Although I couldn't possibly feel grosser than I do now, swimming in a filth of boogery tissues and sinus headaches, and I can't quite bring myself to work on my play to give to Soho Rep because this is IT, this is the draft that will be once-and-for-all rejected or accepted, and until I begin working on it I can pretend that I still have an ounce of control over it... like I can Still Be Brilliant about the play if I just ignore it.
Right. Instead: here's a non-recurring segment called When I Become...
Disclaimer: Sometimes (not often) I feel like I'm suffocating because I keep trying to breathe through my eyes. Below is an illustration of such a moment. Merry Ex-mas...
WHEN I BECOME...
...I will draw pictures like Ruth to romance myself into writing, and I will give talks at BAM like Lisa about how to make theatre not suck, and I will make pictoral collages about my plays like Susan, and I will buy beautiful journals at art supply stores and write all my plays longhand like Melanie, and I will be mad-famous and mad-tall and mad-sexy like Adam, and THEN (and only then) I shall be All Art, and THEN I will stop building my plays from aluminum cans and cigar cuttings and soggy breakfast cereal and butt sweat and pencil shavings and fingernail grime.
But of course I won't. I build my plays of such things because this is the matter from which I am made. Although maybe a bigger Art is to be found amid the filth...
So. When I Become, Redux... I will have green forks of lightening sparking from my fingertips— the static electricity from the friction of the two halves of my brain rubbing together... I will have the cosmos spinning in my palm like a coin, fueled by the burning compost of my slag heap... my heart will be a hot white coil rising into my throat, and my lashes will be swords, and when I blink I will slice down traffic cones and fire hydrants and lamp posts. And my smell will be toxic. And my hair will be wire. And my plays won't be plays... they will be wild angry polyphonic SHREIKS vomited into the air, and the bones in your knees will shatter in your skin when you hear them.
And you won't see me because I will be burrowed deep within the coat of another small mammal, like a tick, because that's where I have chosen to smother myself.