Merrily Merrily Merrily

I had a pint of strawberry ice cream and took a nap. Here is the dream that followed.

I am in a hotel in Vienna or Prague. One of the grand old cities and a city I have never been in before. I am traveling. I am well dressed, fittingly for travel in an old city, and on this particular trip I am traveling with my most valued possession: my old guitar. I am sitting in the upstairs section of this hotel's bar, not far from the staircase in what might best be described as an alcove. It is well-lit, too well-lit in fact. I attract the attention of another person at the bar.

He looks at me. He's younger than I am and looks like a combination of various people I've met before, but he's a stranger. He sees my guitar and asks if I play. I tell him I do. He asks me to play him a little something. We are functionally alone in our little alcove so I pull out my guitar with great pride and happiness, explain that I am no great shakes and proceed to play a catchy little twelve bar blues jingle. Satisfied that I have demonstrated that I do in fact play the guitar while not having overbent his ear to that end, I stop- in anticipation of some compliment.

"You're not terrible," the stranger says. He explains that twelve bar blues are always somewhat appealing no matter how poorly played. I ask if he is a musician. He says he is. I ask if he wouldn't mind playing something. He says he wouldn't.

He pulls from somewhere a violin bow and picks up his drink. He is drinking a Green Margarita with salt. He places the margarita on his shoulder beneath his chin and takes the bow to it and begins to play the margarita as though it were a violin. The music is beyond excellent. It is extraordinary, otherworldly, I am driven into a frenzy of wonder. He concludes, too soon in my opinion and I hurl the most ludicrous compliments at him.

My compliments enrage him. He finds me toadying and sycophantic. He takes his margarita and begins to lob icy swatches of it all over the alcove. He is making a spectacle of himself. Some of the margarita gets on me. Some of it gets on the gold leaf detailing of the wall, and on the marble floor. I grab a chunk of the ice and push deeper into the restroom of the alcove fearful of the outcome of this ruckus.

The hotel/bar is owned by frightening Eastern Europeans. I suspect in my heart they may be gangsters. I mop margarita from starched shirt in the bathroom and rush back out to protect my guitar when I am thrown to the ground by one of the mobster owners.

On the ground, I can see clearly that the head mobster has prosthetic legs. But rather than having prostheses that looked like the legs he once had, he has opted instead to stand on very small chicken feet, maybe four inches long. The chicken feet have been ornately carved and are deeply grooved and lacquered.

Then I woke up. I submit this to you without comment.

The strawberry ice cream was excellent. Gandhi would keep reading... Why don't you?

Bug blog

I don’t know where the terror came of bugs. The bed bug thing didn’t help. I told the story at length here once upon a time, but I whitewashed it. I rendered it episodic and hoped people would accept that. To me that story now reads like a blog about the one and only time I ever had herpes.

Once upon a time I lived in a tiny apartment in Sarasota with my girlfriend and we got termites. I pretended so hard that we didn’t have termites. That the tiny wings that collected on the window sills were coincidental. That the slow flying bugs that would cloud around the television set when it was on at night were something else, anything else. The kittens’ shadows would leap across the front of the set, snatching bugs out of the air with their paws. I remember reading the Illiad at the time and taking great pleasure in reading it aloud as I smashed bug after bug “Darkness and the strong force of fate.”

A year ago, on my birthday, Deanna was performing in Fort Myers (where she performs again. This year. On my birthday.) I flew down to see her show and then whisked her to Sarasota, to my parents condo where we would spend my birthday together in the sun and familiar surroundings. Arriving at the condo, after the ninety mile drive Deanna and I both had to use the bathroom. Luckily, the condo has two baths (one of its many perks) so there would be no waiting.

The master bath was fine. Spotless and unremarkable. I don’t recall who used the guest bath, only that there was screaming. There was, in that bathroom, a roach about two and a half to three inches long. Not even that big by Florida standards. But by New York standards we were looking at something prehistorically large- a relic from some Land of the Lost era. It had been locked in that room for a long time, it had left a mess everywhere and I mean a mess that even thinking about now sets my hairs on end. And it was jazzed up to do battle with Deanna and I.

The condominium has thick carpet everywhere except the bathrooms and the kitchen. The cockroach rattled around the bathroom for a brief moment before charging directly at Deanna and I who had not the time or wherewithal to arm ourselves with shoes. Once it had made it out of the bathroom, Deanna was going to stomp on it but then it dawned on me that a good stomping would leave remaindered bug carcass indelibly stamped into the carpet. I bade her hold!

The roach skittered and scampered into the guest bedroom. It had mass. Weight. Force. It had spent months on its own in the guest bathroom dining entirely on a bar of blue soap which upon later inspection had tiny teeth marks that even now raise the gorge in the back of my throat. It had been alone for all those months, and instead of putting its energy into breeding it simply grew. And grew. And grew.

And now it was in the guest bedroom where it had two twin beds to navigate between as well as a pair of bureaus to hide under. The light was poor in there. The carpet soft and deep. Deanna looked to me for a plan.

I had one.
“Why don’t we pretend it’s not here?”

The roach chuckled softly from beneath the bed. A clicking, clattering chuckle. It smacked its forelimbs against its carapace, determined to intimidate. Deanna declined my offer of armistice.

It was 12:30 in the morning and we were going to war. Implements were grabbed- a broom, a dust pan, a bowl. We were determined to terminate this roach with extreme prejudice but at the same time not to entomb his entrails within the berber carpet. For the next twenty minutes, the roach staged his own version of “the most dangerous game.” I’d move the bed, the roach would counter, I’d cut off an escape path, and the roach would call an audible. I’d get a clear shot at him and throw a sneaker directly at him. He would catch the sneaker and lob it back at me clucking his ganglia.

I had begun to despair as 1am rolled around. It was my birthday, I was losing a fight with a cockroach, the amorous vibe of the evening had given way to a general ill-at-ease brought about by armed conflict with a quarter pound bug, and no matter how this battle royale ended I still had six months of aggregate roach droppings to scrub. Then I got lucky. The roach made a miscalculation bringing him far enough out into the open that I could drop a bowl on him.

Once I was at a restaurant with my brother in Sarasota. A nice restaurant- he insisted that he take me some place nice- and I recommended this one. During the meal, a giant roach –possibly a relation of the one previously described- was loafing, loitering by the table leg of an unoccupied table. My brother pointed it out to the waitress who dropped a wooden bowl on top of him. It was decent solution but moments later the bowl was slowly moving across the hardwood like it was some kind of David Copperfield special.

The roach in the guest room couldn’t move the bowl across the berber, so I slid a dust pan underneath it.

“What are you going to do with him?” Deanna asked.

I felt like an emperor at the end of some gladiatorial display, this cockroach had fought bravely and now he was mine to do with as I saw fit.

And I let him go. In the direction of one my least favorite neighbors. And spent the next forty five minutes of my birthday gagging as I cleaned up his mess.
Gandhi would keep reading... Why don't you?

How I got engaged...

By request, what follows is a lengthy and detailed account of my getting engaged.

There’s a big dead fish in my refrigerator.

I checked last night. And again this morning. In spite of the many indications that I am now engaged (the ring on her finger, the phone calls to family, emails, etc.) the most strikingly real one- the image that brings it all home for me- is the yawning and indignant mouth of the dead fish in the Tupperware.

My fiancée and I have been together nearly five years. We’ve been friends for seven. We’ve been in serious negotiations about getting hitched for over a year and a half. Two months ago we began talking about rings. This sped things up.

Engagement ring selection is, by design, a drag. You and your lovely begin plans to purchase a beautiful item of arbitrary value with arbitrarily determined positive characteristics (color, cut, and clarity!). The item will be worn by one of you her whole life. The people selling you this item will use every tool at their disposal to get you to purchase a more expensive item including appealing to guilt, low self-esteem, machismo, and jedi mind control.

There is a school of thought that the wearer of this item should have no idea what it will look like before it is on her finger. I do not subscribe to that school. We are getting married after all, not throwing a surprise party. So we started by describing what our ring would be like: it would be old, because I like old stuff; and it would not be a diamond, because Deanna said that diamonds were overpriced, cliché, boring, and of compromised ethicality.

Not only did I insist that Deanna go shopping with me, I sent her ahead to a place I’d seen a website for by herself. I had rehearsal, she had some time, and it was time to get the ball rolling.

“You go,” I said.
“I need an appointment,” she said.
“So make an appointment,” I said.
“No. I don’t feel right about it if there’s an appointment” She said.

This is part of the drag of ring shopping. You have to make an appointment to shop. Appointment is only three letters from disappointment. And if you walk into a 47th Street jeweler’s 8th floor studio and don’t buy a ring, and not only don’t buy a ring but lack the pre-requisite on-hand would-be fiancée, the jeweler is likely to be disappointed. He may even look at you with frustration and derision through his jeweler’s loupe, purse his lips, and make you wonder whether you are really of marriageable stock. But in spite of the terror of the jeweler’s scorn, she relented and went to the diamond district. She said although it was weird to go into an engagement ring store without a boyfriend, she had completed her mission: the place was on the up and up and had nice rings.

A week later we came back and visited the antique ring place together. As I said, my beloved and I were interested in a non-traditional ring. We were talking about sapphires, rubies, emeralds, all kinds of things. There was no stone that we were ruling out except diamonds. Passe, boring, ethically compromised diamonds. We were not those people. For about four minutes. Until the guy took out his rings. At which point, diamonds just look an awful lot better than those other stones. They do. Unless you have some sort of pathological block against diamonds which we thought we did. But we didn’t. And then we saw the ring.

Now the thing about the ring is that you’re not supposed to have a ‘the ring’. You’re supposed to fish a wide net of rings so that you can bargain. Pokerface. This ring is nice but we could also go another way. We like this ring well but we could take it or leave it unless you are willing to come to agreeable terms. We did not do that. Deanna saw a ring she liked and fastened on to it Gollum-style. Upon seeing ‘the ring’ the rest of the rings went back into their little boxes while Deanna continued to play with the ring. I did not inquire about prices with the jeweler just strained to look at the little hieroglyphs that were scrawled on the tiny adhesive tab on the ring. I could make out nothing. The jeweler sized her finger and took our information down and we left.

The jeweler never returned a single one of my phone calls or emails. He pretended as though the ring was his and he was not going to part with it unless I fought him for it. He would shake me off the phone, promising to call me back in fifteen minutes and then two days later I would be calling again. He would promise me to call me back with a quote at specific times. I called my father and asked him if jeweler’s were just like this. Perhaps this was a tactic: part of the crazy diamond ring dance. My father assured me it was not and then asked me why I was going into some tiny den of thieves on 47th Street when the Internet was full of lovely competition and rocks without sales tax. He had a point. And if I were buying a ring for myself and not for the best girl in the world who I want to have forever and ever it would make sense to add logical, deductive reasoning to the proceedings. But that is not the case and the Internet will have to wait for when I buy myself a pinky ring.

Eventually, I realized that this jeweler was not mad at me or a misanthrope. He’d just been burned too many times that he realized it made no sense to be eager. He’d seen my girl’s face. There was no reason for him to hurry. So he just slow-played us, never giving off even the slightest waft of eagerness. And when I finally picked up my ring and my credit card declined, his eyebrows didn’t even move.

“It’s just a new card.” I said.
“Of course.” He said.

A phone call to Visa later and the ring was mine, placed in a handsome blue velvet box. Spring-loaded at the push of the button to pop open like a switchblade.

This was Friday. Her birthday was the following Tuesday. I mentioned to the jeweler that I had planned to propose on her birthday and he responded “Ah. Saves you from buying a present.” On the one hand, I suspect he was trying to add value to the ring: this ring doesn’t cost you money! It saves you money! On the other hand, he was absolutely right. I could derive some psychological satisfaction that in some warped way, this was thrifty and sentimental. But the question of how to propose dogged me.
I thought of all the guys I’d heard about who did remarkable things with proposals on the scoreboard and fireworks and barbershop quartets. People who proposed on the French Riviera or in a vineyard or on a Yacht gently circling the island of Malta. Those people all had something in common: they had a lot more money than I did. I briefly thought about calling up a barbershop quartet, the poor man’s Malta-yacht, but declined when I imagined how strange it would be to watch the oddly-shaped men of the quartet sink back into the night after they’d sung.

The day before her birthday I called her father. Our conversation was brief but happy. We talked about baseball for about three minutes and then I mentioned that I was going to propose to his daughter on her birthday. He said a few nice things, but I kept thinking that I should say something else: something pithy and important. As I listened to him, I realized I’d said everything I needed to say when I told him I wanted to marry his daughter.

Her birthday began oddly. The day before her birthday, I got my haircut. The haircut turned out kind of bad. Deanna pointed out that I looked a bit like a flapper from the 20s. So the day began with some coffee from Starbucks and Deanna taking a scissor to my hair and rescuing it from the sexual liberation of the 1920s.

Deanna and I then sped off to the Bronx Zoo where we spent five hours flopping around every exhibit. I grew up in St. Louis where the zoo is free and taken in leisurely. But in the Bronx where it’s 50 bucks to take you and your date, the zoo must be marched briskly. I paid for gorillas, dammit! I had the ring in my pocket in case there was a moment at the zoo where I just had to propose. We walked through the butterfly garden, by the Bronx river, we took lots and lots of pictures. It was a terrific day, brisk weather, a zoo with an almost 28 Days Later-style lack of people, gorillas pulling faces, sea lions doing tricks. Even the train-ride home only took forty minutes.

Once home, Deanna and I went on a nice 5 mile run before dinner. We’d stop running over the last couple of months due to arguments about speed. I run too fast. She runs too slow. Sometimes she walks. Sometimes I bark about that. We ran that night through Queens and she set the pace. The sun was setting in Astoria Park as we ran through.

We got back home and changed. I put on exactly the same clothes I’d worn to the zoo, including the blazer with the ring in it and she put on a necklace that I’d given her for valentine’s day in 2006. It was an extravagant gift at the time but I had really liked it when I saw it and once that happened I couldn’t find anyway to talk myself out of getting it for her. It was the only piece of jewelry I’d ever given her and I loved that she was wearing it.

We went to a Greek restaurant right off of Astoria Park. We had eaten at this restaurant once before and ordered so much food that we nearly died. So there were discussions about how to limit this from occurring. The waiter came over, skinny, greasy, too young, too much jewelry, too much facial hair and took our order with great nonchalance. As he recited the specials, he mentioned that there was a red snapper special, and because red snapper is one of the very few fish that I can eat without too much prodding and because my beloved is a certified fish gobbler, I ordered it without listening too much to what he said.

After the salad and half of one appetizer we were full. And then he brought a 30 inch fish, complete with head and tail and placed it in the middle of the table. Its head pointed directly at me. Its dead eyes and brown burnt teeth. Across the table, my beloved slumped in her chair from the onset of feta-borne food coma and I made as much progress as I could removing flesh from carcass and fishbones from my mouth. Three out of every four bites were good, that lemony fishless taste that I can tolerate or even enjoy, but every fourth bite was so fishified that my eyes would water. For the rest of the meal, the red snapper watched me. Deanna said she would take it home as leftovers and she has apportioned her self several small red snapper and deli mustard sandwiches. But the head remains in the fridge, eternally curious through the Tupperware.

After dinner and complimentary dessert, we walked through Astoria park and I tried to casually discuss how long we’d been together. At the bottom of the hill, between the Hellgate and Triboro bridges I said to her that I’d spoken to her father and he said it was okay and I got down on one knee and asked her to marry me. Tears. The good kind of tears. The kind you hope for, strangely, when proposing to somebody. And a yes. The ring had done its job perfectly. And then the lovely walk back whereupon she explained how she kind of suspected it might be tonight and enumerated the many different subtle ways in which I’d kind of given myself away (“You asked if my parents would be home tomorrow. When have you ever asked that?”)

The walk home was the best part. The ending of one time and the beginning of another one. The fall breeze blows cold and you wrap up in this wonderful person next to you that you’re going to be with for as long as you get. And you’re embarrassed at how irrepressibly happy you are and how implausibly lucky you’ve been up until this point. Then you call your family and you get the joy of telling people and hearing them be happy for you.

After all the phone conversations with family, she and I went to a beer garden near the house and split a half liter of cherry wheat beer (the only beer she can tolerate). We took pictures of ourselves and listened to 80s music. We played with the ring and did what we always do, laughed ourselves silly at each other.
Gandhi would keep reading... Why don't you?

Bad Dream

The night before last night I had a bad dream. It was not a terrible dream, one of the dreams which leaves you sobbing in the morning bereft of hope. More a standard bad dream full of anxiety and thrilling terror. The kind of thing that pops you out of bed for about fifteen minutes and forces you to watch TV for 15 minutes to bleach the part of the brain that had been tainted.


This dream was very straightforward and took place in my own apartment. In brief, there was a ruckus in the foyer outside my apartment door. I heard the ruckus and recognized the voice. It was the voice of a McDonald’s employee with whom I had recently had a disagreement and had swapped some pretty graphic insults (this part of the dream was known to me in the dream but I had no specific memory of what I said- only that I had said them). As I walked toward the door I saw the door was unlocked and that my would-be McAssailant could stream in through the door. I lunged for the dead bolt and through the lock just as he landed against the other side of the door with all his force. The lock held but the wood within the door clearly bulged. At which point he let forth all kinds of violence against my door and I watched knowing it would not hold. I stood and waited to be McAnnihilated.

I woke up.

I don’t like dreams. As a general rule, my dreams fall into one of three categories with some cross-over existing between catagories. First, the non-descript. I know that I have slept, suspect that I have dreamed, but in the short farty walk from bed to bathroom, the dream dematerializes entirely and falls into a file-folder in my brain entirely reserved for creepy de-ja-vu feelings. If there is a file in your mind containing all of your past dreams, would you want to see it? If you were a hot dog, would you eat yourself?

Second category: nightmares. My nightmares are, fortunately for me, exceedingly rare. And while I recognize the possibility that I have a constant stream of forgotten nightmares, when I have a bad dream they tend to be pretty substantial. I have in my mind a picture from a dream of midtown Manhattan being devastated by a nuclear blast that well rivals anything I have seen generated by Michael Bay. It was not my first post-apocalyptic dream. My nightmares set me off for a couple of days- an alertness and sensitivity to bad feelings or negative intuition. My semester of psychology leaps to the forefront of my psyche, “could you be trying to tell yourself something?” Lucky for me I lack the attention span to provide my deep-seated psychological ills the kind of attention that might result in any positive effect.

Third category: celebrity appearances. From time to time, my subconscious feels so neglected as to need to fully staff my dreams with celebrities. Conan O’Brien has guest hosted my dreams. We did some bit on his show after the first commercial but before the first guest that involved racing calamari squid down waterslides. I may have won. Conan, if you are reading, the calamari water slide bit killed. Killed. Sometimes there are minor celebrities who show up. I can recall having a bad dream about witnessing a murder. The murderer? Keanu Reaves’…roommate. That’s how the murderer was labeled in the dream. “He’s done it again!” “Can nothing be done to stop Keanu Reaves’..roommate?”

Carl Jung, one of the major forces in psychology, wrestled with dreams- made them the focus of his work. Serious Jungian psychologists will begin sessions with two questions: How did you sleep? Did you dream? I know this. I realize that there is a major literary industry in dream interpretation- that there are those out there who believe the answers to my psychological conundrums are being screened every night on the inside of my eyelids.

So if you know this, you the actively questioning reader posit, then when haven’t you started a dream journal? A dream journal, for the passively scanning dullard, is a book that you keep bedside and scrawl in without any kind of editorial process the moment you wake up.

And the truth is that I have kept a dream journal.

For one day.

One day in 2004, I tried to penetrate my fog of dyshappymalcontentedness by dream journaling. I don’t know where this idea came from but if I had to guess, I’d point the furry finger of blame at NPR. My dream journaling lasted a single day. A single dream. Is it possible that my subconscious, knowing that it was likely to be logged for the first time decided to roll over and show its most gleaming strangeness just for the joy of being posteritized?

I hope so.

The dream involved me being involved in a celebrity love triangle. I was the primary object of affection being vied for in a way that both flattered me and made me fearful of the anguished intensity of the rivals for my charms. Who were the two celebrities you ask? Leonardo DiCaprio and Johnny Depp.


Gandhi would keep reading... Why don't you?

My Father and the Moles

About a year ago, my mother and father decided to celebrate my father’s retirement from the hospital by going on a five-week road trip to Nova Scotia. They loaded up their newly-acquired Prius and trekked thousands of miles up into the Canadian Northeast stopping at all points of interest along the way. It was, as my mother described it, the college road trip they’d always wanted to take but never got to. The photos were fantastic, they even stopped by my apartment in Queens on the way back and took me out to dinner. It was a lovely trip with one tiny specter looming in the background.

The Dow Jones at the beginning of their trip was around 13,500. And by the end of their trip was right around 8,000. My father’s retirement was heavily invested in the market. And to his credit he managed to go through with the trip despite what must have been heavy inclinations to break it off and busy himself with financial damage control. He did the trip and judging by the photos and the stories he did it right.

A few months later my dad had unretired. Money stuff. He took a job working reviewing hospitals all over the country. The pay isn’t like his previous job, but he travels two weeks a month to hospitals that have to treat him like a foreign dignitary. He gets sucked up to. Each hospital is different. He’d been an administrator as well as a doctor for 28 odd years so the work interests him. The work pleases him mightily and when Mom wants to go with him she can on the company’s dime. It is a lovely job with one tiny specter looming in the background.

My father is a cold blooded killer. And the job is cutting into his killing time.

Two years ago when moles invaded the yard my mother hired someone. A guy. The neighborhood mole guy. When you get truly suburban, as my parents have, there is a guy for everything. The neighborhood basement remodeling guy, the neighborhood lawn and landscaping guy, and now the neighborhood mole guy. The neighborhood mole guy charged like seven hundred bucks to set mole traps and then an additional 40 bucks for every mole he caught.

I don’t know if you are familiar with moles and the damage they do but my father has a “Hank Hill esque” relationship with his lawn and the brown veins of broken earth that began to show up on every corner of his lawn were slowly destroying him. My mother hired the mole guy. He caught seventeen moles. They paid over a thousand dollars to make their mole problem go away.

Only it didn’t actually go away. It just subsided into the fall when the moles, fat from the destruction they’ve reaped upon the lawn, descend into hibernation.

My father’s Italian heart pumps the blood of vengeance.

In 1992 my father installed central air conditioning in our three story brick house. The house, created in 1906, was not easily wired for the cold stuff and the expense was exorbitant. Unfortunately the tall oak trees situated by the eaves of the roof provided access to many squirrels who saw the piping and tubing for the central air as excellent construction materials for their nests. Thousands of dollars worth of central air conditioning work had been undone and destroyed.

As far as my father was concerned, it was on. His first solution was a firearm. He wanted to buy a sniper mat and a high powered rifle and lay on the roof of the breakfast room and shoot squirrels until he didn’t see squirrels anymore. My mother overruled him. So he got into his car and came back with iron traps. These traps were baited with something irresistible to squirrels (central air conditioning tubing?) and trapped the squirrels alive. In the ivy that surrounded the oaks by the house a large plastic rubbish barrel was filled with water. The squirrels’ high pitch yells as they sank to the bottom of the barrel lives with me still. Dozens of squirrels perished. My father, upset by the sheer waste of it all, skinned and ate one of the victims to see if perhaps the squirrels’ carcasses could be salvaged as edible meat. The image of the naked pink squirrel marinating in pyrex in the fridge lives with me still.

For three decades my father has waged a personal war against death. He’s worked in Intensive Care where people die as a matter of course. The war has casualties. He lost sometimes and at considerable personal cost, but more often than not he won and people got better. But I think that the way he prosecuted the squirrels, the ruthless efficiency showed another side of that battle. He’d fought death long enough to be friendly with it. There was no squeamishness, no chink in the armor where in which mercy might nest.

The squirrel population took a major hit that summer and when the dog would chase squirrels after that you could watch them scurry towards the oaks by the house and actually change their routes to avoid them. There death lies.

This summer my father has killed 42 moles. I know because he sends me spreadsheets. He sends me graphs comparing his mole killing to Albert Pujols homerun production (Pujols has at the time of this blog 47 homeruns). My father is a scientist first and foremost. He uses deductive reasoning to determine mole-behavior and then sets his traps based on that behavior. He has plotted out temperatures and humidity on spreadsheets, he has kept a record of the weight in grams of his victims, he has attempted to ascertain morphological diagrams of mole genitalia so he could better understand the gender of his victims. He has not, to my knowledge, performed autopsies but that seems like only a matter of time.

Baseball season is winding down and my father has several road trips still to make. My mother tolerates my father’s molegroms but does not participate. She sends apologetic emails to family members after my fathers’ lengthy and detailed updates which almost always arrive in spreadsheet form. But as a result when my dad is on the road, Pujols tends to pull ahead.

Fall is coming soon. The moles will retreat underground. My father is pushing hard to the end. He’s moved off of his own property, received permission from neighbors to widen the war into Laos and Cambodia. He’s curious about how much effect he can have on the mole population- there must be hundreds, if he kills fifty will it have an impact on their numbers next year?

The lawn looks great. An unimpeded swath of green and if you look closely at some of the outskirts and hinterlands you can see the spike traps strategically placed. The moles are losing badly and my father, far from being complacent, sees a mole-free subdivision as a possibility. Maybe when he re-retires.
Gandhi would keep reading... Why don't you?

Purging the buffer

An Unfocused Series of Updates.

First.
A man stands in front of a car stopped at a red light on a largely deserted 21st Street in Long Island City, Queens. Tiannemen style, he bows at the front of the car with a fist to his palm. Judo style.

I only notice this because I’m walking home from rehearsal hoping for a meal of opportunity at one of the bodegas.

Suddenly, after bowing the man does three back handsprings culminating in a backflip. In the middle of the street. The car is still stopped at the red light. The man judo bows. Walks up to the side of the car and bows. The driver of the car rolls down the window enough to give the man a dollar. The man accepts the dollar bill. Judo bows. Sprints to the other side of the street where he hands the dollar to another man who I hadn’t noticed standing there before.

Green light. The car takes off. The man waits in the middle of the street. Red light. There’s only one car at the intersection, this time on the other side of the street.

Same routine. The man bows and then turns three handsprings, a back flip, a bow. And walks to the side of the window. No dollar. He bows. Does two handsprings and another flip right by the guy’s window. No dollar. Light is still red but not for too much longer. The guy stands in front of the car, bows, and does four back handsprings into a backflip landing in the splits right there on the concrete in the middle of 21st Street in Queens. Bows. Window comes down. Driver flips the guy a dollar. Guy bows and trots over to the man on the side of the street.

The guy btw, the flipping guy looked to be about 45 years old when I walked past him.

Second.
I’ve started taking improv classes (spellcheck suggests “improve”-suck it spellcheck) at Upright Citizen’s Brigade. I’ve only taken one class but I like it very much. I’ve taught improve to high school students and middle schoolers and adults but have neither skills nor knowledge which simply led me to feelings of shame and fraudulence. Some deep karmic hole feels like it’s being filled by taking these classes. Observations: I have no pride in my skills at improv and as such I don’t feel as at risk as I expected. The fundamental psychological state encouraged by the class, wherein all contributions are valid and helpful is really a place my mind doesn’t go right away. Discernment is a bitch to get over. I’ll keep you updated.

Third
Tonight I close Love’s Labour’s Lost, an extremely short and silly sixties-flavored cutting of Shakespeare’s (fairly forgettable) comedy. I play a clown in this one and sport an afro and very short jean shorts. I don’t have too much to do but what I have to do is pretty straightforwardly comedic and I feel more confident in doing that than I can remember. I’ve nixed a lot of my comic tension and effort. Clowning in Shakespeare is always fun because you can submarine other people’s intentions and status and attempts to be self-important. You can speak truth and be funny that way. As well as all of the other craven and deplorable ways that a man can try to be funny (like big hair and small shorts).

I get to play guitar and mandolin and sing in this show. And I haven’t made a hash of it like I have in other cabarets and benefits and performance opportunities where my mind wanders or I get seized with rockstar ambition. I’ve just enjoyed singing bad harmonies and playing simple guitar lines. I need to find a way to do more of that.

Fourth
I enjoyed Inglourious Basterds a great deal. And I’m, for some reason, quite defensive about this.

Fifth
It’s been six months since I was laid off. Quality of life not working at that that job has improved by several orders of magnitude.

Sixth
I stopped blogging for the last month. It kind of snuck up on me. I blame a couple of factors. First, the notion that people got really hacked off at me a couple months ago for something I wrote has been I think subconsciously prohibitive. I’ve been over thinking things. Secondly, I got really topical in my planning to blog. I even mentioned a couple of topics out loud.

Namely: Was Quentin Tarantino a proto-hipster? And If LSD is such a dangerous drug with such long lasting consequences why are there no support groups for the millions of people who have tried it?

I may still write that last one. But seriously, my blogging tends to suffer greatly from pre-planning.

Also, since my last blog the St. Louis Cardinals have won almost 70% of their games. And I’m an extraordinarily superstitious person about things like that. So I might have been trying to do my part to keep the streak. That said, I promise to do better in the near future. Particularly that I am once more out of shows or rehearsals and have an endless hash of time on my hands.
Gandhi would keep reading... Why don't you?

On Coming Out of Retirement

In April a series of coincidences occurred that resulted in my being on stage last month for the first time in two years .

In September of 2007, I took a step back from acting.

I put together a play in the New York Fringe Festival and the amount of psychological force involved in having my work produced and acting in that production produced enough strain to result in massive disruptions in my personal life. I nearly lost the woman I love. I ended up parting ways permanently with a number of good people who had put a huge amount of their own work into the show. The show itself I was proud of but the human cost to put it up seemed unnaturally large and made me question whether any artistic endeavor that I was talented enough to put forward was worth what it cost me in real life ya-yas.

The experience forced me to start to examine my entire ‘career’ through that lense: cost/benefit analysis. What have I gotten versus what have I missed out on, etc. The costs became immediately apparent and overwhelming, while the benefits- transitory as they are- seemed nebulous and incalculable. I remembered the artistic and interpersonal battles, the crushing disappointments, the constant loneliness and insecurity, the weddings, baptisms, and funerals I had missed so that I could wear lousy costumes and do lousy shows. Missing an uncle’s funeral to do a bad Shakespeare play for 30 people really skews a cost/benefit analysis.

So I stepped back. I rebranded myself as a writer because at least my failures as a writer were easier to deal with. You fail by yourself as a writer. In a room. Alone. You know you suck but at least you can take comfort from the fact that nobody can see you sucking.

And then in April I was cast. In a play that had been nominated for a Pulitzer to be directed by theplaywright. I was to play a piano prodigy. I’d have to sing Schumann in German. I’d have to cry in a spotlight at the end of the play. The play had only two people and I was to be in every scene.

I wasn’t looking to be an actor again but I did really want to be in this play. It was leaps and bounds better than anything I had ever written- structured with ruthless economy and layered with misdirection that Houdini would have admired. The playwright, whom I met at the audition, was a smallish kind of man who it turned out would always wear cargo shorts, a t-shirt, sweatshirt, and sneakers. He struck me from the moment I met him as a guy who did nothing but write plays, a kind of savant. My first impression of the man was a desire to be friends with him. Not sycophantically but genuinely. Such was the dude’s aura.

For the months of May and June, I worked on my singing. I studied with my friend Daisy who convinced me that I would be fine. I’m a handwringer, and sometimes I can convince myself that I’m working when in fact all I’m actually doing is worrying for an hour. She got me to work instead of worry. She would sing, and then I would sing, and then her dog would bark and bark. We were the three most irritating people/dogs on the Upper West Side.

I read and reread the play. I sang by myself in a park by the East River. I went for long walks with the script. I guilted my girlfriend into telling me things would be okay. And then I left for Sarasota, Florida. To the condo that I used to live in that my parents still own. The dirty secret on my being cast: I didn’t need housing or a car and was therefore a big money saver for the theater company. A shot to the confidence to know you are a cost-cutting maneuver.

When I arrived I met Ken. The other actor. Ken was playing an older Viennese singing teacher. Ken is in his sixties and has a PhD from Harvard in German Lit that he’s never used. Ken had been on over a hundred television shows. I watched his work on Barney Miller on youtube and it was genuinely funny and real and good. Ken had done the play twice before including once in Vienna.

Have you ever been rescued before? It’s an extraordinary feeling. You have doubts and fears and the nagging feeling you’re about to make a complete ass of yourself and then you meet Ken. And suddenly a light goes on inside your mind and a single sentence flashes: “Oh! Everything’s going to be fine!” Such was my experience.

Even more so, the playwright was such a joy in the rehearsal hall I could scarcely believe my luck. Ken never wanted to hear what my direction was so every fifteen minutes or so the playwright would put his arm around one of us, walk us off in a direction for a few minutes and whisper in our ear. And then we’d go back to work. It was the friendliest form of direction I’d ever received- the director who was not your judge but your advocate, like a boxer’s corner man.

I worked hard. Harder than I’d worked before. I had no car so I had nothing to distract me. I had a play to do and a girlfriend to call in the evenings. For three weeks I got to work like this.

There was no personal baggage. I didn’t know either of these men. They were professionals the likes of which I had never worked with. The underlying attitude when they walked in the rehearsal hall seemed to be “Of course this is going to be great.” Success was a foregone conclusion, the rehearsal time was simply the pursuit of optimizing success. There were fights in the rehearsal hall between Ken and the director (never between me and anybody, a first for me in the rehearsal hall- I was too happy to be there to fight with anybody). The crazy thing was they’d fight like dogs, snarling and snapping and teeth bared but just like dogs five minutes later the things would be forgotten. No apologies. Only a tacit respect for the other’s strength of feeling and right to respond. It was so goddamned healthy.

There were technical problems. There are always technical problems. The play fell off the rails in previews, when a technical glitch stopped the second scene and the playwright literally left his seat in the house and jumped on to the stage to explain what happened to the audience and give the tech guys a chance to reboot. The night after we opened he had a sitdown with the two actors and the entire tech staff and hosted a roundtable discussion on how to make things better. No recrimination, a grimace at past mistakes, and a smile towards how they to make sure they never happened again. Of course this was going to be great.

I was too tense at the opening performance. Overplayed every moment in the first act. One of the critics savaged me for it. He was right. I had no complaints, he talked about great Ken was and how great the play was and how great the company was. If I had to take one in the shorts for the team, it didn’t bother me. I was kind of shocked by that. Typically bad reviews lived with me for months. Instead, I just did the show.

The show got better every day. So much better. Leaps and bounds better. Every night, as the lights would come up, I’d have the same thought. How much happier I was to be on this stage in this show than anywhere else on earth.
Gandhi would keep reading... Why don't you?