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.

THE BATMAN WILL OPEN IN RUSSIA

I get a lot of emails. I suppose we all do. Most are semi-junk from sites I sort of follow, with updates, headlines, things to buy and so on. This morning, I got one from The Hollywood Reporter that sort of made me laugh and cringe at the same time. "The Batman Will Still Open in Russia, But What Will Happen Next?" was the subject line. 

Fucking weird.

I immediately had this vision of The Batman in Moscow, hunting Putin down and bringing him to justice, hauling him off to Arkham Asylum to hang with The Joker and The Scarecrow and Killer Croc. 

Then my mind went to Zelensky being The Batman, a crime fighting super hero with no super powers other than determination and a sense of what is right and wrong. 

And I dug that thought. 

Things are crazy, but also clarifying, I think, right now. 

Thanks Vlad.

There are a few things that are clear. 

Invading a country because you are a dickhead is bad.

Want of money and power lead people to do evil things to one another.

We are always at our best when things are at their worst.

Always.

I check the headlines of the NY Times, HuffPost, Apple News, and The Washington Post almost hourly, dreading and expecting to see that Ukraine's Batman is dead. 

But so far, that hasn't happened. 

Instead, I read about women in their 60s making Moltov Cocktails. And road signs being changed to read "Go Fuck Yourself " in Russian. And about that garrison of soldiers who told the Russian Navy to Go Fuck Itself.

Seems that Go Fuck Yourself is sort of a new national slogan. Maybe international.

I picture Zelensky/Batman, in his confrontation with Vlad the Invader, telling him to Go Fuck Himself before kicking his ass. 

I am finding this whole situation, this invasion, somehow inspiring. Giving me new found hope in humanity, in resistance, in glory and honor.

This is how you treat a bully. This is what you do to people who want to destroy the world we all share for short sighted and selfish ends. 

This is what is means to be a hero.

Okay. Off to the races. Here's a song. It's The Captain by Guster.

I AM CACOETHES, ASK ME HOW

I get up every morning and go through my eternal list of emails. I get so many updates, ads, pleas for money from various causes, it takes a good five minutes to delete them all.

I don't read them. I just delete. Even so, I have over 95,000 unopened emails in my inbox. And that's just the gmail one.  

That's kind of sad. All these unread messages. 

Sometimes, I take a few minutes and try to clean up old messages, deleting page after page. It's a fool's errand, I know. But still I do it. I am not sure why.

One of those emails I get but mostly ignore is my daily word. I opened today's, a rarity, a sign I suppose that I got a good night's sleep and woke up feeling energized and ready to take a long walk, eat the right things, get in at least two hours of writing on the new screenplay, and answer the emails I actually do open and need to get to.

And the word today is cacoethes, which roughly means the urge to do things you maybe shouldn't.  

That word describes my first thirty three years of life this time around. 

At least, that's how I am choosing to interpret it. Though I supposed it could mean urges to do really stupid things like stick your hand in the garbage disposal to see if this reality is actually reality or merely a dream a butterfly is having in some other dimension. Or pick a fight with Cad Bane.

But the way that word resonated with me was in reference to things I have done and survived. Like jumping from one building to another six stories up while at a theater party, or running across a freeway in the wee small hours of the morning after another theatre party.

You know, a lot of my past poor decisions were made at or after theatre parties. 

What was that urge? I think a desire to keep life exciting, to seek a reality slightly more exciting, more real, less dull. And yet, those were things that could have killed me. Was I defying death itself? Or embracing life? 

I don't know. 

But I do know what it means to feel the urge to do crazy things. 

In my experience, they've all paid off. My wife always says "leap and the net shall appear". 

I've leapt a lot. 

This past week, I closed a production of two one acts, one by me and one by Shannon Brady, a former playwriting student who is just amazing.

This was in the middle of putting up a huge production of Wizard of Oz down at the PACE with my company Sasquatch Productions, rehearsing A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Logan School, casting and beginning rehearsals for The Wedding Singer up at StageDoor, as well as beginning a production of Chamber of Secrets for young actors up at Reel Kids. And beginning prep work for another new play called Puerto Rican Nocturne. 

Holy shit, I do a lot of theatre.

And I am writing the aforementioned new screenplay, as well as getting ready for a new draft of another.

And I feel like I am living well. Doing what I am supposed to be doing. Living. Writing. Directing. Teaching. 

I am absurdly lucky. And all it takes is listening to the mad voices, the ones that say "go ahead, write it", or "add a wizard's duel for the witches"; or "yes, take on yet another show". 

I am not interested in life without these things. 

The One Acts, under the title Dates with Death, sold out three of four shows, and got very positive feedback. Oz is selling out every show, and has one more week end. The scripts are coming together and there is a very good chance the new one will be shot this fall. 

There are plenty of things that suck in this life. But taking risks is not one of them.

Here's a song. It's The Legend of Xanadu by Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick, & Tich. It captures how I feel sometimes. Absurd, joyous, insane.