I think I've rediscovered some joy for the workplace. It's a fragile thing, suseptible to corruption from unkind bosses, critical salespeople and rude coworkers, not to mention deadly numbing work. But I still like that I get paid a good wage to stare at Web sites and play with words and I can wear jeans everyday and noodle around on the Web.

Maybe it's easier without stupid woman in the office and now that I'm under new management. Dunno, but it's nice.

Tha Brutha Man has left town and we're back on to trying to locate "normal" and employ it some. I have to try and find a way of not burning through all of my money long before the next payday. IT's hard though, when the things I like to do are expensive and the cheap alternative make me want to chew my arm off to get away.

And of course I still want something exciting to do over the 4th of July weekend. Hopefully it'll include leaving town....


gah. another gnat. why are there gnat's in the office? come think of it, how do the bloody things survive? It's so freaking cold in here how can they possibly live? Seriously my hands have cramped up more than once in the past two weeks to the point where it's really painful to type.


Last Thursday we saw Marienne's play at HFC and it was fairly cool. I would have made a couple of different choices as director but for the most part it was silly and entertaining. Only one of the actors kept distracting me with a bad delivery, and that was only when she was doing 'naturalistic' scenes. When she was trying to be a charicature it worked out pretty well. The playbill contained a call for theatre people to join up. I'm definately going to send them a letter of interest, once I figure out how to write the silly thing. I'm not sure if I should name plays I'd like to do or state an interest in upcoming projects. Anyhow, if that works out it'll be something, and something is more than nothing.

The local Barnes & Noble stopped carrying BackStage West. Darn them. *sigh* it's not like it was much use. the few emails I sent met with deafening silence. I've been told to just do stuff on my own. But that requires money, a commodity I don't have. *Sigh* why did I have to be attracted to an art form that requires other people, a space, a time and an audience all at the same time? Sheesh. Why can't I just be a writer and hole up in my apartment and bang out stories to the deafening silence of publishers?

Thought about more education but it can't be serious until I've paid off my current school loans. I know everyone else just adds them on but I just can't incur more debt until what I've got is paid off. But it would be nice to have a Masters and try for real to buld a contact network. Then again there aren't many places that I can head to with only a BA in my CV. Certainly not the good places like CalArts or NYU. I would kill several small furry things to get a degree from CalArts. Actually I would kill just to direct something in their Mod theatre. And, ok I wouldn't kill them. I would just feed them to Nefertiti.

I miss the sense of being in a live theatre. I miss that sort of danger that anything can go wrong. I miss walking into the mod theatre as the actors chased each other on the stairs and scaffolding around and over us. They were playing at war and it was thrilling and exciting. I love it when things are so tight that the cues crackle as they're picked up. I love it when things go wrong and the actors' determined nonchalance as the bowling pins they were juggling before have now become lit sticks of dynamite. I love the reality, the sur-reality and the metareality. I love that it messes with my head so that I can never be sure if I'm dreaming or it's just a guy talking about dreaming.

I miss the silence of the audience when they've been stopped cold by something more true than anything they've dared to admit to. When an audience sees a great towering love that it's afraid of scaling, when it beholds a seething, fierce hate that would as soon destroy them if they tried to hold it, when it watches as a play strips away reason, tradition, protocol and basic manners and the humans that are left behind expose the truths that we've blinded ourselves to long, long ago. I miss that moment of truth between the last line of a play, the dimming of the lights and the curtain rise on the final bows when the audience has to make up its mind to love or hate what it just experienced. Make no mistake, it's manipulation at its finest. But that's sort of the point of art.

It's a transfer of ideas and a point of view that is more fine than any series of facts. You don't simply tell your friends what you observe when you see a movie you like, you try to explain the experience. You draw on all of your faculties to try to encourage or dissuade their patronage of said movie. And so you do what you can to impart the essence of your experience. In fact I bet you get frustrated when someone walks away with the impression that you didn't mean to give them. I bet you get annoyed when you feel like somenoe didn't get the full gist of what you were tryin to say. They don't have to agree with you, but you'd love it if thay could just see it your way for just a little bit.

Art is like that. Telling stories is like that and most of all when cause and effect reality is tossed out the ideas and concepts left are a peak into the mind the artist trying to explain something either too simple or too complex for language.

I miss stepping into another reality that goes beyond someone else's life or place or time. But to see an exaggerated view of some other truth that I might fail to notice in my day to day life. Art is a fundamental look into the human condition and theatre is my favorite media.

I want to recreate reality onstage and see what I find. I want to bring an audience to the edge of excitement and just like you would strike flint and steel to spark a fire I love starting fires in peoples' heads. It forces them to open doors they didn't know were there, to cock their heads to the side, squint their eyes a little and look again. It's that little pause when someone stops to consider something new that I live for, and those seconds of silence, of held breath, when the world stops turning for just a tiny bit and all those gears in all those brains stop grinding for just a second.

It's the biggest high in the world.