ON THE ROAD AGAIN

Dreamt of a cross country road trip. There was a time I was on the road quite a bit. Something about the open highway, the vastness of the land, the strange glamor of cheap motels and bad gas station food, appealed to me. I drove from NYC to California a lot when I first got out of college, drove from San Jose to Michigan, took a circular trip from Arkansas to Memphis to Chicago to NYC to Missouri to Iowa. Like Johnny Cash sand, I've been everywhere. Or at least it feels like it sometimes. Indeed, one of the seminal events of my life was a road trip I took with two buddies from Salinas to Vegas to Grand Canyon to Telluride to Denver to Columbia MO to the Twin Cities to Chicago to NYC. We just went where the wind blew us. And I remember, clearly howling into the Grand Canyon my joy at being alive. It felt a lot like the 8 pm howls we do nowadays. So last night I dreamt of the road. First, I was at The Western Stage, a theatre I did a lot of work at when I was a young actor. I was seeing a bunch of old friends, who were quarantines at the theatre. One of them was a mom, and she was far away from her children and missing them. Then, somehow, I was given dispensation to not only travel about, but to take a few folks with me. So about five of us loaded up a van and headed north. We drove past lakes and farmland, and then I decided we would go to Mount Shasta, an old volcano in northern California said to be full of mystic energy, and a place I loved when I was a kid. We drove past a town on the Pacific coast that looked a lot like Kansas City, then on to the mountain. The main thing I felt was a connection to everything. To the road, to the things we were seeing, to the stories people were telling me, and the stories I was telling them. I felt present. And that's something I feel all the time now. Present. One thing being shut in has given me is that feeling of being in the moment much more often. I still have flights of fancy where I stay into space, gone on a thought walkabout. But even then, it feels more germane to the here and now. Maybe it's the meditating I've been doing. Or the inability to go anywhere. Or the fear of mortality bringing out the brevity of this life. I don't know. I just know I feel more alive.

Speaking of feeling more alive, I took part in a group Zoom for writers last night. There were about fifteen of us, and we took turns talking about what we are working on, how this is effecting us, what we need, and so on. Several of us mentioned howling. The meeting felt both long and short at the same time. I felt like each person spoke forever, while only using a moment. Time has really gone elastic, hasn't it? That's something that has become quite apparent, now that the veil of busy work has been lifted. Instead of life rushing by, over before you know it, time has slowed, even stopped, and it seems as if I could almost move back and forth in it, like I'm a Time Lord. Yeah, I'm freaking Doctor Who.  Anyway, this Doctor is writing a new screenplay, and it feels so good, so where I want to be, so relevant to what I am feeling and so fun to write. And I'm writing it for myself. And yet, I think it might be the most commercial script I've written. Fact is, every script I've written that's done well has been written for me first. Not for me. For the story itself. When I let the cosmos dictate what should happen, when the story takes a life of its own and goes where it wants to go, be it NYC or Mount Shasta or San Jose circa 1976, that's when the magic happens. So I'm a Magic Time Lord. I'm Doctor Strange Who.

Today I've started getting up at 6 am. Set the alarm and everything. Part of that is because both Lisa and I start teaching during the day again today. Part of it is that it just feels right. I like writing in the morning, and by setting the alarm, I give myself this hour of quiet, making coffee and letting whatever comes out come out. Of course, having set the alarm for six, I woke up at quarter till, and lay there pondering if I should just get up or try for that extra fifteen minutes. I opted to just lay in bed, enjoying the moment.

Not much to rant about  this morning other than the usual: we still need to improve our national response; we need to continue to keep the curve down; our Dear Leader is an incompetent boob who should be thrown out of office immediately; and we need Universal Healthcare. Not shocking, but worth saying every day.

Ok. Here's a song. It's Rodeo, by Aaron Copland. We played this on that seminal cross country trip that started in Salinas.

Oogie Boogie Man

We're watching the mini-series version of Stephen King's The Stand right now- the one from the early nineties, which seems like it wasn't that long ago but somehow is. How did that happen? i really don't get this whole concept of time and movement and life and death. i know that everything in the past, from the beginning of the scene i'm watching right now (Rob Lowe as Nick Andros just left the jail in Arkansas) to a million years ago are all the same distance from me- what is it that Tom says at the end of The Glass Menagerie? There is no greater distance between two places than time, or something like that. i know that to be true. However, there are these time worm-holes, powered by memory, that span that vast distance of experience in the blink of the eye. i think that as we go along in this world, we all become time travelers- occasionally popping through these portals and finding ourselves in a room that hasn't existed for fifteen years or more, talking with some people who no longer walk the same roads we who call ourselves alive do. And as we move along the highway, it happens more and more often- i'll be sitting at a wedding reception, and in the time it takes to pour some cream in my coffee, i'll go to several other wedding receptions from days that somehow have gone by, never to be seen again by waking eyes.

i just think that's weird.

i wonder what if John McCain ever time travels- if he's ever shot back to some other event in his life. i bet he does. i was watching some footage a little over a week ago- which might as well be a million years ago- and McCain was giving a speech, and some nut job in the audience yelled out "terrorist!", and McCain got this look on his face or regret, of sorrow, of "oh boy, i really did sell my soul, didn't i?"- and i think maybe he went on a little journey right then, to some other time- maybe to some moment where he learned about dignity and having a soul- like i said, it's pure conjecture. But i think it happened.

What is happening to us, as a nation? We're so full of anger and fear and sorrow, we don't know what to do. It's like the past eight years have been a variation on Captain Tripps, the man-made plague let loose on the world in The Stand, only instead of killing our bodies, this version has killed ninety-nine percent of our soul. And now, as we wander the wastelands, we have to decide whom to stand with- the Walking Dude, who caters to our more selfish, fearful half, or with Mother Abigail, who appeals to our better angels.

i have hope we will go with Mother Abigail, but it's going to require sacrifice.