I DON'T MEAN TO MAKE IT ALL ABOUT ME BUT THEN AGAIN I DO

Sometimes, oftentimes, now times, I wake with this feeling of existential dread. Or what I think existential dread is. I get up early, almost every day. Usually it's around 5:30, but on days off I might not manage to get out of bed until 6:30 or even 7:00. Not that I don't wake up. The waking time is so ingrained in my soul I just wake up. Then I lie there, thinking about... everything. Life and meaning and death and worries and money and friends and theatre and jobs. Does any of it matter? Do I matter? Have I made the right choices to get here? 

I suppose it's kind of stupid, crazy, and wrong to do so. 

But there it is. 

What's strange is I think I love being alive more than almost anyone I know. I love the warmth of the blankets over me when I wake and ponder. I love going downstairs while Lisa sleeps, making coffee, the world still dark, the heater coming on, getting my journal out. This morning, even with my usual companions of questions about what it all means, I am at the same time I'm glooming and dooming, I am reveling in the luxury of being able to do so.

I am so spoiled.

There are so many parts of this world, so many people, where getting up, putting the kettle on, and feeling lost and confused for a moment would no doubt be a miracle. We have a world full of angst, danger, hunger, and uncertainty. 

But I do feel these things, and have to honor them, deal with them, seek perspective and move on.

My life is like my writing. At times effortless, at times impossible. But always sustaining my soul. Even when it's not so great. Even when it is repetitive, derivative and dull. When none of the characters surprise me, the plot feels predictable, and I find no wonder. 

Oh, who am I kidding? I love all of it. I love being a version of Eeyore for a bit, because most of the time I am the Pooh. 

And yes, I realize I just wrote that I am the shit.

Well, sometimes I am. 

I am not short, but kind of fat, and proud of that.

I am writing today for many reasons. But one of the best is that a friend, a former student who I don't get to see so often because they had the audacity of growing up, sent me a text with a song they thought I would like to listen to while writing in my blog.

I think that's the one of the best things about writing. Because, now and then, when the Writing Gods are generous, you can manage to say something that resonates with at least one other human being. 

And now I feel better. 

Here's that song. It's Voyager by boygenius. 

ALL MY TOMORROWS

I get all sorts of emails, from every possible place. I have over 180,000 unread emails, most of them semi-spam shit about some product I once looked at or bought, some show I should see, a political plea for money, and on and on. Truly amazing amount of bullshit, floating out in the ether, waiting to be read with the hope I will send money or do something like that. I also get a lot of news articles, announcements, and helpful hints on how to live my life. I can't blame all the sites that send me these things. And I'm not talking about my junk folder, which I rarely look at. Junk folder is like the junk drawer we had in the kitchen when I was a kid. An overstuffed thing full of odd devices, old recipes, broken buy maybe save-able doo-dads. To put your hand in it would be to hazard getting cut, or a finger eaten by some strange beast living in the upper regions of that drawer, in the area impossible to get to because the drawer was always broken and could only open so much. 

But I digress.

Today, I opened one of those random emails in my regular inbox. (Email, for those of you who only use Insta or Snapchat to communicate, is an old timey way of sending electronic messages to one another.) In that random email was a thought of the day. I've been getting these for a few months now. Fairly certain I clicked something, somewhere, and thus the daily emails from somewhere with this salient thought:

"What you do today can improve all your tomorrows"

Wow. That's some deep thinking there. And, as obvious as that is, worthy of a Hallmark card or poster in a primary school office, there's is truth in it. A truth I often manage to forget, ignore, ridicule in blog posts, or down right actively try to ingore.

Today, I can work on the outline for the pilot I've been working on for a few years now. Or the opening monologue for the podcast I wrote that is recording in the next few weeks. I can memorize lines for a show that I am in that goes up next week. Clean the house. Take a walk. Call old friends. 

So much.

Yet, here I am, on a chilly Monday President's Day, still in my pajamas well past nine, finishing a blog post I started around 7 but left to go make coffee, discuss the finale of True Detective: Night County with my wife, put on some tunes, contemplate getting Bagels at Rosenbergs. 

I have tools to improve my tomorrows. And my todays. Farting about, interacting with my wife, listening to music, walking through the neighborhood. This is important stuff too. Maybe it's not what I do, but how I do it, and how I let that inform my ideas of what is worth while, that counts. That improves things.

And I am all for improvement. But what does that mean? More money? A cleaner house? Getting that screenplay sold? Is improvement more about being able to get the most out of this shockingly short life? 

Yeah. 

That's got to be it. 

So. Today, I'm going to try and be alive. All day. 

And hopefully that will improve all my tomorrows, yesterdays, and todays.

Here's a song. It's really weird, and I found it on an Instagram post. It's  Prisencolinensinanciusol by Adriano Celentano. Listening to it will make all your tomorrows better.

WANDERING THE NIGHT COUNTRY

Home with Covid this week. Almost seems retro. Like most of life, it is surreal and odd, perhaps an illusion or dream a butterfly is having. Of course, this could be the Covid talking, deceiving, tricking. In any event, I am stuck at home, and so I am finally putting away the last of the Christmas decorations, catching up on shows I need to catch up on, writing projects, and the final edit of my latest short film, which is a combo short film that stands on its own and a proof of concept, meaning a short meant to indicate what a feature version of this would be like. Plus I have to do a new draft of a podcast episode that is set to record in the next month with an air date sometime in the fall. A scary tale of the North Woods.

I'm rambling, like a lost hiker in a strange forest.

And I like it. 

Shows I am catching up on:

The Traitors, on Peacock. It's a reality show set in a Scottish castle where a bunch of terrible people, most of whom have been on other reality shows, perform various tasks for money, and have to contend with the fact that there are secret traitors in their midst, plotting their demise. It's sort of a glorified version of the game Mafia, which I have played with many a theatre class over the years. The show is hosted by Alan Cumming. It's really fun, the scenery is beautiful, and Alan Cumming is just the best. As a bonus, the castle is just north of Inverness, which we were lucky enough to visit last summer, and one of the great joys in life is seeing some place you've been to on tv. 

True Detective: Night Country, on Max. This is a fucked up story about a bunch of fucked up people in a fucked up part of the world, which I am quite familiar with. Alaska, land of the Midnight Sun and Midnight Souls, lost people who either have had their entire culture and history violated by intruders, or the intruders and their progeny, who mostly live their to be as far away as possible from wherever they came from. I'm sure there are happy, well balanced people up there. I just didn't meet that many. Especialy way up north. It's where I found my father when I was 28. A huge, dangerous country. The show is chock full of the supernatural, alludes to things like the Dyatlov Pass Incident, Murder, and mythology. The writing is tight, the imagery creepy and beautiful, and I can't get enough. 

The podcast episode is based on a short play I wrote a while back that has since morphed into a pilot I am currently working on. The pilot is totally different, but the podcast is basically the play mooshed into a radio play format. It's titled "Alma's Anomalies", and is about a pair of slackers, ill equipped in every possible sense of the word, who journey to the Apostle Islands in Lake Superior in the hopes of resurrecting a ghost. Sadly for them, they succeed. The story is set to air on Coffee Contrails. More info to come soon.

The short, Burning the Old Man, is based on my play of the same name. The play has been my most successful writing project to date, and has been produced all over the world, in NYC, Prague, Sao Paolo, and various other places. It even had a run a few years ago up in Boulder at CU, which was conveniently located for me. The short takes the soul of the play, boils it down to its essence, cooks it for a few months at a high heat, and now is ready to serve. It is the first film from McSquared Productions, my new film company I've formed with my great friend Tim McCracken.  It features an original score by Bob D'Haene and Matt Vogel, who are fucking awesome. More info on that soon too.

So, my thought for the day, as I sit, housebound and wanting to get out, is this. I think we manage to keep our minds closed to most of what is going on, most of the time. We create our explanation of existence, which seem to be variations on either "the world is terrible" and "the world is fantastic", all the while ignoring events as they unfold in real time. (if such a thing as time exists. I'm going with our existence being real, for the sake of this blog entry) The world has all sorts of shit in it. good and bad and bold and beautiful. Music, nature, violence, sorrow, death, birth, and on and on. We bounce through it all, and I think we need to experience it all completely, with as few filters as we can manage. I realize sometimes we need to keep some of it out. But I think we keep too much out too often. 

Now that I've written that down, it doesn't sound as deep as it did while I was laying in bed ruminating. 

Ah well. Two songs today. Into Dust by Mazzie Star, which was featured in episode four of Night Country and which I first came across while dealing with my mother dying. It both comforts me in the loneliness and makes me want to cry yet again. The other is Hallelujah by D'Haene. It is featured in the short of Burning the Old Man. Enjoy.