re-history

"We can no longer afford to take that which was good in the past and simply call it our heritage, to discard the bd and simply think of it as a dead load which by itself time will bury in oblivion. The subterranean stream of Wester history has finally come to the surface and usurpped the dignity of our tradition. This is the reality in which we live. And this is why all efforts to escape from the grimmness of the present into nostalgia for a still intact past, or into the anticipated oblivion of a better future, are vain."

- Hanna Arendt "The Origins of Totalitarianism"

Exhortation

Fuck! Did you come into work this morning and say, "Man, I bet nobody called up Rich today to tell him he's an asshole."

talking to the mentor

"How'd it go?"

"Oh. It was good, but it's hard to hear sometimes because he mumbles."

"Ah. Too cool for diction?"

sentence structure

That's the thing about the beginning of a sentence. Each letter exercises that much more tyranny upon the next. If i get good and stuck on an ending, it can be very helpful to just chop off the head.

Plane crash

Imagine you are on an airplane and you hit a wind shear. The plane drops 500, 1,000, 3,000, 10,000 feet and still diving. At that moment, in my opinion, you have two choices: you can either start screaming your head off, release your bodily functions and stab your neighbor, meeting your destiny with a blank mind and soiled pants; or you can sit back and try to connect with that carnival feeling in you belly and just let it build a smile on your face.

In the end, at least you can say you enjoyed the ride. And who knows, the pilot might just pull it out, in which case, you won't have to finish the flight overwhelmed by your own stink.

Anyway, that's what I think of when someone asks me how I can take it America these days.

braindrop fiction

I recently reread my first play. My only play. The act of the only play I ever wrote. Are you a writer? If you are then you understand what it's like to go back and read something that you wrote back when you didn't know a thing. Not that you know anything now, but at least you know that much.

Anyway. You read something that you wrote an eon ago and most of the time it's pure masturbation. The main guy? It's you. It's always you. but wealthy if you're a sucker. or poor if you got too much. or in a dress if you're trying to do the opposite of you, somehow. Maybe it's you getting you a better gig or a bigger stage--either way, it's you playing with yourself.

Well i recently read the first act of my only play and i had to laugh. It's at a wrap party way off broadway where a merry troupe of players just ended a run of A Midsummer's Night's Dream. See? Shakespearean masturbation. The whole thing centers around the Don Juan who plays Puck and spends the first act shirtless in outrageous woolly pants. The nuns told me i'd eventually go blind you know. By the unwritten end, Heartbreaker gets his own heart broken yet love sits on the horizon. aaand, denouement.

When I finished, I actually heard a voice in my head say, "Why yes, Mr. Lucas. Of course you can make a movie of my life, and I'd be honored if you think Han Solo would be a good fit."

Sitting here. I find myself torn between dying of wizened embarrassment and starting the next act.