The Play That Wants to Be Written

I'm working on a play right now - but really, I'm not working on it so much as taking dictation.  This is as close as I've ever come to having a play appear of its own volition.  Always before, there has been a germ, a seed, an idea, picture, character, something acting as the spark plug of a new play, but in this case, scenes just keep pouring out of me - or rather, into me - without me giving the slightest thought to either the parts nor the whole.

These scenes or lines of dialogue always come when I'm dancing in the evenings.  That's when I take diction, scribbling in a purple notebook with an erasable ink pen.  The next day I'll type those pages into the computer in play format, and each time I end the session thinking "This isn't really going anywhere, it's not very good, I have no idea what to do with it".  But every time more of it comes to me, it comes on a deeper level, revealing the characters to me, making them more real and full.

The characters are Roben Lee Gunder, a rock star sensation, and Doll (Dahlia), his sort of wife.  It has never occurred to me to write about a rock star.  Just doesn't feel like my sort of milieu.  Until day before yesterday, the characters and situation seemed flat and pointless.  Then a long expository monologue for Dahlia came to me, and even though I think long expository monologues are almost never a good idea in a play, I dutifully wrote it down and then gave up on the play again.

Last night, I saw how to break that monologue up into different scenes in different settings and time periods for the characters, so that the information will still be made available to the audience, but in an active way, a way that fleshes out, not just the situation, but the personhood of both Roben and Dahlia.

What's sort of great and squishy about how this play is unfolding is that I have no particular investment in how it turns out.  I'm sort of assuming that it's not going to be very good, which gives me all kinds of freedom and could possibly mean it ends up being one of my best and most popular.  Funny how that works sometimes.  And if it does end up being no good, well, I'm still writing, and any writing is good writing because any writing contributes to the foundation I'm standing on when the play turns out all right, or good, or great.

If this ends up being something I can be proud of, I'm going to try making it a companion piece to This Almost Joy, because both of them are about characters being forced to play roles which end up diminishing their lives.

The Scarlett Syndrome

My favorite day, by far, is tomorrow.  Tomorrow is going to be wonderful.  Tomorrow I'm going to get so much done.  I'm going to write a sparkling, clever blog.  (You'll have to decide if this one counts.)  I'm going to work for at least two hours on a play, maybe even bring one to completion.  I'm going to clean out one of my filing cabinet drawers.  I'm going to do a one hour workout and take a walk.  No avoidance behaviors, no games, no eating when I'm not hungry.

Eating, oh, I'm going to eat so wisely, so healthfully tomorrow.  It will be all protein and vegetables, no sugar, no carbs.  After all, if I chow down on the Girl Scout cookies and chocolate covered almonds today, then tomorrow they won't be around to tempt me.

Oh yes, I'm going to be so good tomorrow, so virtuous, so righteous that at the end of the day, I'll be able to look at myself in the mirror and say "Good going, you.  A day well spent", instead of "Oh well, there's always tomorrow."

The trouble is, I'm old enough now to know that there isn't always tomorrow.  My tomorrows are finite.  I'm still behaving with a young woman's habits and indulgences.  I need to create new habits, new rigor, new intentionality, and I'd better start today because someday - well, it's not so vague any more.  Someday is here.

Baby Mine

I was pregnant once.  I knew it almost the moment it happened, well before it was detectable.  And I also knew in that moment that I did not want a baby, and certainly not a baby with this immature man.  I don't regret not having that baby.  A child who is not truly wanted starts life with a huge disadvantage.
I have never really wanted to be a mother.  Perhaps if I had met Sweet Hubby during my fertile years, I might have yearned to have children with him.  Except for the fact that SH doesn't really like kids. 
But even though I didn't want to be a mother, I know for certain that if I had ever become pregnant and decided to bear that child, even with the intent to give it to a better home, I know that I would have fallen in love with it as I felt it grow in my body, and probably wouldn't have been able to part with it.
I think this is why maternal connection so often seems stronger and more at ease than paternal.  Mothers are always nine months ahead of fathers in learning to truly bond with this new being, nine months ahead in starting this precious relationship.  I wonder if maybe pregnancy is too abstract for men, so when baby is born, it probably seems abstract, too.
Maybe not.  For eons men have been evolving as the protectors of their families, just as women have, and maybe the instinct has been bred into men to decide very quickly (in best cases) that this is their future, their flesh, their helpless child, themselves made new.
I'll never know what it's like to be any kind of parent, and I don't regret that.  But I sure would like to have known what it's like.

Arrangement, Design, Bun-Bun, and Aftermath

It took until I heard Joe Cocker's version of "With a Little Help From My Friends" (which was quite a while ago, naturally) for me to notice the awe with which I regard those people who arrange music, especially rock music (because that's what I listen to most and am most familiar with).  Who thought to turn that song into a waltz?  The Beatles must have been completely blown away when they first heard it.  And from that thought came this awe, this recognition of how talented those people are, composers, musicians, engineers, producers, professional arrangers, back up singers, all those who decide the sound of a song.  Who decided to bring in the drums just there just like that in "In the Air Tonight"?  The sax in "Baker Street"?  The cello in "Yesterday"?  The extended organ at the end of "A Day in the Life"?

This observation is closely related to one which occurs to me from time to time: Everything man made has to have been imagined, invented, manufactured, made commercially available, and bought.
Everything.  Someone had to think of cloth, someone had to figure out how to make it, someone had to decide how it would look.  When I look in my closet, I see shapes and patterns and colors, and everything single item took who knows how many different minds, different tools, different set of hands to be brought into existence.  The stove, the couch, the rug, the blanket, the backyard fence, the sidewalk, the car, the power lines.  Everything, imagined, designed, and manufactured.  For some reason, that absolutely blows my mind. 

I sometime try to envision the natural planet underneath all the concrete humans have added on.  I understand why humans desperately need to look at or be in nature when we can manage it.  Man made things are hard.  Convenient, certainly, but hard.  We need the softness of nature so that we can relax our eyes now and then, relax our minds, be reminded that we truly belong to the natural world, no matter how unnatural we try to make it.

Sweet Hubby and I saw a rabbit in our backyard recently, a sweet little brown bunny with short pinky ears, probably the descendant of a pet.  We stood and watched little Bun-Bun for as long as we could see her, and for those moments, we didn't think of the vileness of Trump and his enablers, didn't think about COVID, we weren't angry at anyone, weren't worried about anything, didn't feel the rush to the next thing.  We were simply with each other and with the bunny and grass and the sky, and it was so good, so very good.

I think none of us is going to come out of this period of time as the people we were before.  I think once Trump is out of office and a vaccine has been found for COVID and it's possible to open the doors of the world again, I think we are all going to be a little more tired, a little more angry, a little more scared than we were before.  Maybe not.  Maybe joy and gladness and gratitude will reign, and we will be filled with exuberance for having survived four years of - well, I don't want to go down that path right now.  But it does feel to me as though we are all being traumatized, not the way one is by the jolt of an assault or a car accident or an earthquake, but slowly and constantly.  I wonder how it will affect us all in the longer view.  I wonder what the world will look like to children and teenagers who have done some of their growing up during this time.  I wonder what my old age will be like.

A small and terrified man

Lately I find I'm hanging in the tension between two distinct states of being.  On one hand, life feels like always, calm and fine and even serene.  On the other hand, I feel a constant tension and anxiety about the virus, outrage at the Republican party, and fearful of the contentiousness and perhaps violence which I'm afraid is going to accompany the upcoming Presidential election.  Trump is sure to be a bully to the end.  He will not be gracious; he will go down (and surely, oh please oh please, he will go down) fighting and fighting ugly.

I can't help but wonder: will he, to the end of his days, always have people around him who bolster and uphold him, or will he finally exhaust and disgust everybody and finally be alone?  And even then, will he resist learning anything at all about his own lack of humanity?  What a small, terrified man he must be.  Sometime early on, he was terribly, terribly wounded, and it  squashed the heart right out of him.  I pity him if he were ever to consider, to truly look at, the kind of man he is and why so many people despise him so deeply.  I can't wish him any worse punishment than that.

The Flip Side

My friend, my very wise friend, Christine, taught me early in my marriage to Sweet Hubby to look for the positive aspects of the things about him which drive me berserk.  I was complaining, as I do, about how much I hate that he has so much stuff, while I like to live much more sparely.  "Oh no," Christine said, "you love that part of him, the part that can be sentimental and bond to things and ideas and memories.  And the very thing that bothers him about you, your looseness, your inattention to detail, your impulsiveness, these are the things he loves about you.  He loves  how you move through the world so freely and creatively."

So, the flip sides:

SH becomes deeply interested in various pursuits and will collect the appropriate books, equipment, etc.; eventually his interest moves on, but the stuff remains, taking up space.  He always seems to want more of things, while I want less or fewer. ("I know you said to buy two," he'll say if he did the grocery shopping, "so I got four!")  The flip side of this, as Christine pointed out, is that he is interesting to be around because he is so interested in so many subjects.  He has a most brilliant and exploring mind.  And he is, indeed, very sentimental.  One of our cats' bowls got broken, but SH has kept the pieces because our little Stachie drank out of it when she was alive.  As silly as I think that it, it's also very, very sweet and endearing.

SH is a very organized man, who loves to do research, to keep records and charts, to know the minutest details of whatever topic is at hand.  When we were looking to buy a new refrigerator, for example, we would go to an appliance store and look at various models; I would say "Let's get this one", but SH would want to go home and do more online research.  I had to keep a rein on myself so that I didn't do a lot of eye-rolling and harumphing.  Let's just choose one and buy it already!  The flip side is that, when we do make a purchase, we can both feel assured that we got the one which truly suits our needs and has the most stellar reputation.  And his penchant for chart-keeping, such as the one he uses to record his nightly dental care, has inspired me to floss and rubber pick my teeth every night, rather than just whenever I thought of it (which wasn't often), as used to be the case.

SH has lots of t-shirts, more than 50, more, in my lofty opinion, than any person needs.  And he wears them until they are pretty ragged.  When he was still going into an office to work, he would sometimes wear a t-shirt that was almost threadbare, with a limp, deflated looking collar.  I really hated that, maybe partly because I thought his co-workers would think I wasn't taking care of him.  And he sometimes buy new shirts without getting rid of any of the old ones, which made me even more wiggy.  The flip side is that his t-shirts are colorful and interesting, and I absolutely love that he uses things until they are truly used up. 

When he wears a buttoned shirt, sometimes he walks around with on side of his collar flipped up, or the shirt mis-buttoned, or what hair he has standing up in odd places.  This is one area in which he is much looser than I am.  I can't stand that sort of dishevelment (and have even been known to turn down a stranger's collar or hem when I can do it without seeming dangerously wacko).  The flip side of this is that SH is the least vain person I have ever known.  He started balding quite early, but wasn't and isn't in the least bit self-conscious about it.  I lived in Hollywood for decades among people for whom appearance is everything, so it is wonderfully refreshing to be with someone who cares more about what's inside than out.  Another perk is that he also isn't judgmental about how I look, which is lucky for me.  We met just as I was hitting menopause, with the accompanying weight gain, changes in skin texture, etc.  I certainly wouldn't want to be out dating at this time in my life.  But when SH looks as me, I know he sees who I am and not how I look.

There are many more instances, but we'll consider the picture painted.  I'm ever so grateful to Christine for opening my eyes to look for what is good underneath what is bothersome.  Because who wants to spend a marriage being bothered and critical, when it's so much more fun to appreciate and adore?

Natural selection

It was a long time before I realized that "survival of the fittest" doesn't mean survival of the strongest, but rather survival of those creatures/beings best fitted to the conditions of their environments.  In Nature, each creature has some gift which allows it to survive and thrive, whether it's rapid multiple reproduction, speed, venom, the ability to burrow or climb or camouflage, etc.  We pink monkeys have the gift of these great big brains, with which we have been able to figure out how to protect ourselves from the elements, from other creatures, and from each other.  Mostly.

However, during this time of pandemic, I've begun to wonder if we have smarted ourselves right into a state of super-vulnerability.  We have used these brains to find preventatives, amelioratives, and, sometimes, cures for the germs which assault  us.  (For the sake of this opinion piece, I'm using the word 'germ' to include bacteria, viruses (viri?), microbes, and all the other little invisible critters which are much more efficient at taking us down than any lion or shark will ever be.)

This is a world of germs.  They are everywhere: in our guts, on our skin, in the air and water and soil all around us.  By fighting them, we have actually made ourselves more vulnerable to them, because we have deprived ourselves of the lessons our bodies would learn by living with them and fighting with them.  In interrupting the process of natural selection, we have interrupted survival of the fittest.  The unfit live and thrive and spread their seeds of weakness.  And because of that, I think ultimately the germs will win.  No amount of intelligence, our one great gift, will be able to overcome them in the end.  They will win.

After all, think of the early battles between conquerors in the Americas and the indigenous peoples.  The conquerors had superior weapons but were outnumbered, not to mention out of their element in the New World, and would most likely never have been able to terminate or subjugate the natives without their vulnerability to the diseases the Europeans brought with them.

I don't think COVID-19 is going to be the end of us (and if it is, it will be through our own stupidity).  But I feel fairly certain that, ultimately, it will be disease which will bring us down.  That or maybe full scale nuclear war.  And if it's germs, then there will most likely be those who survive through the luck of natural immunity.  And then, finally, natural selection will begin again.

Growing Pains

My family moved to Manhattan Beach, CA the summer after my freshman year of  high school.  That made sophomore year pretty tough, being the new kid in school.  I wasn't bullied or ostracized or anything.  I just didn't know anyone, missed my friends, felt out of place.

I wrote a poem that year, one I'm proud of to this day, as simple as it is:
Growing Pains
When I go down to the side of the sea
With my shadow following after,
And bend to the sand 
And stretch to the sun
And make the appropriate sounds of fun
By greeting the waves with laughter,
What will the seagulls think of me
As I try to cavort by the side of the sea?

Because I was proud of it, I showed it people, and it kept surprising me how many of them thought I should change the last line.  "It should be play and cavort by the side of the sea" they would suggest, or something like that.  Which meant they didn't get it at all.  That word "try" was the heart of the entire poem.

I can still remember so many feelings, new feelings, the sense of becoming someone I didn't recognize yet.  It was exciting, and also scary.  Hormones began making themselves felt, and there was an intense and constant feeling of longing, although I didn't know what I was longing for, besides maybe to belong somewhere.  I realized, understood that I was becoming an adult and that life was going to become more complicated.  Being an adult looked hard.  So many decisions, so many consequences.  I wanted to cling to my Mom and push her away at the same time.  I felt very full of myself, but knew that I didn't know anything.  I was torn between wanting to remain a child and flinging myself full thrust into adulthood.  I wanted to stay youthful and carefree, even though my heart was breaking, even though I couldn't articulate why it was breaking.

I couldn't understand why people didn't understand that.  Didn't they remember?  Isn't it like that for everyone?