Bottle up your springtime.

Yesterday may have just been one of the finest days I've ever spent. All my friendships here have officially made their full circle. Six surprising expedites to various haunts around town. The revisiting of old faces, deeply-etched memories and the absence of overwrought resentments. Apologies were finally exchanged accompanied by much needed liquid courage to leave everything behind for the best. Leaving Chicago at four in the afternoon. My life has been packed away in a series of six overstuffed boxes. I've decided that George Carlin was right all along. Maybe all home really is just a place for your stuff. Spending the morning watching the Fassbinder trilogy synched up to Nina Simone and Villa-Lobos's Bachianas Brasilieras. ("Let's switch reels at the end of the song. Bury old motifs and hold tight to this new rhythm. Shall we? We shall. Let's go.") If I were any happier, I'd turn to gas. If the sky were any more blue, we'd be deep in the ocean. Everyone is out today. And no one is a stranger. I'm full of love and beauty and sense of glorious renewal. I can only hope it sustains itself a little while longer.

Or forever. Yes. Forever would be nice too.

---The Deleted Commentary - Hair-twirling, caution stickers, etc.---

There's an underexplored natural phenomenon that occurs within any switchover period of a person's experience. Like that feeling you get at the end of summer break before going back to the job you really, really hate. Or the final week of that job you really, really hate when you get drunk with your employers and decide maybe they weren't so bad after all. Or... okay, I don't feel much like coming up with another example. But you know what I mean, right? It's the same phenomenon as danger itself. Standing on the heels of one experience before coming into another. Which sounds simple enough, but I feel ridiculous for even trying to describe how complicated it really is. For one, it's not a place where you can live, and after awhile (if you do it enough) you can tired of all the bridge-burning, all the arbitrary swerving and hair pulling and hysterical phone calls to Mom and Dad. Today, I feel an incredible of release from all this. But why can't I give this a sense of constancy? What's the hell is that going to take? I guess it's the next thing worth finding out.

Big Wheel Keeps on Turning

"I’m living in a static fury, an unraveling laugh track, the land of the dead. And now, my heart is telling me to get back."
MIRACULOUS LIVES, Part I – The Berserker

I seem to be experiencing most of this month in the third person. The seasons are changing, but manic as ever, with clear and crispy afternoons followed by ill-omened sessions of snowfall. I hobbled down Rush Street last Wednesday to hand in my week’s notice to Urban Outfitters. When my lease is up in March, I’ll be returning to Seattle for a few months for some final medical treatments and recuperation before planning my next move. Although there has been discussion about relocating to New York, San Francisco, or even Berlin, what I mean when I say move is, in fact, somewhat open to interpretation. Living in Chicago and working in retail has proved to be manageable, but not nearly enough to establish a foothold here in the weeks, months or years ahead. Since having dropped out of school last October, I’ve surrendered this incendiary determination to generate something that is all my own in this city and instead, become one of those pneumatic bodies filling up the street who live from one paycheck to the next, hardback to paperback, prescription to subscription. It’s dishonest and unproductive.

I blame no one. Not Chicago, not two-and-a-half years of school, not even some idiot mugging crew on Lakeshore Drive. I will come back, if necessary, with the ammunition of logic and experience, with the muscular creases common in the faces of most survivors, with a navigational design undeviating from desire and principle. But first, I’ve got to get all those things back. The words and music and intensity and conviction. Without any of these things I’m simply another one of the hungry. The walking roundabout. The men in black mouthing at their reflection in the train, recoiling into their coat-collars, resting in defeat. Forever anonymous. Innocent and guilty and unknown to themselves.

(All these triple-ands, this colorless rumination and talk of blue devils and whatnot…quite the birthday party, isn’t it? Actually, it’s got nothing to do with being miserable, this is just my way of getting sentimental.)

I spent my first day out of crutches walking around the city listening to a free audiocast of Michael Cunningham reading from The Hours. I finished Specimen Days last summer and found it to be a revelation. I’ve since decided that I’d like to take some sort of stab at writing a novel. Maybe when I’m thirty, maybe tomorrow. I’ve written several different openings, a few of which have the potential for expansion if I could just permit myself to commit to an idea. I’m reluctant only because I don’t want to encourage the perverse meditation than goes into prose writing, the patience of laboring on spherical descriptions and defying dramatic impulsions. To be honest, my problem is that I want to do it all. In fact, it’s this same recklessness that all too often gives to inertia and lack of sleep. The key to these next few months will be redistributing these energies into a specific domain. Maybe it’ll be a project, perhaps something far less selfish, I don’t know. But these unremitting patterns of flippancy and indecision have become rather boring, silly and conventional.

It’s time to grow up. Yes. This time, without settling for less than enough.

- TO BE CONTINUED, Part II – From the Hancock Observatory -

Recent Purchases That Make Me Happy

Check out the teaser for my friend James's upcoming short film Future.

Excerpts from A TANTRUM OF CLOWNS and UPSIDE DOWN MOON or BALI SHAG NIGHT

In addition to working full-time without sleep, I'm currently at work on two projects: a prequel to Here Come the Alligators entitled A Tantrum of Clowns and Upside Down Moon or Bali Shag Night, a one act full length that takes place during the sexual revolution.



A TANTRUM OF CLOWNS


Moments after shooting his son in the foyer with a pistol.

QUINN I’m sorry, Benjamin, I thought you were your Mother.

--

MORGAN I hope you don’t mind, Pabbo, but I discussed it with Janet’s father, the symphony conductor. He wants to adapt your castration tale into a Three-Act-Opera with singing genitals that die at the guillotine.

QUINN Hey kids...

MORGAN “The grisliest finale since Don Giovanni!” is what he said.

QUINN All right! We're done talking about Daddy’s penis!

--

DOROTHY When I look at your father, all I see are the things I haven’t done, all the things too late to do. And when he looks at me, I search into his eyes and see an iceberg, shifting out, sinking down... and my fault that he’s sinking. All my fault.

--

MORGAN Do you know how hard it is for me to stand here and say something like “alcoholism is a legitimate biological condition”? All I can think of are those memories of Mammo staggering through my room past midnight, gnawing up her skirt, limbs pounding to Joe Cocker, knocking me out of my crib...

BEN She knocked you out of your crib because you were four years old. It was time to get out of the crib.

MORGAN Up yours.

BEN And back again.

--

BEN I’m only twenty-three. I still haven’t, I don’t know... climbed Everest.

QUINN You want to be one of those people that climbed Everest so they could brag about the time that they climbed Everest?

BEN I’ve never been arrested for streaking.

QUINN Better not to call attention to what God didn’t give you.

BEN Or listened to Pink Floyd synchronized to The Wizard of Oz.

QUINN We’ll do that when we get home.

--

QUINN I'd let Bill Clinton fuck me.

DOROTHY Pass the crepes.

QUINN Bill, but not Hilary. Am I the only one? Let's have a show of hands. No one? Great. So then what does that make me?

MORGAN Uncharitable. Poor, poor Hilary. Look at the woman face. She’s more frigid than Aunt Magda.

--

DOROTHY Well after all, a woman doesn’t always marry into what she likes.

QUINN That’s right kids. Take note of this: the sex only improves with someone you’re driven to kill. Listen for us around, oh, a quarter till midnight? That’s me molesting your mother in her sleep.

DOROTHY With your girth, honey, I’m likely to sleep all the way through it.

--

DOROTHY Your problem, Quinn, is that you’re unwilling to submit to change. These are the facts: your children have left. I’ve had a post-menopausal breakdown and do not know who I am anymore. Our canary is died last week. Our croquet mallets have been stolen and every day, a two-year old boy with downs syndrome sneaks through our backyard and lights things on fire. The way I see it, you and that pyromaniac kid have a lot in common, Quinn. Everyone except for you seems to be in the process of... I can't think of any way other way of putting it... of finding themselves... and you’re set on punishing us for it! Well, I think that’s silly and I’m not going to let you do that. You want to shoot me, fine. But as long as I’m alive, I will do what I want. Because if I’m to survive this marriage it's imperative that I learn how to keep you from crushing my soul.

QUINN You haven’t got a soul. No, I take that back. You did and you aborted it. Don’t you see, there’s no use trying to find yourself anymore, Dorothy?! You’re too old for that! We’re both too old for that. Now is the time for us to rest, to watch things grow...

DOROTHY I disagree.

QUINN Well then Cheers! To our children! Finding themselves. They’re in for a lot of pain.


UPSIDE-DOWN MOON or BALI SHAG NIGHT


ABE How do you take a slogan like “Make Love, Not War” and apply it to trying to change the most violent civilization to come out of human history? Any asshole can say they’re fed up with coercion and control nowadays, that they want to change the entire nature of the institution. But look around, baby: It’s 1973. The war isn’t over. What does that mean? What do all these fat baldies mean when they call us a bunch of “horned-up, cakewalking vigilantes”? Have they got a point? Are we just reinforcing the stupidity and motivational bankruptcy of every youth-upheaval that’s taken place in this country in the last five, six years? Or are we standing for something real, something true? Something more specific than a mass-movement, something more practical than the sharing, shifting and reshaping of an entire establishment...

--

RALPH Are you a real woman?

MIKAELA (Hooking the heel of her stiletto to her shoulder strap.)
Peel me away and see for yourself.

--

CYBELE Descartes had a name for this. “Le Petit Mort”, he called it. “A Little Death”. Maybe I’m confusing my cross-references again. I can't remember, was he a mathematician? Doesn’t matter. “Le Petit Mort”. The part after the lovemaking where two souls part ways and hold each other through the afterlife. They lie together, naked, in opulent anguish... sharing secrets, anticipations, uncertainties... what are you uncertain about, Abe?

--

MIKAELA It’s a shame how mortified we are of our own bodies. We’re instructed to loathe them, desert them and only give in until they’re on the brink of emergency… to use our skin as an asylum for our secrets, nightmares, our dangerous recollections… there’s nothing at stake tonight, no reason to be nervous, you see. I can tell you’re a sensitive person. You should never be ashamed of that.

--

CYBELE How would it make you feel? Someone else. Touching me.

ABE What do you want me to say?

CYBELE I want you to say that you’ll fight to keep me, Abe...

ABE You’re better off putting all these thoughts in a journal.

CYBELE … that the thought of me with someone else would make you homicidal! I am tired of playing Tinkerbell to a bunch of half-baked revolutionaries! Tired of this goddamn children’s crusade! Tired of all of it, Abe! When we met, all this banging around wooden spoons, Bonnie and Clyde stuff sort of made me hot. But look at us, just look at us now! What are we still doing in the middle of it? I don’t think any of us ever expected we’d be at this for another hundred years, ending up in jail and ruining our lives! And what I'd like to know, what I'd really like to know, Abe, is why the man I’m having a child with is off fucking strangers on rooftops instead of me? Tell me what establishment is being tested here?
(Pause. This is difficult.)
Or am I the establishment. Are you testing me.

ABE I’m going home.

CYBELE You’re a bastard! You walk away from me and I’ll wring your neck right now, I will! TELL ME WHAT I’VE DONE NOW! TELL ME!

ABE You’ve made growing up look like something I never want to do.

--

ABE So back to this question of changing the nature of institution, what that means or rather, can we do it? Or will we be chasing one gun-and-butter war after another, because we let it happen. Will our children and their children will live indoctrinated by the powers that be because we let it happen. Or will life in this country will be unlivable, because we let it happen. Our time is now, Bali Shags. No more upheavals. Personal freedom is our permanent revolution. Armor away...