Stuff Now.

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Ventilation.

Growing up, we had three dogs. One was a cocker spaniel, the other two were lhasa apso mixes:

They were fun and friendly and we loved them a lot. But we didn’t walk them enough. Probably because my family’s default setting was “sedentary.” Instead, we’d open the back door for them twice a day so they could do their business in the yard.

But sometimes, business was slow.

Consequently, there were many indoor accidents. If we were home we could identify the culprit by the deep shame in her eyes. But when we were away, our house turned into a giant carpeted animal toilet. We’d arrive home and bee-line to the paper towels for the inevitable shit-piles and piss-puddles waiting for us.

Every. Flipping. Day.

I know my house reeked because my best friend’s mom stopped letting her come over. I had become inured to it; or rather, the smell from my parents’ ever-lit cigarettes was more egregious to me. Possibly because dog excrement doesn’t threaten human lives the way smoking does.

Still, we treated them as though they were tiny humans. They slept in our beds, ate off our plates, swam in our pool, slobbered on our guests. We coped with their bathroom quirks even if it meant never taking off our shoes inside our own home. Because they were family.

So…

Um.

I don’t quite know how to make sense of what my mother did to our dogs when my father died, so I will just report it.

His death was sudden, a heart attack, and came on the heels of a pretty horrendous financial disclosure. We had to move very quickly to a place my mother could afford; a two bedroom apartment that didn’t allow pets.

I found out she euthanized our dogs after it happened. She brought them to the pound and had them put to sleep. She said she had no choice, she couldn’t find homes for them. But I know in part she couldn’t bear the thought of them living with another family. Eating off their plates. Pissing on their carpets.

And as shameful as it is to admit, I never got over it. I never even talked about it until now. I cry every time I think about it. I’m sure some of the pain is related to my father (we were unable to mourn him properly for reasons I may hopefully be able to talk about someday)… but also, for years I had to downplay their loss so I’d be capable of grieving with my mother instead of vilifying her.

Anyhoo.

I told myself I’d never own animals again. My adulthood would be filled with sweet-smelling rooms, spotless carpets, bare feet indoors, and zero pet heartache.

It was. For a bit. And then we had a baby. Who became a toddler. Who became a nine-year-old. Who wanted a cat.

Like many kids with two artist parents, he’s smart and sensitive. We often indulge his (and our own) desires to discuss topics that are slightly bigger than him. As a result, his conversational drive often has a kind of phrenic patina to it. Adults love talking to him.

Kids, however…

One time when he was seven he shouted this to an entire table of boys at lunch: “If any of you guys are feminists, raise your hands.” None did.

He sat alone at recess and read Garfield books. He rarely had playdates. I knew his desire for a cat came from his longing for soul who was as helpless as he felt. But I couldn’t do it. “No pets,” I said.

And while the citizen part of me was proud of him for his professed political leanings, the mother part felt like a failure. I was raising my child to be a responsible adult ten years too early.

We decided to send him to sleep-away camp, hoping the day-to-night kid rhythms would replace his premature adult ones. It would be his first time ever without a parent or grandparent.

He was going to be surrounded by kids he didn’t know how to talk to.

For an entire week.

While I was on deadline.

(Sigh.)

He came home from camp a week later to find two bewildered kittens and this contraption in the living room:

The D.I.Y. litter box ventilation system I built.

YOU WANNA MAKE THAT, DON'T YOU...

NEEDED: a piece of Plexiglass, a Dremel saw, a CPU fan, a laundry hose, vinyl & acrylic tape, anxiety, insomnia, and a light case of osmophobia.

I basically followed these instructions, except I used this litter box so I wouldn’t have to cut a hole in the side.

TIPS: Make sure your CPU fan faces the right direction so it’s pulling the stink out. And be careful when you use the Dremel to cut the Plexiglass; you’re basically melting plastic so do it outdoors and score it well first with a sharp utility knife.

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Troubled sociopath.

In 2004 I decided to write a novel. As a devoted reader of difficult books, I had massive ambitions.  I wanted to write something personal, experimental, universal, tragic, poetic, epic, complex, controversial, and affirming.

I felt capable. I took tons of notes. I began writing with great zeal.

My novel concerns itself with Tremont, a young man recovering from a mental collapse caused by the dual traumas of grad school and his mother’s rectal cancer.

He drinks whisky from the bottle. He chain-smokes ’til dawn. He reads dense social science anthologies like Rethinking Context: Language as an Interactive Phenomenon (Studies in the Social and Cultural Foundations of Language).

He’s not an asshole per se. Like he’d never purposely hurt someone. He may have broken a few hearts, but that’s just ’cause he’s young and hot and broke and maybe an alcoholic and also an aspiring writer and potentially bi-sexual.

And although he’s never pinned a woman down against her will, he considers himself an average guy. No one really knows him, though. People describe him as brooding, mysterious, charming, aloof, and wry. But he’s very very alone.

Probably because he’s tragically flawed.

I got 23 pages into writing before I started hating myself. I was regurgitating a cliché.

Of all the many many types of humans who could have inhabited My Great Novel, why had I chosen that tired-ass trope? Why was I burning brain cells out over a troubled sociopath? And why did I date him more than once? Whose wet dream was this?

Um, everyone’s, for about a decade. I came of age in the 90’s, the era of the Brilliant Damaged Bro and the Sad Chick Who Hates Herself For Loving Him. Which does NOT hold up, friends.

Luckily I figured this out before chapter three. I shut my novel down and turned the parts I didn’t hate into a play… this play!  Which is currently running in Seattle at Washington Ensemble Theatre through October 8th, if you’re in the nabe.

My hero is now a programmer chick named Jess who goes on a road trip with her dead father so she can reckon with her past and cope with her future. She’s tragically flawed (fist pump) and drinks too much, but that’s about where the similarities to my former hero end.

It’s big and messy and visual and has a killer cast and a brilliant design team and a smart-as-hell director. But if you like your plays straightforward with cleanly drawn lines and one clear sonorous wail of a message, definitely stay home and watch Reality Bites again. Please.

Jess has a monologue in a dive bar where she discusses the kind of dude she wants to take home that night, if you’d like a taste:

THIS CHICK WALKS INTO A BAR...

JESS
I’m waiting for someone I haven’t met yet.
We don’t have an appointment.
He may not even exist.
But here are his stats:
One.
He is skinny
The kind of skinny that makes people nervous
It’s partially genetic
But mostly he just smokes a lot
And forgets to eat
I’m so jealous of that.
Two.
He wears gorgeous clothes.
Clothes I’ve only seen in photos.
The kind I could never bring myself to buy.
He spends every penny he makes on them
He’d rather be poor than have an unfit garment touch his skin
But he isn’t superficial
He just loves himself
Some people do.
Three.
He looks like my father. Who died when I was two so I can’t call upon his face with any precision but that’s probably okay ’cause now I can make my small inventions around the parts I do know such as his body type, his complexion, his hairline.
Four.
He’ll have no qualms about allowing a tipsy degenerate to take him home.
Five.
We’re gonna have some crazy epic drunk sex. Slamming against walls and tearing up bedsheets, et cetera. Someone will probably get a black eye. It’ll go on for like, ever.And eventually his particles will become mine and we’ll shrink down all microscopic. We’ll travel into the corpuscles of strangers, in and out of cells and cilia, through mucous membranes, beneath fingernails, then out into the earth, through the roots of a grass blade, through the hard shells of Amazonian insects, onto the tongues of termites, and oh then we’ll get fucking HUGE! We’ll billow upwards into the galaxy and cloak the constellations, wrap ’em up like wedding gifts. And then we’ll collapse in the pull of our own gravity and reconstitute as a white, heatless star, and wash the universe in our ghostly glow.
Yeah, man.That’s how rockin’ our sex will be. home.
Six.
This is more me than him but he’ll fall asleep right after and I’ll just stroke him and talk to his sleeping body like people do on TV.
I’ll tell him this:”I am stroking the space between your ear and your shoulder
I am stroking the space between your hip and your thigh
I am stroking the space between your spine and your navel
I am consumed with your spaces between”
And from these I’ll build out my father. Shape him from dust and aromas and smoke and breath and everything else in the invisible world.
And later on I’ll wonder if I raised my father from the dead just so I could fuck him.Which is pretty dark, right?
But
First he’s gotta walk through that door.
(VICTOR walks through the door, looking much as described.)
Posted on

No more doling.

Hi. Hi again.

So this is aaaalllll an experiment, right? Which means I’m still learning shit.

Like today! Here are two things I just learned:

1) People don’t like email excerpts.

2) People like their stories intact.

So. If you were waiting for the next and final installments of that smoking story, I posted them all at once. Just click that link and scroll down to where you left off.

And if you get these via email, I’m gonna start sending entire posts instead of just excerpts. You don’t have to click anywhere. No more of me doling out the goods. You get ’em all! The posts will be longer, some of them, but there will be fewer. One a week. Maybe less.

‘Cause like, I’m not trying to “drive traffic” to my website or whatever. I don’t need “hits.” This isn’t a marketing tool. I broke up my stories as way to post consistently without getting overwhelmed, but the larger experiment of this website is for me to try to stay sane and writing regularly while I don’t have a job.

I’m paused, as they say. This is a caesura.

I’ve never really had a pause before. When I’m on hiatus for TV I’m generally trying to catch up on theatre stuff.  But no matter how well I appear to be balancing everything, I write many more TV scripts than plays. Which wouldn’t be a problem if I’d figured out how to do it without destroying myself.

I don’t know if it ever comes across on the screen, but I give a lot to my TV scripts. More than I’ve ever been asked to give. More than I keep for myself.  I give as much as I’ve ever given to my playwriting. And it isn’t healthy for me. Not from a psychological standpoint.  Not for the amount of TV scripts I need to crank out.  Not if I wanna keep my actual feet on the actual earth.

‘Cause like, there have been times I’d turn in a first draft after pulling an all-nighter, and when the other writers told me it was good I’d burst into sobs.  Like a big goddamn baby. In front of my boss, the PA, everyone.

This was recent, friends. Like not even a year ago. On a show I’d been on for SIX SEASONS.

I know it’s exhaustion and anxiety and hormones and low blood sugar and extreme neurosis and whatever… which also is bad for my health and scares my family…  and on more than one occasion my kid has woken up at 5am, seen the light on in the living room, marched over to the couch where I write, and demanded I close my computer and go to bed.

But also, I put so much of myself into a script that when my colleagues tell me it’s good, they’re validating a fuck-ton more than just my writing.

You see how that can be problematic.

I suppose at its most injurious, the act of giving that much to something that isn’t (and never will be) mine is a form of self-annihilation. I recognize the feeling. I have it often. Of wanting to pack up parts of my psyche into little parcels and mail them off into the world one by one until there’s nothing left of me. I feel a haunting peacefulness at the thought of being emptied like that.  I no longer have to judge my good impulses from my bad ones, or the helpful thoughts from the damaging. All of it is for other people to sort through now, all wrapped in smooth butcher paper and tied with jute twine ’cause I’m a crafty bitch.

Though the scariest thing for me, kinda, is the fact that I feel most connected to my writing when I am least connected to my body. Like I’ll start working at say 7pm, and the next time I look at the clock it’s 6am, and my low back is on fire and I’m shaking from hunger and my jaw hurts from clenching my teeth. But somewhere in that pocket of time, if I’m lucky, I’ve grasped at a kind of vibrating vulnerability and truthfulness that begins to sound like the moan of humanity… like, the thing that hums beneath it all… 

But I can’t always hear it. And I don’t know how to listen for it in a “normal” way. Which blows.

So while this isn’t an actual honest-to-gosh writing break because here I am writing to you, it’s an experiment to see if I am capable of…

Routine?

Grounding?

Writing-while-normal?

Self-preservation? (Yikes.)

All of the above?

(Sure.)

Ok then. Wish me luck.