Back to basics.

Hey guys.  You don't mind if I just start doing this again and pretend I never stop, right?
Awesome.

anyway...

In more ways than I realized, I have spent most of my life trying to find my voice.
When I was young(er), I was fascinated by dialect and colloquial usages of language, so I've been an aural sponge(dirty) since I saw my first Dead Parrot sketch.  Pile that compulsive mimicry on top of a scattershot approach to settling on a home town, I was never been rock solid on what my 'accent' is.  Californi-Balti-Pensly-Appalachian?

"Y'all, like, know where I can find a hoagie?"

It wasn't until I was put in the laboratory space of Actor School that I learned how to identify my own vocal habits isolated from my parrot sqwaking of anything I had heard in the past twenty minutes.  I'm pretty sure, after all that work, that I sound like me, which is nice.

So, then, when it comes to putting any of my distressingly scattered thinkspace to paper (or screen, you literalist) I feel as if I'm starting from a similarly singular square.
This has come to my attention in a rather drastic way for that I've been attacking the grad school application process with...middling results.
It would seem that these nationally accredited institutions of higher learning want to make sure i can string a series of thoughts together in a compelling way...BUT I'M AN ACTOR!  If the working world has taught me anything 'tis that i'm not invited to the party to be the thinky one.
which i have some reason to resent
but i have every reason to therefore expect to be the norm for my work.
Unless i want to be a teacher
which i do.

So, before i even get to meet these people they want me to cram my life, my work, my goals, and my 'special something' (dirty) into an essay that is 2500 words or LESS (which is almost offensive; even a boring life is deserving of more than 2500 words).
And i should really be working on that right now.

So thanks for enabling my procrastination, dear reader.

I've moved back to the Big Bad Apple after a hiatus of homesteading worth about 8 of your human months, and this time i'm doing it with a partner in crime.
I'd like to credit her presence with potentially keeping me out of trouble, but she was around for pretty much all of my last stay in the city, so i think she's just going to make it worse now that we're house hunting for a place to share.

Who here knows the best way to sum up most of a year's worth of life in a single blog post without overshooting a 2500 word count?
Sonnet you say?
Sonnet it is.

When Fuzzy left at first 'twas Texas bound,
Leaving behind a job of crystal shit.
Treading the boards with actors from all 'round
Aiming at dreams I feared I'd never hit.
Success in Kilgore ringing in my ears,
I wound up back in Mountain State hometown(s)
Teaching craft through blood, some sweat, some tears
And beaming pride at my Brides in paper gowns.
A Christmas Tour is how I braved the cold,
Building family from friends both young and Brent.
With Merry Cheer well travelled and well sold,
My holidays are rarely better spent.
I rest my heart in homes apart but near,
And make one now with she I hold so dear.

Let that be where we leave off for now, I'll be back i think.

"Overcoming a fear of breasts" Burlesque for the modern prude.

I remember, through the foggy haze of my wanderlusty youth (my Brigadoon boyhood, if you please) the first time I saw sex for sale.

"Glossy"

that was the first comprehensible verbiage that i could muster after my poor, pre-pubescent brain had been shattered by my bosom-buddy's 'you have to promise not to tell' personal safari into his father's walk-in closet shoebox-cache of a spank bank investment portfolio.

Playboy was the next beacon in the fog.

Of course i remember the name Pamela Anderson, but that's as much a luck of timing: if i had been a seven year old in the early 50's, the name's would be different, but the EFFECT of the magazine would have been the same.

I was lost, for just a moment, in a private (except for some kid, who's name i really can't remember, so i'm not just omitting it for privacy's sake) show room with a technicolour gallery of exquisitely air brushed caricatures of female humanity's pop-sexuality.

Remember, i was a kid, so whatever physiological responses that are supposed to occur in the wake of this kind of momentous exposure, i didn't get em (that i can remember; maybe the blood loss to my brain from...nevermind).  Or maybe i did, or maybe it was all in my head.

Maybe, that was, for me, the moment that began my transition out of larval human into full blown philogynist.

We all know that advertising and presentation is what makes a product succeed and the success of a product is as much in how memorable it is as it is functionality...ummm...
anyway
it was my initial exposure to human sexuality through this venue of softcore pornography that would serve as a rough outline of my understanding of what 'beauty' means, what 'sexy' means, and even (sorry mom) what 'woman' means.
or meant
or means.

and so it went;
follow the bouncing ball(s) and sing along, won't you? 

American boy experiences glossy print porn
American boy immediately seeks out more
American boy sucks at this poon hound shtick
American boy maybe asks his dad for help

That was a lesson learned the hard way

Refrain:
Some lessons are too easy to let go;
These lessons are got at work and play.
But there are just some lessons that you never forget
And these are the lessons we learn the hard way

Etc...

Don't fret about faulty parenting folks; my parents raised a well educated, sex-positive hippy dude, no doubt.  i just maybe would recommend against enlisting them in your search for porn.

Anyway, folks, the sad sack attempt at lyricism above only serves to highlight my next point:
sometimes, we learn to be ashamed of our libido.
We learn that the objectification of women is unequivocally wrong, and genitals (DO WE NOT HAVE A BETTER WORD  FOR THEM YET?!) were made to be respected in the abstract, and any and all sex trade is a perpetuation of institutionalized sexism and misogyny, and to participate in such things is a diminishing of who the woman is, of what womanhood is, and eyes above the neckline mister, etc.

We learn a harsh black and white perspective on yet another subject that, it seems, does much better with sequins and bright colors than it does with shades of grey.

I saw my first burlesque show, is what i've been getting at.
And it was amazing.
It was loud, and rowdy, and intelligent, and fun, and fleshy and a little randy...and it wasn't smut.
I was not watching, for all the historic context of the practice and purpose of burlesque, a powdered nose peep show.

Let me explain.

St. Patrick's day is a big fucking deal, apparently, especially in this city.
These people certainly think so.

It's Sunday, March 18th, 745pm, and i'm EXHAUSTED.
I've got the chest funk from hell and a pint or two's worth of St. Saturday's reveling under my waistcoat, making a fermented phlegm swamp out of my upper and lower respiratory system.
All of this compounded with aught but a two hour nap to bridge the time between Saturday's adventuring into Sunday's work-a-day monotony has got me loopy.
But i promised, i Promised my dear friend Adrienne that i would go with my favorite ginger {Her} to a red-head-centric burlesque show.
She's been yammering at me about this whole scene for about as long as we've been friends, and it's about time i see what all the damn fuss is about.

Stoner-cold and more than my share of grumpy, we stomp up to the box office and the attendee tells her that she ain't paying for shit cause she's a ginger and that'll be twenty dollars, sir.
Glare at her.
Glare at friend.
Back to her.
Sulk to ATM.

Finally, we pass the threshold into the room itself to see...a dude onstage, with a mic, bedecked in a Mal Reynolds brown coat and a facial hair configuration that would make a confederate cannon commander blush.
Our MC, it would seem, has a touch of the dandies.
He's leading the crowd in a pledge.
A call and response pledge to not be a douche.
No touchy
No camera
No phone
No touchy
No douchy
Seriously no Touchy
No problem.

I like this guy.

And, like that, with a quick introduction of the shtick {every act is named after the brand of the performer's bottle-red hair} the evening is off.

***
I want to offer a punch by punch review of the Experience of these performances, but i don't know if i have the vocabulary for it.
I'll discuss some highlights of what most stands out, and maybe i'll review a show in a later post.
***

What i remember most is each performer's costume choice served as our first impression of the tone of what we were in for, followed immediately by the music.
Sight and sound set a scene where a set would have taken twice the time.
Succinct and to the point, the tone of each performance lived in every sequin, every feather; every nuanced, curve-accentuating fold and pleat.

I remember: a strip tease conducted to an aria, with the soaring high notes paralleled by the exquisitely handled 'pull' of a glove; a young lady conducting her entire affair as if she were a cross between Enya, Titania, queen of the faeries, and Pippy Longstockings; an  'elbow to the ribs' jab at the whole Irish event set to a drinking song; a boy-lesque magician act where a musclebound, bald all over {save some rather impressive, o'natural ginger red mutton chops} fellow held the business end of a taser-type 'wand' and, using the sizable static charge coursing through EVERY INCH of his body, used the sparks generate to light a torch...every inch...insert the inevitable 'fire crotch' joke; a beautifully handled old-school burlesque act performed by a woman of exquisitely Rubenesque proportions; a sendup of the entire conceit of burlesque {and jazzercise} wherein the performer came out and just did a jazzercise routine with SLIGHTLY more gyrations than originally choreographed, and all to the original voice over.

I was laughing far too loud, and clapping and cheering and having the jolliest of times i've had in quite a while
The MC even complimented my suit.

All the while i was sitting, late comer that i was, not in the front row center stage, but off to the far stage left, next to the bullpen: i had a de facto backstage pass to watch these people just be with each other and hang out in between performances...in their performance outfits... 0_0

Enough of that.

What i mean to say in any of these recollections, ladies, gentlemen, boys, girls, men, woman, hims hers and any shade of ambiguity you prefer for your pronoun-cing: these scantily clad, conventionally beautiful to the {wo}man performers were within lawsuit distance and all i could do was revel in the sheer audacity of the thing.  i was Free of the hyper-commercialized crutch of layering shame and eye-averting apologies over a perfectly natural impulse to See, to Observe, nay even to Ogle!

"Ogle away, ye respectful patrons of the anachronistic arts!"
It was written in every movement, every pasty, every tassel.  Every second spent in that room was one spent in giddy hearted worship of the female body and it's excellence.

who the hell is going to tell these women, any of them, that they are victims?  I just saw a woman with half her head shaved and the other half in a power pixie cut do a work of such heartbreaking elegance that i was between chest clenching epiphany and riotous laughter the whole time.

and...and, well , the best part is that i never felt any of that sweaty soul'd smutty feeling i've known since that first feathering through the oily(ew), leafy folds of some kid's...some father's nudy mags he probably left findable ENOUGH so that his son could find out one, short sighted way to look at a woman without ever stepping up to the plate and having a conversation about it.

Burlesque is a conversation with it's audience, a bawdy diatribe on who and what we accept as sexy and how it falls to the viewer, the audience, the Partner to decide if 'sexy' means naked, or if 'sexy' can mean funny, intelligent, expressive, articulate, sarcastic, genuine...and also naked.

Thanks for reading.

What about this

All I seem to have to talk about these days:

Today I saw this.
This is what I said to whomever.
I felt such and such about either of those.

When I was at WVU, while we were desperately trying to retain whatever the hell they were teaching us in between our dating dramas and binges (pizza, video games, exuberance, etc), we were persistently, habitually, ritualistically asked by the enigmatcally frazzled Jerry McGonigle-

"What about this?"

I've heard it since called a 'check in' or 'I did, I saw, I felt' or, in some circles, a 'safety meeting' but, in my head, in my humble jumble of education and life experience, that first one, that simple, impossibly open ended interrogative
"What about this?" Is what you ask after something important happens.

I think I just saw something important.


The 9-5 commuter subway is a mystery world to me, still.
We all sit, ignore the vagrants and beggars and go about our working class business, trying to distract ourselves from our proximity and the moments of our life we're losing to our transit choices. 
Eye contact is discouraged but not out of the question; outright engagement with a stranger is a rarity to be avoided for the sake of making easy and Quiet everyone's morning commute.

And, for your sake as well as ours, don't make us notice you.

I like to read.

It was the usual, quiet, safe morning when he sat down.
He took a seat next to the door and was almost completely lost behind his standard-issue, metal mesh handcart: maybe it was painted red to match his coat, or maybe to match his mood, but radio flyer red it was no matter the dichotomy of aesthetic intent v. narrative significance..
Quiet and small, he sat behind his little cage instead of in it, while the rest of us sat in our city-sponsored cage, waiting for an escape into sunshine.
I can't tell you  much else of what he was like before the girl bumped his cart with her suitcase.  
until that second he was just one of the crowd; unnoticed by most and soon to be forgotten by all. 
And then like a foolish, unwitting child at a derelict zoo, this sorry girl rattled his cage.

This first words were just noise, because i wasn’t really listening.
Children are told that there is a value difference between hearing and actually listening.  
through the admonishing tones of their disgruntled and discriminating parents they learn by contrast: “I know you heard me, but are you Listening to me?”
I wasn’t listening to any world but the one of my subway-commute playlist.
Until she yelled back.

Suddenly a solitary outburst of unjustified rancor (‘Don’t bump my fucking cart, bitch!  Apologize!’)
had become something else.  suddently we were overhearing a conversation.
A scene.
I shit you not, ladies and gentlemen, but i thought i was watching a piece of poorly rehearsed street(car.  A streetcar named claustrophobia) theatre.  
It was impossible how quickly the escalation happened.  
And how psychotically intense the exchange remained for as long as it lasted.
It was just a poorly paced acting excercise, because they were shouting for WAAYY too long.
Ten minutes.  
They were spitting bile at each other for over ten minutes.  
A little man, --

                      we all see him now, and measure him: a presumably african-american black man with long braids and a red hat to match his red coat. as is fashionable, his dress is oversized to his build, and even with that allowance of anatomical ambiguity we can all see that he is short of stature and slight of build.   a high toned, almost youthful timbre to his voice and rhythm makes everything he says, every hateful, angry syllable sound like a lame joke delivered in the hazy air of a closed door, sneaky-cigarette-smoke-out.  just another lost kid talking trash in between pink lunged hacks, lurking in the locker room during seventh period.  Maybe he's so angry because he's tired of people thinking he's just a punk kid telling stupid jokes.
                                                                           --near screaming (he’ll get there soon enough) at a young woman also of a presumably african american descent.  she could have been no older than twenty, let’s call her a cool nineteen, and there she stood, meeting intensity with intensity, finding her practiced tactic of strongly worded rational explanation lost on a personality we are all coming to see is unhinged and careening towards some kind of major metropolitan meltdown. 
Railing against people, and how he doesn't give a fuck and all this while she is standing, feet planted, unbending against the gale force wind of his tirade.
She's demanding that he treat her with respect because she is a student, and she is getting an education, and she's smarter than him and she won't just please, miss, sit down because we're all watching now and there's something in his eyes that no matter how hard i try i can't really believe that he's faking it anymore.

He sat, planted in the seat he claimed as his bully pulpit, his wire mesh-throne of indignation over a petulant nation of rude train people who bumped his fucking cart and wouldn't apologize.


And we just watched.
Sir Terry Pratchett has a running theme in his Discworld books that the city rabble of his fictional city of Ankh-Morpok love a free show, and there we were, the city rabble of my dream home, watching a co-ed, freshman-year David-ess try to slay her own personal goliath-in-miniature.  she had no sling, and the only stones she slung were slang and sticks, breaking no more bones than if she'd kissed him.
and finally, as he reached out to her, as he finally touched her, we realized that they weren't pretending.
he wasn't pretending; he actually was a brain-fried manic who would lay hands on a girl for buming his cart.
she wasn't pretending; she really thought it was a good goddamn idea to get in a shouting match with a lunatic on the subway.
and now we had to start pretending; pretending we knew what the hell to do.

she was standing in front of me when he touched her so i don't know if he struck her or just grabbed at her, but suddenly the cocophany of the preamble was gone and the only sounds were the grunts of exertion as he attacked, the sigh of panic she attempted to retaliate, and the intake of group consent as we moved.

before i talk about this next part, i want to make abundantly clear that i was not thinking when i did anything.  the moment i felt the shift in the room/car/air/whatever, i moved and i did what made sense.  he was surrounded on all sides and suddenly he was being held back, all i had in front of me was a young woman who had just been talking about her future, promising her promising life yet to be lived,and she was angry, enraged, and diving into the brawler's braying of a batshit black dude.

So i grabbed her.  i grabbed her by the waist and i pulled her back and fell into the seating bank I'd just lunged out of (i think i even had the presence of mind to apologize to the dude who's lap i landed into) and started talking.
because what's the one thing a situation like this needs but more fucking talking.
softly, quietly, i'm trying to calm her down
"miss, i know, miss i'm sorry, please, i understand but i need you to stop.  you need to stop.  you're going to school.  you cannot get in trouble.  miss, do you hear me?"

nothing.  just words, just the kind of meaningless prattle that comes out of a panicked brain when something NEEDS to be said.  but, alas, substansive contributions to the moment at hand are not the stuff of adrenaline fueled panick-prattle.

before i ran, full tilt out of one of the scariest subway ride of my life, i made eye contact with her.
i saw, for the first time, the honesty of this young lady's Fear, real fear, at what could have happened if he'd hurt her.
if he'd had a knife.
or a gun.

i left her, standing still, while the men who had him restrained were calling for the police, and i ran up the stairs, desperate to be far away from that place, because i couldn't think about anything but the look on her face when she actually stopped and started breathing again. 

i think she saw that, in a second, she was put at the kind of risk it took a quartet of pro-active working class professionals to pull apart.  she almost got herself, and anyone in that cart, seriously injured.

and we said yes to that, as we say yes to everything in this city, because it is what it is.
we have no alternative; we watched their exchange until it was something we all understood. 
violent.

i've asked my dear father (Doctor of Psychology, Dr. Jonathan Stevens in the HOUSE) what this kind of social contract means and he suggested that people in groups are often directionless in times of criseis until someone takes control and guides the group.
violence is someone trying to take control away
which was enough to get my ass out of my seat.

This crisis paraliysis is largely caused by the weighty expectation of social norms.
we do not act as we feel we probably should because we know that it is expected that we not act at all.
No one in that train moved or said a word until he got violent because we were too scared of the passing disapproval of a stranger.
Ironic, then, that a listless anti-social, someone with no appreciation of the nuanced delicacy of social norms, might have been the very best person to handle that very delicate situation.
maybe that's what i'll do next time i see imminent social catastrophe brewing on the subway
"excuse me, sir?/miss?  i'm trying to read my book.  could you please be quiet?"

...
anyway


i don't honestly know if there's a point to me telling this story other than i felt compelled to tell it.
this is not me progressing as an artist, an actor, or even a new yorker. 
this is a scared man/boy/person coming to realize that i cannot control when life decides to do some stupid crazy shit, and sometimes that crazy shit's gonna land in my lap...and then it's gonna hurl me into someone else's lap while i hold on for dear life.
but i do trust, now, more than ever, that no matter how deeply i dive into my little imaginarium, i am never alone, and these people, this world of strangers... and stranger still: we've got each other's backs. 

There's another theatrical touchstone, another mantra i learned, and this one is more recently added to my emotional lexicon. 
I learned it from the unstoppable Symmonie Preston.
I'll end with her words, so simple in their delivery, and so sure in their meaning, and so persistently validated in my everyday experiences with people, even at the worst of times:

"If you fall, I will catch you"

Thanks for reading.

Finding something Holy in the Holiday.

In which we discuss:
Discouraging generosity as a means of absolving ourselves of the guilt of poverty during the season of giving;
Bus rides on Christmas day;
Making friends with family;
Telling stories in play;
Coming out to your family as an Actor;
Et all...

I'm on a bus.
I seem to do most of my *sarcastic air quotes* "Writing" while riding public transportation of some kind.
My dad and I left a family party in Northern VA (a delightful time, of which we will speak later) and dropped me with a backpack, and one more suitcase than I arrived with. 
The first is full of clean laundry, and the second with the gifts of my doting family (both of which will also be discussed, at length, later).
It's dark and my eyes are tired from all this screen staring, and all I can think is how strange it is that we have found no better configuration for mass transit seating than 'front and center, everyone!'.
Where is the genius of the American innovator now, when all I want is to take a piss in the porta-outhouse they call a bathroom and to do so I have to try to parcour over the prone form of some sweet old lady who just wants to catch a few winks(she's leaning on me and it's adorable) before we hit city limits?? 
Inquiring bladders want to know.

If this blog weren't evidence enough, I will admit to being a fledgling amateur storyteller: I love to spin yarns and play with verbiage and composition, and I'm constantly exploring new venues to do so. 
So!
I've found a new one: I am going to write and run a campaign in one of my favorite if not my Difinitive favorite role playing game settings.
It's cyber punk, post apocalyptic trans dimensional, magic slinging alien slaying (or saving) epic ness on a scale like I've not seen in any other such game, and I'm writing my own (competitively) low scale epic to fit nicely in this delightfully fictional waste land earth.
Any interested parties living in, or within commutable distance to the NYC metro area, please contact me in the comments.
But the game is hardly the point!  It is that I've been given a framework to structure my narrative around (around which to structure my SHUTUP), and that's always been the hardest part for this already mystifyingly difficult process. 
I can see why so many fantasy authors have made novels out of their game sessions; the storyteller's initial process is so vague in anything but the large, set-piece details, that the actual practice of Play, the collaboration with a party of adventurers can serve to detail and inspire the finer details of the narrative as it happens.
I am so gonna get rich off of this, I just know it.

So, my family, my madre y padre, are very generous.
My impulse is to say 'too' generous, but that smacks of ingratitude and diminishment of the value of their gifts.
And I'm trying to get over that.
I am in an ok place when it comes to my finances, and by that I mean that I think I can actually pay my rent without help from my family this month.  And I'm actually rather pleased about my progress in the city thusfar.
But I could not, in any sane world, purchase them gifts Knowing that doing so would put me in a situation that would demand I ask them for help again.
Yeah, a conundrum, to be sure.
so, instead, I brought all the love and focus a gift might seek to symbolize in a visit.  I bought a round trip bus ticket and that was my gift.
And I've known that this was going to be my gift for a while.
So, knowing this, I discouraged my family from buying Me anything, thinking the sheer inequity of value of giving and blah blah blah.
I love my family, and they love me.  And they can share the success they have now because they worked very hard for many hears to have it.  If, in addition to every other expression of love they offed me, they want to show their love with generosity, knowing full well I can't reciprocate (yet) who am to discourage them? 
Is it more noble to discourage the gift for the sake of pride and equality, or to accept, swallowing price and being thankful for the bounty of new socks?
So many socks!

So, I'm in a show (woo!).
Off Broadway (woohoo!)
With potential for serious exposure (Whooooaitaminute...)
Exposure is the operative, here, folks.
Fuzzy is going Mr. Natural for my off Broadway debut in blah blah, the point is that I had to explain this to my sweet, doting family.
Mom and dad are fine, they knew what they sere signing up for when I said 'I want to be an actor' and they said 'Ok'
But my extended family...
So I'm at a holiday party, standing in the only place anyone ever talks about anything of substance, The Kitchen.
Jesse (my deliriously talented young cousin who, by sheer force of will, I have tricked into being my friend) has dexterously dismembered the roast beast and we're all standing around, picking at the bones.
Someone asks me about how I'm enjoying the city, what I'm doing with myself and all that...and I am presented with a choice.
In the ever self-editing choose-your-own-adventure book of my life, I had two options. 
Do I say:
1. "Oh, I'm working retail and just got cast in a small beans musical with the potential for real growth and public response"
OR
2. "I got cast in a show where I'm gonna be naked allot!"

I don't know where my instincts for shameless self-promotion come from, but they suck and need to be improved.
Anyhow, so begins the cautiously bemused questioning of a group of people who love and know me well enough to want to be supportive, but still nervously giggle when I say something to the effect of 'c'mon guys, it's just a penis'
Apparently, it's never just a penis.
Unless it's Equus, or Quills or something like that.
Oh well, they laughed when I made a joke out of it, and in excited to share my NYC debut with my family.
And that's the real pisser; I think they might actually come see!  I've told everyone that we're double cast, so they can look at some other pale, malnourished man-boy waggle his tallywhacker for fun and profit, but that was met with a resounding No!  We wanna see You...which I received with mixed feelings, to be sure.
Any way you spin it (like a record baby) I had one of my best Christmas holidays, not because of all the cool stuff, but because I spent my time genuinely trying to invest in my family and I felt them investing back.
Counter investing.
Incesting?  Nah, that's weird.

Happy holidays, everyone!  Thanks for reading.

Frugality and Panic; Observations from Christmas Retail. And feelings.

Trendspotting was never a movie.
But Trainspotting was.

Trainspotting was about the lost generation of disenfranchised Scottish youth, lost in a shimmering pool of hedonism and heroin, doomed to drown in it's mirror bright refraction of life, like a tartan Narcissus in the Sky with Diamonds. 

Trendspotting would just be a bunch of half baked customer service reps, taking hits off of a bong shaped like a lectern and stoning all over human behavior around Holiday Season.

Allow me to explain.
If I've had any career other than theatre, then it's been in customer service and retail.
I'm good at people, so that's my business.  (What a shmucky thing to say, right?)
Anyhow.
Like any blogger worth his MacBook, I would presume to understand how people work because I have a liberal arts degree and a pedantic disposition, so herein I shall(!):

So, we have built this convention of 'The Time of Year for Giving' which has, in a genius of Edison-ian parallelism, produced 'The Time of Year of Getting'
These have, in turn, twisted 'Giving' to 'Buying' and 'Getting' to 'GIMME'
None of this is news, but bear with me.
The gift of giving has gone sour in the state of men-mark; married, middle aged men.
They enter my store (for it is always Mine while i work there.  Not in any any deliberate ego stroke, but it does help to feel at home in one's. work, no matter how frivolous), these shambling, briefecase bombardiers, braving this foreign land of fashion and feminine grooming... things, desperate to find some token of fealty; some sacrificial ornament to pay homage. 
Homage not to the partner they think they're buying for, but an unconscious obsequience to the pagan demands of Consumerism, The expectation of Tradition, Demonstration of Success, and Sparkly Shit.
But we mask it with words like Love, Commitment, Generosity, Festivity, and Sparkly Shit!
These men come in, desperate to buy some object, some fabrication of our cultures agreed upon standard of what beauty is, and throws HUNDREDS OF DOLLARS at me so that I may act as officiant to this ritual; he's handing me the mag-strip dagger to eviscerate his pocket book and spill it's gold-backed entrails straight into my bosses coffers...
And I'm...
I'm.
Going to let that particular rent settle.

Life is just too short.
I started this post on Wednesday; a hump day.
We all have them.
But Wednesday was a different day.

I am finishing this posy on Friday, December 14th, and that means that there is nothing I can say that has any value in the face of what has happened.  Human life has been sensibly wasted, and no one understands what it is that exists inside us that makes it happen.
But it keeps happening, and we have to mourn more senseless loss. 
Children. 
Children are a wonder of potential energy; a slow fuse firecracker of bright, colorful, wondrous Chaos. 
We celebrate what children represent in our old, more practiced lives, because their eyes see all of what is with a wonder that we've forgotten.
They remind us that even an old man can be exotic, new in the eyes of his infant grandchild, and that bananas are delicious and paper being torn is hilarious, and dentist appointments can end in drug induced hilarity as well as a tooth ache.
Children remind us how to celebrate the simplicities in our banal, everyday, humdrum lives by reminding us that
There is Nothing hum drum about life.
Life is a great swirling accident, and that those children came into our maelstrom world was magic, and magic must not go unappreciated. 
If you pray, then give thanks for the joy that those children brought into the lives they touched.
The rest of us, the lonely cynics, will do what we can to honor the lives of those children by loving where we can and thanking those who touch our lives in whatever ways we can.

I've chosen awkward, stilted words on the internet.
now I'm going to go call my mom.
Love

Bathroom bound bumpkins bouncing off bros...in pajamas, are coming down the stairs.

Sweet shit I've consumed far too many relaxing chemicals and i need to pee so 

GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY WAY

Was all i could think as i tried to wade my way through the well groomed obstacle coarse of human road-blocks others might call bar goers.  

I am, i have been informed, too gentile for this city.

Ha. Ha.

I just don't feel like it's necessary for someone to line-backer their way through a crowd to get places in the indoors of this city...

though i do like the image of Hiring a line-backer and latching onto his back like some kind of mustachio'd lemur (isn't there some kind of simian who's mustache is so mighty it's revered as an Emperor?) to ride to my destination.

I need to become a bro-bender; subtly brushing aside the otherwise immovable mass of blood-hungry poon/pecker hounds who populate the much coveted, rarely appreciated (til you’re a resident of a city where such a thing as

                                                            ELBOW ROOM

 Well…dance floor

only exists in myth and fable)

Anyhow, that particularly harrowing bladder-venture was only a snapshot of an otherwise delightful evening out with my Dan-ppleganger. 

His name is of no importance (Hi, Brett), all you need know is that he is my auxiliary-double and shall be brought in only as a replacement in the event of my untimely death or dismemberment.

I’ve started collected books.

This is not a ‘beginning’ so much as a ‘picking up where we left off’ with a rather bibliophilic impulse to collect and rarely read the interesting and available.

I have a bookshelf of nerdy, well bound ambitions to prove it.

But that’s back in West Virginia.

So the cycle begins again; see book, covet book, purchase (or, in this case, and more to the eventual point, abscond with off the street) book, and then take book home to collect dust and guilty sidelong glances from my couch, where I am ever more invested in my love affair with X-Box and Internet hilarity.

BUT NOT N’MORE

I have a goal.

Or maybe a mission.

Perhaps a quest.

Quixotic though it may be, I’ve never been one to pass up a lively tilt with any kind of well-trod metaphor, so windmills and book reviews it is!

I am going to continue to pick up books on the street, and then I’m going to read them-

BEAR WITH ME-

And then, I’m going to write about them here.

I am not a literary scholar, as much as I wish I were, and I’m far from any kind of authority on the qualities that define a book as ‘worthwhile’ or ‘good’ or even ‘better than campfire kindling’ but I think this might be fun.

I’ll take a picture of where I got the book(with a fun note on the location, he said brazenly), be it table vendor, a deliberately laid out box on the side of the street, or the top of someone’s trash bin.

I’ll then read the damn thing.

And then I’ll talk about it.

On the Internet. 

To be mercilessly judged by all those with the credentials to do so.

And maybe I’ll make people laugh, too.

So, I need to get back to reading; I’ve got a small collection going already and a big ol’batch of the Bacchae to cram into my brainpan.

Wish me luck, and thanks for reading.

A tangent.

Some of the best moments of my life seem to have felt, in retrospect, like tangents.

Or, something like a tangent...

A sidenote

An interlude

An addendum to the everyday movings i have through my life.
...

You know what i mean!

You've had these days; any kind of day, where for just a minute you're mind can be elsewhere because the task you're involved in is Simple. 

Going for a run.

Doing the dishes.

Walking getting home from work.

Walking in a residential neighborhood to or from the subway.
Getting groceries.
Any of these fit.

Thus far, and most recently, i have two very sweet city tangents i'd like to share, and then maybe i'll talk about the goddamn holidays.

So.
I have a confession to make.
I don't much like the Greeks-
PLAYS, people, Greek PLAYS-
and i never thought to really give them the chance.
Oh, sure, when my guidance counselor told me I had the reading comprehension of a college student (so much smoke up my ass it's a wonder i wasn't made of brick), you're damn right i got a copy of Homer's 'The Odyssey' and try to drudge my way through it.
And i did, and with gusto.
And then i put it down and never after that so much as touched a page of greek verse if i could help it.
I got spoiled doing Shakespeare!
More accessible themes and characters; a sense of goddamn humour i could understand; acting direction written into the text...a metric system that makes sense.
Go ahead, call me a fool and an uneducated surf and tell me that my analysis of whatever is etc.
I am only setting up all of this as a kind of prelude to an apology letter to the Greeks.
So, if you'll excuse me, i'm addressing them now.
Ahem
"Dear Greek Tragedy,
I am Sorry for spending so much of my life avoiding you.
I didn't know.
I had never read The Bacchae.
No one has ever forced me to sit down and actually Try to like you.
And, apparently, that's all it takes.
A little effort, and being cast in a student project centric to a scene out of the Bacchae where a guy shows up, tells the Chorus an immensely disturbing story about a woman tearing off her son's arm and parading his disembodied head around her home town like a trophy.
And then leaves.  The guy leaves.  I leave.
The Messenger just had a MISERABLE day, and he's getting right the hell out of town.
Thanks for waiting until I had the attention span to read a classic,
Love,
Dan

thanks, guys, i think i'm done now.

So, there it is; a new friend of mine(Maridee is her name), in the true spirit of sharing good when good can be shared, is bringing me in to do the messenger rhesus from The Bacchae for an in-class assignment over at Columbia.
And I couldn't be more pleased, but i could've sworn i was going somewhere else with this...
Tangents!
I was coming home from Maridee's apartment, walking a Bronx street i'd never seen before that evening, on my way back to the long ass subway ride that would later take me home, head abuzz (with a new language, a new tragic vocabulary, a new reason to celebrate being so goddamn ignorant that Everything is novel and exciting) when i see, discover, a dancing red on the side walk ahead of me.
The hell?
Looks like the smallest police lights i've ever seen, too close to the dirt.
Mouse police?
Wait, wasn't there a cadre of boistrious young men on a stoop not ten feet behind...oh, it's a lazer pointer.
They're fucking with me.
And, of course, I see that a decision must be made.
Do I, the grown ass man that i am, keep walking and teach these young men that teasing grown ups is inappropriate by simply ignoring them?
Or, do i (of course i do) take this opportunity to play, to encourage a harmlessly rambunctious approach to...
so i start dodging the lazer pointer.
and they chase me.
and i run.
and it was so goddamn fun.
that i almost regret leading them into a busy street to be run over by a toys'r'us truck.
sad coincidence, this close to the holidays...

Tangent  TWO(coming soon)!

Because why wouldn't I love it here.

Absence really can make a heart grow fonder.
Yes, dear reader(s), I speak a kind of practiced, well tread truth.
I have been without my voice. I tried looking for it in work and teaching and travel but for all of that, I knew that I wasn't really settled until I was bellowing my brain into the vast, two way mirror of expression that is the blogosphere.
I cannot see myself unless someone is looking, and I cannot be honest to their view unless I can't see them, so here goes nothing.
Again.

In which we discuss:
Shameless (if slightly self-aware) use of tired sentiment to re-boot a pet project;
A retrospective on recent life happenings and what all I think pertinent;
The joys and terrors of transitioning into a metropolitan inevitability;
Why it is a transplant country bumpkin cannot help but love his new home;
The romance of want;
And, of course, feet... Or is it toes?

My hearts fondness for blathering about whatever I damn well please being the result of that catharsis' absence notwithstanding, I have missed this. I tried cooking and taking pictures, and may again, but I am not a photographer nor a cook.
Better or worse (much fucking worse) I identify as a writer.
I will keeping cooking and photographing, but they will always just be silly funtimes.
Whatever this is is, on some fundamental level, a necessity for me, so I'll share it with strangers to see if they like it.

Busy boy has been busy.
I was camping out with Shakespeare nerd-genius-babies for a summer which lead to teaching general-theatre-nerd-genius-babies, which gave way to pensive unemployment which lead to now; I'm a resident of the city I chose, about to start a job to pay the bills so I can live enough to make the career I choose.
This has all happened over the course of but a few fast months. So fast, I feel windswept and whiplash and worldly and weary and wacky and weirdly welcome.
Here.
The city.
My city. If you're asking anyone who lives here, I feel like they'll claim the place like an emperor of an ancient, well established dynasty.
A dynasty build on a heap of rat shit and exotic pornographies.
But how exotic they are.
How exotic everything seems to be here.
I make no show of being anything other than a doe eyed tourist, drinking this city's scummy cool aide like a man lost in a Dixie dry dessert of bible belts and buck hunting.
Some days I leave my apartment (and some days I don't. Some days I just hide behind my door and never leave. Desperate to conserve capitol and calories, I hibernate until I can begin my life as one of the gainfully employed) , and every minute I spend wandering these streets is a new adventure in why this place was the right decision.

Beauty lives here. Did you know that?
Of course this city is filthy.
Unrepentant. Unwashed. Ugly.
But in that is has found the grace of the Uncaring.
In Mellville's timeless classic Moby Dick (oh, christ, here we go), our narrator suggests that anything done 'cooly' is a thing done admirably.
This city is 'cool' in it's filth and depravity (scum and villainy, dear reader!) and for being so, it is beautiful.
That, and the people are impossible.
The architecture breathtaking.
The fashion questionable.
The food ravenous.
And the subway incomprehensible.
I'm lost in the pulsing, bilous bowels of a technorganic monster called a city, and I'm not sure if I'm a virus or just a persistent turd.

Persistent Turd; my next indie band.

Going to bed hungry is something new for me. I'm far from starving (calm down, mom), but I'm not the glutton I know myself capable of being.
But it's ok: I planned for this.
When I worked as a professional Summer Camp oddity, I was just as much the glutton I could be, and for so being, I put on my winter coat.
When I took happy advantage of my family's unquestioning hospitality, I was a more controlled kind of glutton, so I kept but grew no further my winter coat.
Winter has come, ye nerds of WinterFeels, and this summer son can smile for that I am layered thick enough to Revel in a tighter belt and a leaner cheek: it means I'm earning my place here.
If I can't walk into that audition room with some gleam of a starved, well honed attack dog, how will they ever respect my ruthlessness enough to want to pay me?
Maybe I'll just drink more coffee.

My feet hurt.
Not all the time.
Not until I come home.
Not until I let them tell me how terrible I've been to them.
So I'll sit on my little floor, turn on music, or maybe some Internet funnies, and GRIND MY SOUL until everything feels a little more balanced.
And then I lull myself to sleep with the sound of my neighbor-bar and my own steady, expectant breathing.
It's all still new enough that even a day fraught with fear and self doubt is made better for that, at time of writing, I am one of Three people on my subway train with either a computer, journal or phone (I blog on my phone. What, wanna fight about it?), all trying to capture something incredible about themselves to share with...
Someone.
Anyone.
Thanks for reading.
More soon.

Forcing a little perspective on the subway

Did i mention that i'm reading Moby Dick at the moment?

Well. That was fun.

We are home!

Well, truth be told, we've been home for a while now.

Two weeks into residence, and it comes to my attention that i've ignored this thing for a while.
And, as often happens when a thing like this 'comes to my attention', this realization has been on my mind rather persistently.

"Should i write in it?
Why not?
Well, i mean, i've ignored the thing for long enough, the peoples who read it are probably moved on to other blogs, so...
So?
So.  So, i guess i wouldn't expect to get any readers.
AhA!  i knew you were just a whore for the views!
No!  I really think i learned something this year!  I feel like i've undergone some drastic, life altering epiphany...and...and-
And you want people to read it.
Maybe.
So?
So."

So.
I have, y'know.
Mind altering epiphanies going cheap this year, apparently, cause if i'm having one it's either cause i'm a person pre-disposed to landmark mind-altering epiphanies with some attempt at synthesizing my recent life's experience into a "very special episode of Blossom" style 'what have we learned' segment
...
or this just happens to everybody and i'm just trying to share mine with you folks.

Anyhow.

It's about the Job, mostly.
And that is that, quite simply, it has become the job.
I have recently neglected my time on this blog because, for just a minute there, i forgot to look beyond what i did for a living as anything more than that.
Being an actor has become a de facto; and now i need to start being other things.
(Like a grown up?)
((Shut up, brain.))
I mean to say that, this job has been an incredible experience for me because it has given me the Experience of trying out this whole working actor thing and
it's great, and i want more of it, and now that i know that i am, in some sense, capable of it and want to pursue it as a means of making my living...
i guess i can get my shit together, now.

I'm moving to NYC in August.
Before that, i'll be working as a counselor for the American Shakespeare Theatre Camp.
Both of these things excite the hell out of me.

I look forward to having a crack at being a long term, full time educator.
I am grateful as all hell that i'll have a chance to do it in the company of a herd of young people who are, presumably, really happy to be there, too.
I hope that, between acting as a chaperone spliced in with equal parts R.A. and truant officer, i will also have the opportunity to learn about the upcoming collegiate generation, learn something about my craft, and maybe even broaden a few minds and educate a couple others.

The city is, well, is my attempt to dive headfirst into this world; i will go there and live in a city alive with potential (and rats) and try to find some part of it i can fit into (like rats and mice can fit in tight places because of flexible...everythings).
I will call this great urban expanse my home and from there i will try to keep doing this acting thing.
I'll go and do as many auditions as can fit in a life that needs to also allow for gainful employ, sleep, eating, and possibly an hour of video games every other week.
I can do this.

Or at least i can try.

I love doing this sort of thing, writing into a word processor and then throwing it into the vast and churning sea of such attempts at human connection as is our internet, so i'll put something together throughout the coming months to talk about this or that...

But this is the thing.
I have done enough of this year to say  that i have been on tour, i have learned how to be better, and how to be enough.
I can live in a troupe of twelve people and survive the social microcosm that that becomes.
I loved this and will do something like it again.
And soon.

I hope.

Ramblings from an Audio Book

I love Stephen King.

Yup, i'm one of those.

Maybe because i read his work as a kid (early high-school counts as 'a kid' right?) and he has become one of the standards of fantastical narrative i have jostling around my fur-laden brainpan, but whatever the reasons are, various and soundry that they be, i i know that i love the man's work.

What of it i know, that is. 

I read enough (The Stand, Carrie, Shining, Salem's Lot, and others) that when i discovered the first volume of the culminating opus that is his Dark Tower story, The Gunslinger, it's called, i was already so commited to his style of writing that the fantastical setting and apocalyptic tone of the novel…well it sucked me right it.

Before that i had been filling my head with the high flying epics of pulp Fantasy and young adult sci-fi: i went from young adult D&D adaptations to the heart wrenching danse macabre of Mr. King's nightmare brain with nary a Dean Koontz transition period to be found.

I started with Thinner, moved on to Carrie and then dove straight into the unabridged copy of The Stand. 

That's the trap with becoming a fan of a famous novelist after he/she/they have achieved their fame; the re-prints, the un-abridgements, the marginalia of a prolific author's career becomes available and begins to muddy a dedicated reader's experience of what is Good with what is Available.

Harry Potter fans may know what i mean with all the journals and side project bullcrap that blossomed up around the original content like so many terdy mushrooms (says the presumptuous prick who never bothered reading them) but i only mention this as a semi-segway into my point; Stephen King worked for me as well as he did for various reasons, but not the least of which was an introduction into the Continuity of his work.

Most stories that i'd read as a kid were all multi-volume series.  

As a fun introduction into the geeky pulp that influenced my reading childhood, here's a list! 

(in no particular order cause who can remember that far back)

The Dragonlance Quadrilogy (with an embarassing array of the aforementioned fringe contributions to the continuity)

The Dark Elf Trilogy (the retroactive prequel to the Icewind Dale Trilogy)

The Dark Sword Trilogy

The Death Gate Novels

The Discworld Series

Dealing With/Talking With/'Doing Something to' Dragons series

The Earthsea Novels

The Ender Novels

The Alvin Maker Novels

The Narnia Books

The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy five part Trilogy

Harry Potter

…

Yeah, that's about the tip of that little iceberg.

Anyway, i only list off all this bookshelf pissing contest content to contextualize where i was coming from as a reader; i Craved the continuity of a multi-installment series because it's what i knew, it's what i know.  

I'll rarely read in a one-off novel what i can read in a series.

Game of Thrones, anyone?

So, when i was skimming through a used book store and found a near mint-condition copy of a thesis paper styled Deconstruction of The Dark Tower's relationship to king's standing body of work…

Well, needless to say, i was like a kid in a horrific candy store.

At this point i'd engrossed myself in a modest crossection of Mr. King's work while also absorbing whatever 'Tower works were available

If i hadn't already been an enthusiastic lover of the books, i would've become one quick enough with the presentation of a mystery adventurer's opportunity to scour his canon for references and suggestions of relationship with the Tower.

Except i didn't.

I finished the tower books my sophmore year of college, nearly wept at the conclusion, was baffled at the Coda, and then stopped.

I listened to a couple audio books as much for the quality as performance over the next couple years, but after the crescendo of publication Mr. King put out around the conclusion of his 'Tower series 

(seriously, he let out the 4th book in '97 and didn't put out number the Fifth until '03 at which point he released the 6th and 7th Both in '04; man was Workin it in the early aught-ies)

i think i just needed a break.

And now i'm back.

Yes, that's right, you read through all of that to hear me talk about 'It'

The Pronoun that would be King.

I bring up the far-reaching wierdness of King's canon because what my investment in it has done is made the reading (or, in this case, listening to) of 'It' the fun cross-section/dissection i'd always hoped to have.

Suddenly, i'm getting references that i might not have got, perhaps even expereincing thematic and motificated (shut up, i make up words) prototypes of images that appear in the Tower itself.

Certainly, we get an introduction to a character that gets something of a cameo in the latter pages of the final (well, it was the final, until recently; it looks like he's crapping out another book this year.  Yes, i will read it.  No, i'm not happy about it.) book.

But then the cynicism shows up, and i'm not sure how much of that series wasn't just self-referential pandering and lip service! 

So i listen, i geek a the words i recognize and the allusions being made to the conventions that i know will soon receive more definition in books to come, and i just wait for jake to read the damn books.

Oh, by the way, Jake and i are listening to the audio of It together.

That's all.

Story over.

now, get back to your life and let me think of something of substance to write about.