"Mr. Happiness"

Just read Manet's Mr. Happiness while home for lunch. A few pages long, a monologue: a 30's radio advise man, one of his shows, maybe 15 minutes long; you can so imagine him sitting behind his desk, in a wide-lapeled white suit, his full hair slicked and bobbed. Maybe I am thinking of Criswell, LOL. Yes, his self-righteous earnestness. The kind of man in the the first half of the 20th century man who read Carnegie's "How to Win Friends and Influence People" with a sage nodding and a knowing smile.

Toward the end I was reading it aloud, imagining recording myself playing him, trying to talk deeply and broadly, knowingly, not sure I can pull it off. But then again it is acting, not simply reading, after all. Some music swelling up at the beginning, music swelling up and down, a resolution, at the very end.

This is new to me, and exciting. Thinking about drama and the theater, twenty-five years after most do, lol.

Macho artists

A blogger on Huffington Post describes how a Hillary advocate put down Obama by describing him as a poet. And, the blogger argues, poetry and masculinity are not mutually exclusive. I have always been fascinated by that intersection between masculinity and the sensitivity required to be an artist or musician or actor or writer. Ernest Hemingway, Nick Cave, Charles Bukowsi, Humphrey Bogart.

Maybe more later today.

morning

It's 6:30, and I've been up since 5:30. Crawled into bed at 7:45 last night, fully clothed, assuming I might just rest, or drop off for just a couple hours. Sometimes I think that; it is totally unrealistic, but I still always do. I was having a rather bad dream when I woke up, and in the dream I had woken up - late, at 8:28 I think! Running around a university building, trying to and then deciding not to climb a "stairway" that was really just a sturdy fixed metal ladder, I was carrying books, and didn't trust myself. Tried not to be embarrassed, with all the people, mostly younger people, around.

Not that anyone reading this would care, lol.

Why don't I just DO things?

The network morning news is showing a story about a man who was attacked and killed on a swimming outing in the Bahamas with chum enticed sharks.

An Australian lawyer, tall, handsome, slender, confident. Tanned, bright eyes, broad smile. You can imagine women's heads turning as he walked into a barbecue. Not only vacationing in the Bahamas, but daring to literally swim with sharks. Aggravated sharks.

Why am I not like him? Why am I not a man? A man who DOES Things. A man who says "This is what I want. This is where I want to be." And just do it. Study and take and pass the bar. Go to a club and smile at a woman and send her a drink and walk up to her, smiling at her confident I can use my dick to make her feel good. And grateful afterwards.

For some reason, I have never liked who I am, rarely happy being myself. Even when I know I am loved.

Encouraging quote by Slavoj Zizek

“Hope is only where despair is.

"Something truly new beginning happens only when you are in such a deep shit that within the existing coordinates you can find no way out. And then, in order to survive you have to invent something new. The magic is to turn a desperate situation into a new beginning.”

Slavoj Zizek

DVD Children of Men -- "The Possibility of Hope" bonus feature

Feb 26, 2008

Been having my constant struggle with food.

I always feel hungry. Even - especially - after I eat. When my belly is full, it still wants more. I just realized that maybe it is more about soothing my stomach, physically. I am either empty or I'm full, always craving, always obsessed.

Maybe it is the sensuality of food, about the only sensuality I have this time of year. I do talk with and deeply enjoy and feeI emotion toward G., but it is still sitting here typing, not really the kind of it that I crave. I cannot go out to the park for a bike ride, cannot drive to Whirlpool Park to hear the rapids below. Maybe in a month I will. No dating or even going out at the moment; can't afford it, besides the weather.

Maybe I'll find the sensuality in writing, being creative.


~ ~ ~

Not sure what I have to offer the world, if I write. I feel I have so little true experience, with anything in life. But reading Mamet's essays Writing in Restaurants -- he talks about how drama is meant to give the audience a collective catharsis for the confusion that is the reality of our lives in this world.

Like Joyce said: "I return to forge the unconscious spirit of my race on the unformed smithy of my soul." I think that's how it goes.

On a couple movie tropes

Watched Star Wars III: Return of the Sith yesterday.

Total piece of shit. George Lucas may be brilliant, may be a genius -- but he has the mentality of a 12 year old boy. Everything was grand, huge, unreal. Over the top!! Wow!! Bang Pow!! The 00's version of those deeply and broadly unreal 1950's musicals. You can picture him on the set, the production designers trotting out to him a model or mock-up or drawing, and Lucas crying out "No, no! Bigger!! BIGGER!!"

But where do all the resources come from? To create that capital world that is one huge city, to build all those 200 story slender art deco skyscapers? Where are the resources to build those giant ships? Floating up on space, kilometers long, every floor filled with elevator terminals and banks of lighted control panels, filled with generals and senators and staff and robots and soldiers? How were they all built? How huge are the dry dock shipyards? How does the metal and plastic get there?

I also have always wondered about the men working in those James Bond villain lairs. Isolated on the island with the secret fortress in the volcano. That they helped hollow out and build. Months on the island, and when they might get back to 'civilization' or home, on leave, they cannot say a word about what they are doing or where they've been.

In In Like Flint the assumption is presented that women are captured and hypnotized into "pleasure units", so obviously I am not the first one to worry about these men. But maybe there is a deconstructionist story or play in there...

the best laid plans

It's Monday and I'm home for lunch -- had planned to chat with G., but she's not on; she told me she may go out shopping before her late start at work today.

I hardly wrote a thing this weekend. My posts here, and a few lines of a couple plays. I came into the weekend looking at sitting for the entire afternoons, writing at my computer in the living room, getting lost in the imagination. Like I used to when I created my tunes. Knowing the clock was ticking, hours rolling into the night, even into the morning, and being aware but not caring. I was doing something more important than worrying about the clock.

Anyway, I never got around to writing this weekend. Or maybe rather what I did was is kept putting it off.

What I always do -- keep putting it off. Would rather just dither here, or watch other people on tv, or play trivia with real people's voices flowing out of my computer. I even downloaded a couple games through GameTap this weekend. Can I blame the cold? Maybe a bit. But not for all of it.

A Musical

It's before 7:00 on a Sunday morning, and a musical is on TCM.

Some "western" where everyone is wearing bright clean well-fitting clothes. No one is scruffy. A Feisty Woman plunks away at a piano in a saloon until she falls asleep gracefully draped over it. Then she wakes up later, and she can PLAY!! Her plunking has purpose now, and the saloon fills with men. Maybe this is meant to represent the elapse of weeks and there was some signal or trope of the passage of that time that someone watching this movie when it came out in the 1950s would recognize that I don't.

Then she breaks into song, and all the cowboys dance with her. Then a few whores walk in, older, zaftig, scrubbed and covered in bright clothes and feather, each with a big round black "beauty mark" painted on her matronly face.

Is this the shit my parents were raised on? Yes.

"And if you asked me to wait for a lifetime / I'll gladly wait for a lifetime, or two / just to get a look at youuuuuuu!!"

This has NOTHING to do with reality. A handsome virile young man, singing this while he is building a house. He has no idea that he will age, days will go by, empty, he will find odd things appearing on his softening body, he will weaken. And this bright hopeful day will pass so quickly...

(He does get her immediately, though; the house he is building is for he and her, and she accepts).

deja vu

Just watched "Rififi". It was a fun movie, in the biggest most meaningful way. French, 1955. But the director and screenwriter, Dusan, was a blacklisted American from Hollywood, and won that year's Best Director for it at Cannes.

Anyway, I did have distinct deja vu with the "Rififi" song and dance number, and also at the very end when Tony is racing little Tonio back to Paris and his mother, staving off death as he slowly succumbs to his gun wounds, his eyes rolling, his pedal foot oozing dark blood, the camera waving, his point of view, more on the trees he are driving under, little Tonio in his cowboy outfit, standing and laughing all over the convertible, at the end pointing his toy gun at the back of his godfather's head.

I might have seen both scenes in some film noir retrospective or documentary.


I also had severe deja vu this week reading Mamet's "The Water Engine".

Feeling better

Really feel that sometime this week, maybe a couple days ago, my mind did that 'flip' from depression to -- if not manic, at least then, well... -- not depressed.

It is like those couple times when I have started on psychotropic prescriptions: the enervating Thoughts were still there, but the attendant Emotions just weren't. There had been a tipping point.

Not sure what or when the tipping point was. We are looking at some above-freezing temps here for the first time in over a week -- seems like a warm up, but really just the average temps for this point in the year, lol. I got through this past week at work our monthly three day training - which always gets me nervous. But this week for the first time I did not cater lunches, per Erie County and budget changes, so that was a huger load off than I anticipated it would be. We also had the first ever Professional Development Training last Saturday and on top of all the usual I ended up having to sit at the front desk at 844 Delaware all day, just reading and webbing. And my car is proving itself dependable through the constant cold; and the problem with the driver side door lock, at least, was fixed with half a can of WD40. But I am still not locking it, not trusting it.

I also am writing more and more, discovering Mamet, both plays and essays of his, and ordering loads of books from the library.

My eating and coffee drinking habits are still as bad as they have been this winter though. But I am having fun enjoying time chatting and playing with G. -- still unsure if she is the young woman in the pics she sent me, she has still not been willing to exchange phone numbers nor has she gotten a mic. So she is still a quantum entity, could go either way, truly the - wonderfully intelligent - 20 year old women she says she is, or not.

So anyway, the Switch got flipped inside my head. I am okay with being less than perfect, I am okay with be human and faulted an very occasionally unwise. It is a relief that I know I should just enjoy while it is here.

Sadness (and food)

Stopped by Elmwood Taco and Subs last night after work.

There was a guy there, I've seem him at a restaurant there before, in the last couple months, but I forgot where.

For some reason, he breaks my heart.

Early to mid thirties, maybe not slender, but a healthy slim build. Maybe an inch taller than me. The set of his face, unintentionally hard, roughened by teen acne by the looks of it, and waxy, along with his somewhat stiff gait and posture, points to some congenital situation. My initial thought was pre-natal alcohol syndrome, but I don't think that is what it is specifically. But something like that. His light brown eyes are angled. His hair is sandy and hinting at impending loss, and he has a fashionally inept sandy moustache; he looks like a guy from 1988 still stuck in pre-New Wave 1980. His clothes are unremarkable.

As when I saw him before, he had a tray mounded with food. A big box of flat waffle-cut french fries, what must have been two entres; I just glanced at it. A couple of the free newspapers on the little table waiting to be read while he drank and ate.

But something about him is so fucking sad. He certainly looks intelligent, perhaps even a failed intellectual, one trapped in his blue collar family past in this past-trapped blue collar city. I am finding it beyond my understanding or awareness to understand Why he draws this devastatingly sad empathy or hopefuly compassion out of me. But he does.

Maybe I see myself in him. A sympathetic resonance. A quiet awkward man - but a Good Man - growing old alone, burying my loneliness and sadness and remorse in piles of food. Eating alone, and it being perfectly normal and acceptable to me when it would be untenable to most people - to Most People. Awkward in his body. Almost there, like where I should be, but never quite.

You walk by some people, as they sit behind restaurant windows, eating alone. And some make you feel nothing - there are people to whom a meal by themselves is a relief after a day of constant dealing with customers or students. But some others... you can feel their sadness, for some even their burying their sadness and grief for life with food, whether they are shoveling it in or delicately savoring. Trapped behind the window. Trapped in their seat at the tiny table. Trapped by their body's demands even if not properly met. Trapped by this snow and cold. Trapped by this little city decaying shoved up against the boundaried river.

Another Mamet quote -- on being an "observer"

From the essay "On Paul Ickovic's Photographs" in Writing in Restaurants :

I have always felt that people look on me as an outcast -- that simple request for a cup of coffee elicits a slight tightening around the eyes.

I have always felt like an outsider; and I am sure that the suspicion that I perceive is the suspicion that I provoke by my great yearning to belong.

I would like to live a life free of constant self-examination -- a life which may be ruled by the processes of guilt, remorse, hope and anxiety, but one in which those processes themselves are not foremost in the mind.

I would like to belong to a world dedicated to creating, preserving, achieving, or simply getting by. But the world of the outsider, in which I have chosen to live, and in which I have trained myself to live, is based on none of those things. It is based on observation.

~ ~ ~

But for myself, I do not think this has been a choice on my part.

It is just the way I am constructed.

The ampersand

Does anyone else find ampersands (&) depressing?

CHOOSE

Having problems writing The Detective's Secretary.

I'm going to it every day. Still. Typing a few lines, maybe just two. Just random images, pretty much.

I have to make the commitment.

When I was making music, crafting my tunes, a few years back, there was always a specific moment when I COMMITTED. I chose This melody line over That one. Squeezed my eyes shut for a moment, and opened them again. And that moment was a release, as much as the moment when I hit the Upload button and sent them to my webpage for the world to hear them. To hear me.

But I only found my voice when I COMMITTED.

That moment when I made that simple decision. When I chose the one direction over the other. And cut that path, made that path real against all others, that would only ever exist in my mind. In other words, they never really existed. Even though I think they existed, maybe even saw them stretched out into the brush out from my feet.

I had the same problem with "Text".

I must close my teeth and grit my eyes and just fucking be a man and CHOOSE.

Side effects?

Wondering if my current haziness and dullness and little memory frustrations might be a side effect of the Crestor...

Just found out a few days ago that one of its known side effect is memory issues and the irritability that sometimes comes with it. An ABC News video about an older woman who was having problems with memory -- severe problems, like not knowing her granddaughter's name, or where she herself lives -- that of course made her family and her doctors think she was suffering from Alzheimer's onset. But it was just the Crestor.

They took her off Crestor, and her memory and faculties returned.

Yesterday, I ran into John who works here as I was coming back in around 4:00 and he was leaving. I thought he was Robert who does the first morning of our DCW training, who had indeed been there yesterday. I stopped John, asked him how things went today. Thinking I was asking Robert about the training. I almost asked him to get me his payment voucher asap, but for some reason -- luckily! -- I refrained. Maybe part of me knew he was actually John (of course part of me knew he was actually John!). I spent a few more moments explaining to John that I wasn't feeling well -- I had left work about 11:00, after having been there before 8:00 to set up the training, and coming back to clean up; if it had been a normal day I would have not come in at all, sick. But by 4:00, having lain down for a couple hours and otherwise padded around the apartment, I was feeling okay. and today I feel fine.

My explaining to Robert I had not been feeling well yesterday made sense, of course; but not to John. Who now I realize was looking at me a bit wide eyed. After a minute, he told me he was getting going. Only after he walked out into the parking lot to brush the snow off his car -- was it when I saw his gait was normal, Bob having a congenital limp? -- did my heart sink and it dawned on me that he was John and not who I had thought he was.

Now, apologizing and explaining to him would just be making the whole thing worse.

And as I walked in and went up the stairs, I called Trudy "Trish", a character in a play I am writing.

Damn! I really have to do some serious looking into Crestor side effects. Again, maybe my frsutrations lately at not being able to think of the bon mot I know I know, and my haziness and blurring between sleepy and dreamtime thoughts and images and what really happens in my currently dull life, is not just SAD or depression or malaise. Which would explain it away well enough.

And fortunately, I have not been aware of any side effects from any of the medications I have been taking since April (Crestor, Lisiniprol, Coreg, aspirin, vitamin D).

more on Mamet

Finished Mamet's booklength essay "3 Uses of the Knife" last night.

Stunned by it. He describes that the basic structure of narrative -- the 3-act play; "boy finds girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl"; the build-up, the middle movement, the crescendo and eventual (inevitable) resolution of a symphony -- are all reflective of how our mind is wired to see events progress, how our lifespan unfolds in our innate philosophical consciousness.

And that in True artistic drama, there is no resolution. Our lives are Manichean in the constant struggle, or see-saw, between our light and our dark. Maybe a moment of peace at the end of the drama, but that is only because that imaginary struggle has ended and we can take a breath. But the walk through the troubled and troubling universe goes on. Because no matter what we want, no matter how we want the relief of resolution, we know in those moments of biting sun-bright clarity that that is not the way Life, the universe, truly works.


Sorry to say, but Mamet here has stirred me more than a decade's worth of President Ikeda's essays and speeches.


Mamet describes religion as relaxing into an appeasement of the Manichean dichotomy, of letting the mind settle into a crevice riven into the middle of the landscape.

Ikeda talks from the perspective of purity; Mamet talks from the place right here, the middle of the city, his people the middle of the last century's full-on hatred and murder. But I need some of that right now. I need to move away from the cleanness, the unattainable imaginary purity of religiosity. The addiction of it. I need to admit, and admit with my life, my actions, the bitter and the sweet grisly grunginess of real life as a human.

A day to feel shitty

It's 1:45 on a day off afternoon. And I feel like shit. I did work Saturday because we had a training class and someone had to be onsite for security. But in the mid of winter, cloudy, windy, "brisk" as they say. Not even snow, not even really white bright snow on the ground -- if any day, a day to feel shitty. I spent almost two hours, I think, chatting with G.. Which was fine, great, but I ended up not getting to morning gongyo til after 10:30 when I got up before 7:00. But then I got a call from Barbara, who wanted to spend 45 minutes discussing work. Then Alain next door grabbed me; he is applying for a job at 844 Delaware, and we ended up talking about... my work. (He did though, tell me he thinks of me not just as a neighbor, not just as a friend, but as a brother. I am rather shocked by that.)

So, technically only three more hours of my holiday weekend. Oh well...

What do I want to do today?

What do I want to do today?

Write.

Not eat meat.

Go to the old SGI Community Center at 4:00 to help the move; I probably cannot join in the physical moving with the other men, but at least to "support", as we say, and to see the new Community Center now all but completed.

I woke up at 3:00 this morning, the ThinkBright channel was running a documentary on Film Noir. Inspired me to - right then - pop open the DarkRoom program (an emulation of the 1980's simple word processor screens) and write up a few lines, of an argument between Ron and Trish in my "The Detective's Secretary" play.

All I want to do it write.

But something is feeling missing, at least when I imagine it. Or someone. It just seems so frighteningly empty. I want there to be a woman padding around the place, or at least away at work, when I write. I want a dog curled up next to the desk near my feet. I want the phone to be ringing, interrupting me, my agent or a producer. I want a laptop to carry under my arm into The Spot, to sit there in public in the doldrums of the afternoon. I want to be waiting for an email of a plane ticket from a theater in Charlotte so I can be there for final rehearsals and opening night.

This is the kind of life many men lead.

The life they create for themselves.

I do not know why I can't just get off my ass, turn off the distractions -- the television, the PalTalk rooms, the food -- for four fucking hours and just start creating this life for myself. (See below, about such a sea change.)

Mamet talks about the fecundity of the "midlife crisis"

David Mamet, from "3 Uses of the Knife" --

Tolstoy wrote that if you don't undergo this reexamination, this revision, in your thirties, the rest of your life will be intellectually sterile. We correctly identify the advent of this phenomenon as a "midlife crisis" and strive to live through it so that we can return to our previously less troubled situation -- believing that this state stands between us and any possibility of happiness or success.

To the contrary, however, this state is the beginning of a great opportunity. Tolstoy suggested that it was the opportunity to change the myth by which one lives; to rethink everything; to ask, "What is the nature of the world?"


[with minor changes to clarify, at least from the way my mind reads this.]

That feeling of abandonment

My therapist, Maureen, tells me that people who score as high as I do on abandonment schema almost always are intensely into a relationship, and when one comes to a crashing trauma-causing end, they jump into a new one immediately, like by the next weekend.

She has never known of someone scoring as high as I do who does not act this way.

But, I am so intense about abandonment from a relationship it is like I refuse to be in one. Absolute avoidance. It feels like my time with Marilyn -- less than four years, never lived together: my only LTR -- was just a blip or burr in a smooth record.

But even my online "relationships" -- an oxymoron, if you ask me -- for me are fraught with freaky abandonment fears. It is the nature of such interactions, even the most intense and personal and emotional ones, that someone online will one day-- disappear.

Just like that. Poof. Nothing but the archived chats. no warning. Just no communication. And most of the time your only contact with them is online, through one paired IM profile and email account. Don't know if they were really married and their partner found out. Or if they made the decision that this was no longer something they wanted to pursue. Or if their computer died, and by the months later when they could finally afford to get a new one, their feelings had just died. Or if the service deleted their account and they can't remember your IM name off the top of their head. Or if they had a stroke. Or if they got murdered in a botched bank robber.

So yes, even though I do not have "real" relationships, I still get rattled to the point of barely functioning, of being a nervous wreck, when someone doesn't pop online for a few days. A brisk white noise of the cold emptiness of the universe.

David Mamet and Herb Gardner

I got about eight books of David Mamet, and a six-play anthology of Herb Gardner plays today, ordered from the library. Mamet is so much fun to read! Sometimes I catch myself reading his plays out loud, sotto voce, rapidfire. Got the Herb Gardner collection from watching "A Thousand Clowns" a couple days ago. Since I went online early on when I began watching it and discovered it was really originally a play, I watched it thinking about how it was originally, on stage. The walk down the fire escape and bolt into the abandoned Chinese restaurant, the visit to his brother's 22nd-floor office, the final sprint making sure he catches the bus for his first day back to work freezeframing him blurred as literally the last image -- looking forward to what this all was originally reworked from.

I have no idea who I am

I'm a 45 year old man, I've had a heart attack and quadruple bypass open-heart surgery, I have an open invitation to MENSA -- and I have no idea who I am or what I should be doing.

"A Thousand Clowns"

Watching 1965's "A Thousand Clowns" with Jason Robards...

Home from work very early sick today -- actually, depressed and partly paranoid, weary and worn and tired from the prolonged cold and snow... -- watching bits of 60s movies on TCM: The Odd Couple, The Apartment, and now most of "A Thousand Clowns".

Some of the reviews of this movie on Amazon talk about how Robards's anti-conformity character changed, or at least affected, their lives or at least their outlook on life.

But, by now we have two generations of Americans reading anti-conformity books in high school -- "Catcher in the Rye" being the obvious -- and listening to heavy metal, and some rap, artists railing against conformity.

So by now, Jason Robards's character -- 30-ish, "clean and sober", with his suits and cardigans and clean undershirts beneath -- seems himself almost someone Holden Caulfield would consider the enemy.

Nothing against the play and movie being as they were on the cusp of "the 60s". But things have gotten more complicated, more complex -- tougher -- since then. It seems so alien, it is amazing to contemplate that this was within my lifetime.

Encouraging quote

“Tomorrow when the sun rises we’ll forget there ever was a night.”

Charles Boyer, the very end of 'Gaslight'

On a snow day...

On a profile I say:

"I just survived a recent heart attack and quadruple bypass open heart surgery ~ what, you think YOU can scare me...?"

But the truth is I'm scared all the time. Constantly aware of the tenuousness of life, moment to moment. It is not exilerating, it does not feel not like ever day I am beating the reaper. It feels like every day I am just scrambling away. But one day He will catch up with me, his cold fleshless lifeless hand gaining purchase, finally, on my shoulders. Pull me down into blackness. One day it will happen.

Sorry if that is not too encouraging...