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.
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