relaxation cot in a spa, this is where my mind goes when new york has reached its most aggressive spiritual shriek within me.
To any of the four remarkable folks with whom I ate Fusion this evening AND to whom I drunkenly babbled that I had a blog... you are truly amazing folks and I am so pleased to have met you. And my blog is not about you.
But thanks for the great food and the tremendous company. I feel very lucky.
I wonder if this post makes me less hardcore...
... but FACT. I am out of my league here. Or rather, out of my committment level. Sitting in a hotel bar listening to the clink of industry names colliding in mid-air over the table... high-profile projects and ivy league schools and celebrities, flying hither and tither.. and me, tongueless. Perhaps because I peruse graphic design websites until 3am and spend too much time downloading full Howard Stern shows and don't read the American Theatre articles I post to TCG's website and avoid the Arts section of the Times because it makes me nauseous and competitive, and it is evident that I am less invested in this industry than everyone around me right now. And less successful. And less.
And today I had the stunning realization that even if I received a gilded invitation to the world of names and projects, even if they booked me on the next flight to Artistic Director Showcaseland, I would still feel like my first class seat was a computer error. And frankly, I am scared that no matter what happens to me in my little career, the sensation that I am the Perpetual Visitor will never wear off.
So there was this moment tonight in the office where I caught myself peering over a short wall at a photocopy machine one story below, and I pictured myself very ardently hurling my body over the wall and landing face-up on the copier, breaking my neck. A strange and beautiful mort in the offices of Actors Theatre of Louisville.
Oh but the day was joyous... watching young actors lay their diginity on the polished floors of a mirrored rehearsal room, just for the sake of learning. The kind of learning where you actually are forced to watch your wounds heal themselves because there is nowhere else to look. Bless their hearts.
I had something to say about the sound a telephone modem makes when it connects, but it really isn't worth it.
A fun moment today: ordering a 107 proof bourbon called "Old Rip Van Winkle" out loud. As opposed to "young," I presume.
Buzzing on a dinner of "original flavor" SunChips and watery coca-cola and wet smoky asphalt in a southern town and the wild delight of being put up for two nights in a bourboney old hotel room with cable. Not much to report yet from Derbyland, so I'll leave you tonight at this late hour with a little something... perhaps in a shade of Neo-neo-dada, circa 2000... anyone? (Be careful... the song is adhesive... it will infect your marrow...)
That's the name of the second album of the awesome rocker gal we cast as Jewel for the workshop of my fucked-up Ulysses adaptation. We also cast a fantastic Samantha. I keep playing their auditions over and over in my head. Ooohhhh, my play... it's a mess, a big joyous sloppy mess and I can't wait to start slashing the bejesus out of it.
Hey, I'm gonna make a go of starving myself. Just to introduce some meager discipline into my life. Now that my house is clean and my clothes are washed, I need to cleanse the INNARDS. The INNARDS, yo. Gotta counteract the holiday gluttony. Wish me luck....
I caught a student cheating on her midterm paper last week. She copied the ENTIRE THING from MonkeyNotes. It's strange to catch someone cheating so nakedly. Dismal of course, but oddly satisfying.
Speaking of morbidly obese creatures...
That is one intractable feline.
(Just kidding about the starving.)
On the loser scale, 10 being the most egregious, where does toasting a marshmallow on your gas burner at 3am after spending 4 hours applying for jobs online rate? I'd say a solid 10 if I was in my pajamas... but I'm still fully clothed. So maybe like 8.
I want to talk about winter and December and my vast creeping relief that the semester is almost over and my boss who was so sweet to cut my hours down and hire someone to help out while I grade endlessly and The Great Gatsby which I am re-reading for the first time in over fifteen years to teach on Saturday... but I can't right now because it's 3am and my boss is not The Great Gatsby and winter is not quite here and the marshmallow made me want to barf and the semester still has two more weeks. But it's December. It's a start.
Speaking of marshmallows, do you remember these? They used to stir me in a vaguely perverse way. Although looking at them now I wish I could fathom why.
