Had we not
bullet in the head
been forced on top
of our neighbors’ corpses
in that festive
Ukrainian evening
Had we not
willing ourselves to forget
plunged
bottle deep
in spirits not our own
Had rape
not been the law
but mercy instead
Imagine
the songs we would have sung
the happy noise
scattered over bright chords
ecstatic leaps
and skiing madly
down the perfect slopes
of upturned breasts
under the thinness of silk
I passed by the Improv after a day of bicycle messengering. World-weary woman smoking a cigarette at the door, clearly worked there. I asked what I had to do to get on stage and do my bit.
“Singer or comic?” she asked.
“Matter of opinion,” I said.
“Comic,” she said. “You don’t get to do your bit. You get to do two minutes of your bit. Get here by 6, sign the list, wait with fifty others, see if you’re called. They like you, you can come back and do more of your bit.”
Never took her up on it, but I liked her style very much.
An old friend from High School I’ve seen only a couple of times in the decades since emailed to apologize for being out of touch. He referred to this blahg as a window into my tortured soul and then supposed he could unsubscribe. Fortunately for me, he was inspired by the endless scroll of arguably depressing musings here to create and send this, which cracked me up. May it have the same effect on y’all:
That voice, speaking up for your deepest beliefs, fondest hopes, telling your dreams. In the noise of the noisy world you may sometimes have to listen carefully to hear it, but don’t stop listening for it.
Explaining the perplexing standstill my life and work have seemingly come to, I described in great detail the workings and potential of the student-run animation workshop. My friend grasped it in unfolding steps as I laid it out to him and said “wow, the kids must love it.”
“They do,” I said.
“Well, then you need to take your strength and inspiration from them now, until you figure out the next move,” he said.
“True, but I haven’t had a workshop with kids since May,” I said.
“Oh…” he said, the syllable expressing perfectly the enormity of what I’m up against at the moment.
Easy to forget when discouraged, and annoying to be reminded of when filled with dread:
Each thing you dread, that you manage to do, will remind you that the dread is almost always worse than the actual doing of the thing you dread. Often, doing the thing you dread turns out to be nothing at all.
Can you feel the weight of dread lift off you?
Not in advance, of course not, it’s unimaginable. But afterwards, probably so.
Like a soothsayer in the time of Caesar spreading the entrails to find a portent pleasing to his master, I sifted the dark brown walnut shell sands of the litter box and learned that my vigil over the cat’s digestive troubles is at an end. I am free to move about as I like. Hallelujah.
The recurring cackle is by Robin Williams, from a 2010 interview during which Marc Maron, the interviewer, elicits this reaction. I have remixed this improvised track several times. Is the bass too loud on this mix?
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Experimental embedding of an audio file. Check it out, the opening scene of Shagsbee’s Julius Caesar, with a bit of crude improvisation by one of the rude mechanicals, and then some page flipping for a random soliloquy and some other chance dialogue. Apparently recorded on July 3, 1998.
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