A Place for No Stuff

A friend of mine was telling me recently about going through his personal items and deciding who he’d like to leave them to.  He’s not ill, but, like myself, he’s middle-aged, and at some point you start thinking about creating a last will and testament.  “Who’s going to want all of my show posters?” he asked me?  Well, who indeed?

Coincidentally, I’ve been purging my apartment, and the answer to the question we all ask ourselves, “Who’s going to want my…fill-in-the-blank?” is – probably no one wants that stuff.  If you’ve recently moved to a new place and had to purge before packing, you know what I’m talking about.  That stuff is going to end up at the dump.  That stuff is probably going to cost you (if you’re thoughtful), or your loved ones (if you’re not, or have a sudden demise) a bunch of money paid to 1-800-got-stupid-shit-and-I-have-no-idea-why-I-kept-it to go and haul it out of your place.  There have been articles on facebook, of course, about people having to deal with their deceased parents’ stuff, houses and houses full, picking through thousands upon thousands of items to see what’s valuable and what isn’t and finally deciding well, hell, nobody wants any of this.

To be honest, I have a very ambivalent relationship to things that I own.  Maybe it’s because we were pretty poor when I was growing up, and most of our stuff was the cheapest stuff we could put our hands on.  My mother used to take us to this joint called “Mickey Finns” in Perth Amboy every September so that we could buy school clothes that fit us.  They specialized in “irregular” clothing, which meant clothes that had holes that could be sewn up, or parts that had been sewn on backward, or sleeves that were a different color than the rest of the dress or jacket – fortunately, it was the 60’s, so that didn’t present as much of a problem as you might think.  The clothes weren’t on racks or anything fancy like that – they were just tossed into enormous cardboard boxes, vaguely arranged by category, and you’d have to go diving down into the boxes to see what the hell had been thrown in there.  The guys at Mickey Finns would put stickers over the irregularities so that you could identify what they were and make a decision as to whether the flaw was going to cost more in time and effort than you’d be saving in cash.  My Mom was also not the greatest seamstress in the world, so more elaborate flaws were passed over for pieces that “only” had rips and tears.  The air was thick with thread dust, and we’d always come out of there rubbing our eyes and feeling like we’d found treasures; at least what we were taking home was new and not hand-me-down from my mother’s friends.

Most everything else we owned was disposable as well, including the electronics, the cars, and one or two of the appliances.  The highest quality items we ever had at any given time were probably the refrigerator and the home heating unit, because, after all, without them you’d literally die.  So I learned not to get too attached to stuff, but I also very unfortunately learned that having an extensive crap collection was perfectly okay.  Some people are very sentimental about the things they own, and so if any of those kinds of people are reading this they’re likely to be offended by my talking about the things I end up, and will always end up, throwing away.  I don’t have a large house where I can lovingly display trinkets and knickknacks.  I don’t have very much room at all in my one-bedroom New York Apartment.  So here is my confession regarding stuff that I end up accumulating, then tossing out or giving away when it gathers enough dust.

First on the list, photos.  Not all photos – but I don’t keep the ones you would think I would keep.  Photos that I took of scenic naturalness while traveling some cool place?  Those I keep.  Pictures of my nephews and nieces, and now my grand-nephews and my grand-nieces?  Hate me if you want, but I don’t keep those.  I love them all – the kids, not the pictures – but honestly there are a lot of them, and when you add in pictures from cousins and grand-cousins and others that come to my home every Christmas, then you get an idea of how many photos like this I’ve been given after over three decades in my apartment.  Old photos, birthday cards, Christmas cards, all of it goes.  I also don’t have a lot of selfies, and I don’t take them, because I’m a mild depressive, and looking at pictures of my 30- or even 40- year-old self makes me really sad.  I envy people who can revel in how happy they were in their own past photos.  I don’t have any such revels recorded.  I’ve had kind of a hard life, emotionally, and looking into the past usually just makes me glad that it’s over.  I recently ran across a photo taken in 2005, the year before my Dad died, of him on one of my sister’s sofas, and me on the adjacent sofa.  I was happy to have found a picture of my Dad, and considered, for a hot second, cutting myself out of the photo because I looked ugly and fat.  I didn’t do it.  I also saved the picture, but mostly because it’s something I know my sister would want, should anything happen to me.  Pictures of my cousins weimaraners, however, are enjoyed for a moment and then ditched.  Sorry guys.

I also give away books.  I didn’t used to – I used to save books when I was younger, figuring that someday I’d have more space.  Perhaps I’d even have a room that could just be an office or even a library.  The likelihood of that seems smaller and smaller.  But I’m an avid reader, and rather than hoard books anymore, I just take nearly 100% of them down to the lobby of my building when I’m done with them and let someone else read them.  The ones I keep are reference books – the complete works of Shakespeare, my 12-volume Pritzker Zohar, the Encyclopedia of the Golden Dawn, those I keep.  The Betty White biography or the Fran Leibowitz essays I pass along for someone else to enjoy.  

Records, CDs and Tapes – this is hard.  I love music, but now that most of my music is digital, the CDs go because I’ve copied them years ago.  The cassette tapes went, too, because I have nothing to play them on.  But the vinyl – Jesus Christ, what do I do with the vinyl?  There are albums in there that we’ll never see the like of again.  Nobody is going to digitize this stuff, yet I love it.  I don’t even have a turntable anymore, but this vinyl – do I just keep it because I have bookshelves in which it fits perfectly?  No, I keep it because I intend someday to get another turntable and listen to it.  I should probably sell some of it, but it’s in bad condition – it’s been well used, this vinyl.

Pictures, furniture, dishes, shoes, clothes – all of it can go with very few exceptions.  I was never a shoe collection girl, and now that I’m older I can only really wear sneakers, so all of the not-sneakers go out.  Ditto clothes – never been very girly, and I only have two types of outfit that I keep – jeans and t-shirts, as long as the jeans fit, and work clothes, as long as I’m working a job that won’t let me wear jeans and t-shirts.  “Oh, but what happens when you have an ‘occasion’”, you ask?  If I can’t adapt some of the corporate clothes to serve the purpose, then I go out and buy something for that occasion.  

I had a friend who had had the experience of losing all of her stuff in a house fire.  She was, of course, traumatized by that experience, and talked about it decades later as a milestone in her life.  It was hard for me to relate to, though, as virtually nothing I own is of any value whatsoever.  I would be annoyed as hell if I lost my laptop, but then again, all of my plays and screenplays are available in backed up copies and other forms.  My ID documents are in a fireproof box.  About 15 years ago my apartment was broken into and the thieves basically took nothing except a CD collection (see above for reference to what I now do with CDs) because my laptop was on me at the time of the robbery, and I don’t keep cash in the house and don’t own any jewelry.  Again, not girly.  The one thing I couldn’t replace all that easily, aside from an extremely small collection of photos, is a vintage Martin guitar, three-quarter size, that is only worth something to me because my friend Rich restored it for me – the “collector” value was taken away, but the restoration enabled me to play it, and that was more important to me.  I’m not, as I’ve been saying, a collector of valuable things. 

I’ve never owned a house, a car, or anything I could subsequently hock.  Would I LIKE to?  Not particularly.  Does this mean I’m living some kind of Buddhist ideal, where material things don’t matter?  No way – touch my money and I’ll freak out.  I’m good with money, and I have investments.  I feel secure when I have money and insecure when I don’t.  But even when I was making much better money than I’m making now, I didn’t go out and buy stuff – jewelry, paintings, higher-end furniture – because empty space makes me happier than stuff ever does. 

There was a travel writer called Dervla Murphy whose books I loved.  Dervla would take a pan for collecting water, a box of matches for starting fires, and whatever cash she thought she needed, and she’d hop on her bike and go and see something of the world.  I have a fantasy that I could carry my life in a backpack and go anywhere I wanted to.  It remains in the realm of fantasy, though, that I could do such a thing, because I actually don’t have a lot of experience camping, and I hate the idea of falling asleep somewhere where there are bugs and snakes.   
    

I wonder if I’d feel differently about stuff if I just had better stuff.  Steve Martin has millions of dollars’ worth of paintings in his home.  Does he sit around and look at them all day?  Yoko Ono lives in a fabulous apartment in the Dakota here in New York, surrounded by stuff she and John Lennon accumulated together and separately.  Does she give any of that stuff a second thought living her life day to day?  Who knows?  

The things that are most precious to me are things you can’t own anyway.  Someday I would like to have a dog, and I guess in some sense you do “own” a dog, but then again, the dog has no concept that you are an “owner”, and just thinks of you as his human.  Your dog, your cat, your turtle, they’re not stuff.  And your friends are definitely not your stuff – thinking of them as your stuff is dangerous, impractical, and wildly inaccurate.  And as for your significant other, should you be lucky enough to have one, ownership does not come into it in any way.  You may think it does, but, trust me, I’m old, I know things, it doesn’t.  

Perhaps if I owned a boat, and I lived on this boat, and then the boat sank and I lost my boat, then I would be sad.  I’m sure I would be sad.  I will probably never own and live on a boat.  And I’d offer up Winnebago as another possibility, but I don’t drive, so that’s even less likely. 

Until then, I’m giving away, throwing out, or otherwise arranging to remove most of my stuff, and this will constitute a good portion of my last will and testament (which I hope won’t be executed for a good long while).  Nobody wants the notes from an improv class I took 30 years ago.  Nobody wants an afghan that I crocheted to cover a couch that I got rid of two couches ago.  Nobody wants the junk in my apartment, including me, so I’m not leaving it to anyone.  If someday I should win the lottery and, subsequently, buy a boat, or a house, or one of Steve Martin’s paintings, then I suppose I will have to revise this plan.  Until then, my will, should I stop procrastinating and finish one, will be all about who gets my 401K, and not at all about who gets my show posters.

And the Word for Today is, Believe it or Not: Honorable

There are a lot of people weighing in on the dismissals or resignations of famous men who have perpetrated, or have been very credibly accused of having perpetrated, inappropriately sexualized behavior toward women.  Some have groped, restrained, forcibly kissed, and some have exposed themselves, involved women in their sexual release against the will of those women, and some have raped.  Some have even raped children.  There are so many discussions going on about the behavior of these men that it’s absolutely maddening to listen, to think about what these men have done, to ponder the state of the world in the context of this horrid, reprehensible behavior. 

What I don’t hear people talking about is whether some, or any, of these men are honorable men.  That sounds very old-fashioned, now, doesn’t it?  I’m going to ask the question here, and I’m asking it for a few reasons, not least of which is that I’d like to know what happened to honorability. Did Al Franken need to resign today?  Yes, I think he did.  Is he dishonorable in general and, therefore, irredeemable, or did he simply do dishonorable things?  I don't know.  Should Roy Moore, on the other hand, be horsewhipped?  Yes.  He should.  At the very least he should go to jail and, as his opponent says, not the Senate.

My father told me a story once about my mother’s ex-husband.  My mother had married this ex when she was 17, pressured into it by my grandmother and by the fact that the man would soon be going to war.  She later divorced her first husband because he cheated on her – in her own bed, while she was supposed to be at work.  My father told me that everyone in the neighborhood knew that my mother’s ex was a “skirt chaser”, and that men like that don’t usually have a lot of friends.  “You can’t trust a guy like that.”, my Dad said.  “You can’t have him around your women.”

Now, please understand that my father was born in 1932, and “your women” was a phrase that came naturally to him, along with a lot of other phrases I wouldn’t use.  But his point was, if a man is not honorable, then he can be counted on to do dishonorable things.  My father was an ex-cop, and though I know he wasn’t perfect, I also know that he taught me that a person needs to have their integrity, their standards, their dignity and their honor, or they were not a person worthy of collaborating with on any aspect of the social contract.  We try to be a civilized society.  Sometimes, rather spectacularly, we fail.  But we try, and we must try, and at the heart of our efforts is a personal set of rules.  We follow these rules not because we will get “caught” if we break them, but because there is a moral imperative that we have internalized.  

In the decades in which America was founded, for a man to call another man dishonorable in public was an egregious shame to the accused.  Of course there were men who owned slaves – dishonorable in the extreme.  We are no strangers to hypocrisy in America.  In 1991, the country watched a very credible accusation of sexual impropriety develop into a monumental hypocrisy when Anita Hill was, ultimately, not believed and Clarence Thomas was appointed to the Supreme Court, where he sits to this day.  He is literally called “Your Honor” every day of his working life.

Is a sense of personal honor passé, and, if it is, why am I writing about it now?  I’m writing about honor because it’s something I can, and do, believe in, even when I can’t necessarily believe in the judicial process, or my own government, or even that karma will out.  I’m writing about honor here because I can, and I must, choose, every day, to surround myself with honorable people, or my own, individual life is doomed to chaos and misery.

I will try, first of all, not to enter into a mutually exploitive relationship with a dishonorable employer.  This can be complicated if one finds oneself employed by a large corporation that pollutes or exploits the poor and, yet, one really desperately needs the job.  I can say, though, that working for companies that are based on dishonorable endeavors eventually weighs on an honorable person’s conscience, and the relationship must end.  I can say that first hand. 

I will not use my democratically endowed vote to support dishonorable men or women.  The job of a politician is to allocate resources, and to do so without abusing their power or betraying the trust of their constituents that they will allocate those resources fairly and honestly.  Feel free to laugh at the use of the word “honestly”, yes, I know, we all equate the word “dishonest” with the word “politician” far too often.  But there are politicians that take their jobs as resource-allocators seriously.  They do not advocate using our tax dollars to fly their friends around to golf weekends.  They do not create legislation designed to steal meager resources from citizens living below the poverty line and distribute the ill-gotten gains to people who already have so much money that they don’t even know how much money they have.  And they do not parse citizens living in a democracy into different groups, based on religion, sex, sexual preference, region, means, skin color, health, height, weight, or any other ridiculous “difference” and bestow resources unequally based on their own irrational judgments about those differences.

I will not call dishonorable persons my friends.  I may be related to them by blood.  I may work with them.  I may run into them at the grocery store because they are my neighbors.  But they are not my friends, and I will not attempt to rely on them, though there are circumstances in which they can, and will, rely on me because I try to be an  honorable person.  My responsibility toward them is clear – I will be kind because I must be.  I will call them out when their behavior is inappropriate.  I will not tolerate them exploiting others in my presence.  But dishonorable people do not have a place in my emotional life, and if I behave badly myself I will expect not to be welcome in other’s lives.

Were I in the military, I would hope I would not follow a dishonorable person into battle, or fight in a dishonorable war, but I know that there were men and women of honor who fought in Iraq and acquitted themselves bravely and well, even though the reason for them being there was political, and financial, rather than moral.

Were I a parent, I would hope I would raise my children to exhibit empathy, kindness, discernment, and strength so that they would grow up to be honorable adults.  They would have what my father would call “manners” – we have manners because we don’t choose to make others uncomfortable.  But my children would also be taught that no human being should be objectified.  I would make it clear to them, as often as necessary, that other people are not things for you to use or not use.  I would teach them this whether they were boys or girls, and if they dishonored themselves I would take that as a stain on my own personal sense of integrity – it would, most certainly, show that I had failed in my responsibility to raise them correctly.

It seems now, to so many of my friends, that America has revealed itself in these past 12 months as a haven for the despicably dishonorable, reveling in the exploitive and dangerously destructive behaviors of monstrous perverts, tyrants, oligarchs, the desperately stupid, the venal and the vicious, and, in the case of Donald Trump, the demented.  I also still harbor the belief, slender though it may be, that the constitutional democracy that we have built can also be a secure and prosperous home for the honorable, the good and kind, the fair and the pragmatic.  There is hard work ahead of us, for those of us who have a vision of restoring this country to some semblance of sanity and compassion.  We are, many of us, very tired.  And we don’t really know what in the hell to do about fixing these horrific, hellacious lapses in the moral fiber of the people who seem, now, to be running things.

Begin by aligning yourself with those who combine their wisdom and cleverness with a sense of integrity.  If you know them, give them a place of honor in your lives.  Work to help them work.  Use your vote, your time, your energy, your experience, and your own personal resources, no matter how small they might be, to further the goals of a generous and tolerant social group.  And understand that supporting the dishonorable person in their dishonorable cause dishonors you, and may do so irreparably.

Even Atheists Need a Sabbath

I knew a guy in college called Kenny.  Kenny had been raised in the Jewish faith, and his parents were very strict about observing the Jewish Sabbath by not conducting anything that looked like work; not operating machinery like elevators or cars.  A friend of Ken’s told me that he went to visit on a Saturday once and Ken answered the door with a pair of day-glo orange underpants on his head, bobbypinned to his hair, because he couldn’t find his yarmulke.  Ken then reminded our friend, a secular Jew, that Ken couldn’t operate the record player on Saturdays (oh, those vinyl days), but that our friend was quite welcome to toss the Van Morrison on there and give it a spin.  Ken was, of course, allowed to listen to music, but not operate the device that was needed to play it.  Ditto the radio and the tv.   Hearing the story, I agreed with our friend that perhaps Ken's reverence was executed in a kind of haphazard, college-kid kind of way, but all these years later I agree with Ken that a Sabbath is something important, and having a relationship with it, whatever that means to you, is essential.  And Sabbath has to be constructed in a very specific way in order to do what it’s meant to do – restore the inner serenity that we need to function the other six days of the week.

A lot of folks do practice a particular religion or other, or in the case of Unitarians kind of practice all of them, but they still don’t seem to treat their own Sabbath as a day of rest and revivification.  Plenty of Moms make it to Sunday with a list of obligations that rivals a full-blown Monday.  My Mom used to cook for a dozen people every Sunday, starting her work at 7 a.m., and I still remember waking up to the delicious garlicky smell of meatballs frying.  Breakfast was usually one of those little meaty beauties on the end of a fork.  She never failed to ask us if it was “a good one?” and it always was.  So everyone seemed to get a Sabbath Sunday at the old Woodbridge house except Mom, who was busting her ass and occasionally doing a bit of strategic yelling to get us to do something, or stop doing something else.  At some stage Mom got religion, and Sundays began to include us being dragged to mass at 10:30, but I put a stop to that by locking myself in the bathroom a couple three times.  She finally got the message, and we arrived at a place where she could finally have a real Sabbath for herself without robbing me, and my agnostic ass, of mine. 

What should a Sabbath include, then, and what should it not, and why?  First let’s revisit the purpose of having one day out of seven, whether it’s Saturday, Sunday, or perhaps a golf Wednesday if you’re so inclined.  You need a Sabbath to clear your head.  You need a day without any agenda so that you can stroll out into the world and do just exactly what you want to, and not do what you don’t.  You need to see friends if you’re gregarious, or perhaps you need to hang by yourself just to quiet the soul and regenerate.  And you need to do this because if you want to be effective during the other six days of the week, not allowing yourself to rest on a seventh will impede that.  You know how your day goes when you’ve been up all night?  Shitty, right?  Your week will be much easier to cope with if you’ve had one day to simply keep company, honor the time you’ve been given to walk the world, and push obligations aside.

Should a Sabbath include work?  Well, sure, if you like, but I would say that it depends upon your attitude toward doing that particular spot of work.  If you love working in your garden, for example, in true karma yoga fashion, and digging in the dirt and admiring the shoots and imagining the future rewards are all pleasurable, then, fine, go on with you.  But if the voice in your head sounds more like, “Oh, Christ, I have to go out there and get after those weeds, Jesus, what did I do to deserve this?” then leave it for a not-Sabbath day.  Does your Sabbath always include visiting a houseful of hated relatives because you have “family obligations” and you just can’t wait until it’s over so that you can get home and watch Game of Thrones?  Bad Sabbath.  Other than the Game of Thrones part, that’s a bad Sabbath.  You can do it if you have to, but not on your one-of-seven.  I don't write on Sabbath, by the way, because the writing could go well or go badly, and when it goes badly it can wreck a perfectly good Sabbath, so I don't risk it.

Do I need to practice some kind of meditation, religious observance, or, hell, tithe or something?  Again, only if you want to.  Meditate, go to church, go sit on a tree stump and listen to the sparrows, sail, or picnic, or just spend the day in bed with a bunch of crossword puzzles.  As long as the point of the exercise is to becalm yourself, you’re okay.

Does Sabbath include electronics?  Like, maybe, computer games and posting on facebook?  Here’s where you’re gonna hate me a little – no, it does not.  I feel pretty strongly about this, particularly since my facebook feed has become an All-Trump, All the Fucking Time zone.  Neurologically speaking, screens interfere with the settling process that a Sabbath can give you.  Checking to see of you have “likes”, or playing Soda Crush, or any of that other jazz we do way too much, is outlawed on the Sabbath.  You don’t have to declare a moratorium on electricity, or human speech, or eating food to have a Sabbath if you don’t want to do those things (although some people do that).  But you do have to promise yourself not to consume digital information on Sabbath.  It’s upsetting to your brain cells in a way you’re not always cautious about.  Music, of course, is excluded from this, as long as you are listening to music and not simultaneously watching video feed.  Television can also be exempt if you like, because Sabbath, in my mind, can certainly include watching football, as long as you can simply watch the game, enjoy it, and not put a shoe through the tv if the Bears lose.  If you can’t watch a Met game without becoming depressed when the Mets choke in the seventh inning, then make your Sabbath a day when your favorite team is not playing. 

My own agnostic Sabbath is on Sundays, usually, although it does move around like Nathan Detroit’s floating crap game when I have shows to review or need to go hang with the family in Jersey.  I put on my favorite ratty clothes and sneakers, grab my noise cancellers, and take the subway down to one of my favorite routes to walk around four to six miles, putting the music on shuffle, or just going without for a few hours if there are birds around making bird noise I can dig on.  Sometimes Sabbath starts with an early morning movie with my friend Vic, and then he goes off to rehearsal and I take my long walk afterward.  Long walk over, I grab a healthy meal, head home to get cleaned up, and then spend the afternoon-to-evening hours in activities that will help me to settle down, rather than stress out or get stirred up.  I meet friends for coffee or dinner.  I read.  I draw, or I play guitar, or practice the piano (I’m terrible, but I love my electric piano.)  And, yeah, when it’s on, I watch Game of Thrones.  Not because it gives me a sense of inner peace to watch Game of Thrones, but because hanging out in Westeros for an hour and change is a nice distraction from having to think about the agenda for the following day, which is absolutely outlawed on a Sabbath.  You’re not going to be able to think about something stupid you have to do on Monday morning when you’ve been watching dragons blast shit into oblivion Sunday night. 

Do you have a significant boo that you will be spending your Sabbath with?  Lucky you.  Do they get the concept of Sabbath?  Hm.  If someone ends up spending a whole Sabbath with me, morning to night, then I do sometimes have to explain the rules of Sabbath to them.  No, we are not “getting the grocery shopping out of the way,” though perhaps we are going to the grocery store and reminding ourselves how lucky we are to live in a country that has food and can afford to buy and cook some of it.  No, we are not “getting a jump on the research reports for Monday” because Monday is not here.  It’s not Monday.  It’s Sabbath.  And, no, we are not taking care of your sister’s monstrous, flatulent dog at the last minute because she has a new boyfriend and he doesn’t like the aforementioned dog.  You can go do that by yourself, honey.  Or perhaps, if I like you enough, I’ll move Sabbath for you to another day.  But, make no mistake, Sabbath is coming.  Even to an agnostic, Sabbath needs to be sacred.  If you need your own, special Sabbath that you don’t have to share with anybody, well, hell, that’s cool too.  You have one, I have one, it’s all great.  If you want to spend your Sabbath with someone or a group of someones, then make sure they know the deal.  And if you want to share my agnostic Sabbath with me sometime, weather permitting, you can meet me in the park. 

The Writer’s Upside Down

 Last season’s hit show “Stranger Things” introduced us to a dark, parallel world where things seem the same, but darker, drearier and, ultimately, negative.  The name for this world, the “Upside Down”, has been applied to everything from hipster cocktails to the current Presidential Administration.  At the moment, I find myself in what I realize is the writer’s version of the Upside Down – "Yes, you’re still a writer, yes, you still write every day (voici) but you’re not working on “the thing” anymore" – the current project.  The one that gets you out of bed, or used to.

Actors are well familiar with this kind of upside down, or in-between.  Even actors like John Lithgow and Liev Schreiber have been quoted in interviews saying that when a job ends, there is an insecure voice inside that tells them they’ll never get another one.  Actors have to cultivate other types of work, or even hobbies, to pass the time in between booking work.  During that time, their significant others, if they should be lucky enough to have such, can attest to the fact that they can be a bit hard to be around.

But how do writers react to their own upside down?  After all, we don’t really need anyone else’s permission to write.  It should be easy to just catapult ourselves from one project to the next with ease, right?  I don’t think so.  Not in my case, anyway.  Maybe other writers are better at it than I am, but for the most part, I follow the same pattern every time, no ease involved.

First, I get myself to the 2^nd or 3^rd draft of something and send it to a couple of trusted readers to get some notes back.  If you’re a writer and you’re thinking to yourself at this point “oh, what kind of lameass needs notes?” then you’re an amateur or a genius, you pick.  Orson Scott Card, the science fiction novelist, wrote about asking friends for notes in one of the forewards to his “Ender” series.  Writers of any kind of drama get notes whether they like it or not.  Better to solicit notes from someone whose opinion you respect and trust and preemptively strike at your own mediocrity.  Get better on purpose, rather than wait for a director to kick your ass should you be lucky to find one.

Once the piece is out for notes, then I become depressed.  As cheerful as I might have been working on that new piece, that’s how ornery I get once I’m no longer working on it.  Of course, when I get notes, then the real work starts, but there's a lull now.  A lag.  I look around at other half-finished work I might have laying around.  I cast an eye toward the novel I’ve been working on since 2011.  I sniff around the non-fiction book I’ve got going.  I look at some old plays that need to be fixed and try to figure out, perhaps, how to fix them.  But, for the most part, I eat too many carbs, watch Game of Thrones or something, and try to get the inner voice to stuck a sock in it, because the inner voice, in the upside down, keeps saying things like “you suck.”

Actors in the upside down are usually contacting their agents, auditioning for things, taking classes, and doing all of the things that remind them that they’re still actors even if they aren’t working a job.  While those things can be unpleasant, particularly auditioning, at least the actor has some agency in soliciting those things, trying to bring more work about.  For a writer, at least for me, there are a few things you can do to try and attain some sort of inspiration, but a real inspiration, the ideas that catch fire and keep you sustained, are a little like religious experiences – you can’t meditate them into existence, you can’t flagellate yourself until you bleed one, you just have to let your mind lay open to the ineffable for a while and go live your life, such as it may be.

Reading helps.  Grabbing random things off the shelves at a library or a B&N can sometimes spark something or other.  It certainly makes me grateful that such things as libraries and book stores still exist, although god knows how long that may be true. 

I take long walks, as well.  Viola Spolin discovered, in creating her theatre games, that busying the physical body can free the mind.  Eastern religious practitioners were doing that for thousands of years before that.  If I drag my fat ass down the West Side Highway or around the reservoir in Central Park, I usually end up writing some bad lyrics or poetry. 

Now that I’m not working the soul-sucking job at a place I’ll continue to call Conglomobank, because they love to sue people, I don’t fall into the kinds of deep depressions I used to.  But I will say that one of those deep depressions led to my writing a screenplay that stands as my best work to date.  Just the same, I wouldn’t cultivate that kind of depression again.  Untreated depression is extremely dangerous, and I’ve never bought into the myth that the crazier you are personally the more you can succeed artistically.  Art without discipline is valueless, and it’s difficult to adhere to a discipline when you’re suffering with untreated mental illness.  At the moment, the black dog is staying away from my door, but I wouldn’t tempt fate by thinking it will stay away forever.  The kind of depression I’m experiencing at the moment, in this upside down state, is mild so far.  I imagine it will kick into hyperdrive once my readers have returned some notes on my latest play and I start to appreciate just how far off the mark I am.

The heroine in “Stranger Things”, the character called “Eleven” played by Millie Bobby Brown, navigates the upside down with righteous anger and a lot of balls.  She finds the monsters and kills them.  This doesn’t help me either, because getting pissed at myself for not being brilliant isn’t going to turn out to be helpful.  In the writers upside down, you have to fight by not fighting, seek inspiration by not seeking.  There’s no match dot com that hooks writers up to their perfect ideas.  Theresa Rebeck told a story once about navigating away from a block writing a particular play by noodling around writing another play.  The punchline, of course, is that the “noodle” turned out to be Mauritius, and ran on Broadway in 2007.  I should be so lucky as to have such a noodle.

Having been an improv performer, I know that a creative person, actually any person, can have tons of ideas a day.  But a good percentage of them are bad ideas, and even the ones that aren’t so bad can be made bad with poor execution.  Been there.  Done that.  Will likely do it again, actually.

But in addition to a nice cobb salad and a leisurely morning writing this blog post, I do have the comfort in knowing that the upside down doesn’t exist without the right side up.  What I can do for myself, at this stage, to make myself feel better, is take the pressure off myself and off the future and remind myself that the next idea will come eventually.  And it might be good.  Or it might suck.  But it will come according to its own schedule, and when it does I’ll put my head down, right myself, and feel better than I do now.  It might be a play, a screenplay, a tv pilot, an essay, or a poster for the window of my friend’s crystal shop, but it will be something, and it will be its own something, and I’ll save the energy I might have used to try and force it to get through the upside down of waiting.

Puffination

It's been just over a month since I escaped my horrible, soul-sucking job at Conglomobank after almost 15 years of being terribly good (if I must say so myself) at doing something I desperately hated.  That's what a lot of people end up going through to make money, so I wasn't all that unusual in that regard.

What was unusual was that I always felt like a puffin in a seagull's nest there.  While everyone else was flapping and screeching for their daily french fry, I was just trying to keep my head down and cadge a paycheck twice a week until I found something else that seemed like a better idea.

After so much of my life's blood was sucked out of me, I decided that I'd had enough, so now I'm taking some time off, have finished a brand new play, and am trying to figure out where I go from here without being too overly planned about it.

All I have at the moment are some ideas about things I'd like to do.  One is go back to Scotland, which is a place I love more than anywhere in the world.  Another is keep losing weight, which is hard but which is a lot easier now that I don't have to sit at a pressboard bench for nine hours a day managing other people's egos and making a lot of old, pasty-assed white men more and more millions.

I will post more later, when I make this blog a bit more of a habit, but for right now I will just list some things I know are cool.  Puffins (obviously), Scotland (love), tabbouleh salad, new sneakers, air conditioning, articles of impeachment, the Cloisters museum, and the Lighthouse Family's "Ocean Drive."

More to come.

Dxx

THIS IS A TEST: of the Re-Emerging Broad-cast System

I have made a couple of attempts to start blogging again.  Both of those previous attempts were via Wordpress which, frankly, I hate like the plague. 

I recently discovered that my domain, dorianpalumbo.com, still links to an old blog which, thank you google, I can no longer access or edit.  I'll have to change that, I suppose.

I've also recently left my corporate job at a place I'll just call "Conglomobank" for now, and since I have signed no severance package (I got none), nor any kind of associated non-competes or non-disclosures, I will likely start writing essays here about my (horrid) experience there in which I made some nice money, developed an ulcer, and ballooned, at one point, up to 300 lbs from the stress of working in a technology division that underpaid women like myself pretty drastically, exploited them completely, and dissed them as often as possible relative to their white, male counterparts.

I'm also including, here, a picture of Alan Rickman.  Because he was one of my very favorite actors, and I feel the world was cheated of him when he passed away last January.

If I can't fix the other blog, I'll be publishing some things under this one.  I'm hoping, one way or the other, that you enjoy it.

Dx