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