New Year, Goals, Worries. New Odyssey.

A New Year. Lots coming up. Shows. Short Film. An election that could lead to the end of America. All sorts of shit. I'm directing seven plays between now and June. Producing a large budget show that goes up end of June. Teaching playwriting at the Denver Center. 

Life, as always, chugs along. Sometimes, of late, I wake with this feeling of existential dread. Like, what is the meaning of any of this? Which I know is not productive. As far as I can tell, my little brain is not equipped to process, figure out, or solve the Riddle of Being Alive. Still, now and then, I get the blues, the why-am-I-here blues. And I think. And play Greig or Simon and Garfunkel or Phoebe Bridgers, and go through it. 

And what's really amazing, and to me miraculous, is that this simple act of allowing my self to wallow in self pity and dread for a bit sort of exorcises those demons. It douses the vampire with sunlight. 

It gets me going again.

I do not know how long life is, for me or anyone else. I don't know why we are here, or where we will go, if anywhere, once it's time to do the Mortal Coil Shuffle. I just know I love it here. I love clouds and music and dogs and cats and coffee and friends and my wife and my home. I love writing stories, and showing kids how to pretend to be a goblin in the Battle of the Five Armies. 

I love all of it.

I don't think this makes me heroic. I am fairly certain I was just born this way. 

And I must be a bit of an egotist, because I write about all this in my blog sporadically, and in my journal every single day. 

I wouldn't do it if it didn't make me feel good. But does doing something to feel good justify it? I suppose that has to be taken on a case by case basis. 

So.

2024. Goals. Resolutions. Hopes and dreams. All that jazz. 

I hope to read more books. I'm reading a new translation of Homer's The Odyssey by Emily Wilson that is just fantastic. I hope to use it to fuel one of my new projects, a pilot set in the world of another project, Lunatics and Assholes, that I really love. 

I hope to finish the color and sound of my new short, Burning the Old Man, which is a proof of concept for a feature that I made with my dear friend Tim McCracken. We shot it in the fall, mostly down in Gunnison, and it was fucking awesome. Is fucking awesome. Once it's done, we plan to enter it into several film festivals, and also send it to some producers we know, with the goal of getting funding to make the feature. All we need is someone to put up 500K to 10 million. Which seems absurd, yet there it is.

How did I get to a place where that kind of money is in the mix? No idea. But I won't question it. I'll just move ahead, hope for the best, and keep writing, directing, producing, teaching. Being me.

I hope to travel more. Going to Edinburgh last summer reawakened my wanderlust. The world is not one oyster, but a constantly refilling, huge bowl full of them. And they come in all sizes, and flavors. And I am famished.

I hope to go to more theatre, see more movies, hear more music, hike more paths, dream more dreams.

And I hope to write on this blog at least once a week.

Okay. That's now a thing. I will write in this blog once a week.

I now go off to make breakfast, get ready for tech rehearsal, then work on script for new show about Shakespeare, then hopefully catch a few more episodes of The Offer, on Paramount, which is an amazing show and I encourage you all to watch it.

Here's a song. It's Northern Attitude by Noah Kahan & Hozier. I dig it.