Familial Tendencies Developing in the SouthEast...

I spent last weekend in Florida with vaious members of my family that I do not normally spend much time with. You know, people are very interesting. My great-uncle, for example, is running for County Commissioner. I had to ask him what that involved. Basically everything on the local level, with the exception of law enforcement and taxes. He will find out tonight the results of the election. My great-aunt (his wife's sister) has been living with her mother and her daughter in multi-generational sorority since her husband passed away nearly a year ago. I must say, they have one of the most interesting and active households I have ever seen. She is a woman of great faith and great perseverence. Which is nice to see. So many people take tragedy like a shirt takes repeated washings, with a slow fade. My great-grandmother (her mother), as I mentioned, is staying with her as well. She actually takes turns staying with her three daughters in a fairly random rotation. Far from being a conversation piece, she has a great deal of spunk which largely manifests itself at the dinner table when cards are present. I have the honor of having whupped her (and the rest of them) at progressive rummy the other night, after which my life was spared, which is the where the honor lies. You see, before me, my great-grandmother is the only other redhead in the family. She is also a poet, an artist, and full-blooded Irish, which is where I choose to trace my roots from, as they seem prominent in me. (Admittedly, I'm probably a bit more German, but if countries were sports clubs, Germany would have had a bad lot of seasons, and when it comes to genealogy, I'm a bit of a fair weather friend, so...there it is).
The most interesting thing about all of this is that I never really found within myself a strong inclination towards knowing or spending time with my family. That seems to be changing, as many things change, and whether it's bad or good, it's life, which I ultimately see as good. It could be because I'm married now, or because I have a stronger sense of mortality than I ever did before (I still leap around and abuse my body, but now the injuries linger). Whatever the reason, I'm enjoying figuring out who all these people are, and, in the meantime, am being very well fed.

A moment of Fear...

I've just been cast in a show--Cat On A Hot Tin Roof. This is pretty cool. I've been doing the 'artist must lie to himself and diminish the need to perform in order to make mom and grandma and uncle sam happy' dance for a few years now, nearly completing the deletion of the inclination within me, when lo and behold--another shot at...something. Something. Which is good. Nothing, akin to the Nothing which ravaged Fantasia in Wolfgang Peterson's popular fantasy micro-epic 'The Neverending Story', is bad, and should be fought against, whether you use a poem or a paint brush or a deep emotional wound which allows you to 'connect in the scene'. I had begun to drown in the riptide of discouragement and responsibility, both achilles' heels for the artist. That is not to speak of the toothache of good intentions and the lumbago of self-doubt.
The character. I play Gooper, aka 'brother man'. If I were gutsy, I would slap on a dashiki for opening night, but why get blacklisted right off the bat? Ok, enough of that. The moment of fear I was initially referring to was a two part realization I had recently. One, Gooper has five children. My wife wants five children. So far we have none. We were both only children, but for some reason she wants an army. That was a little scary in an 'art imitates life' kind of way. Of course, I thought to myself, why on earth would anyone believe that I have five children. I'm young, 29, and youngish (think Seth Green--I only say it so that you don't say it first); how is that going to work on stage. Then I looked around. I live in the South. I'm almost thirty. I know people younger than me who already have several children. I think that was the scarier realization--that I could already have a full family. Living in NY leads you to believe that people don't grow up and decide what they want to do until their mid-30's, don't marry until almost 40, and may perhaps have one child of their own, although they will likely adopt a couple more. Oh, and the husband is optional. Understand, this is not the case with everybody. Just some bodies. Ahh, stereotyps: they start as innocent observations, and they end up as inclement limitations. Pilate made a good point, questioning truth.

Once again...

In the interest of not breaking character, I wrote a longish entry to be posted, only work became a disobedient child yesterday and stole my attention, so I left it up over night. This morning, after agonizing to figure out where my mind was at yesterday when I began it, I finished it, complete with a nifty reference the the Dukes of Hazzard. And, of course, after attempting to post it, I found out it was lost. This, then, really is the most appropriate follow-up to my initial entry, although I must say, I'm a bit put-off by it. I understand that far more disastrous things have happened--the Berlin book burnings of the early nazi era, the burning of the library at Alexandria, the invention of the Harlequin romance novel. But those were someone else's words. These are mine. They are like children that I throw around a bit but gererally love. But it's all right. Only God's words will never fade away. Mine are like those little black pills you light on Independence day that turn into ashy snakes. A couple moments of mildly interesting curvature, and then, if I'm lucky, a small stain on the concrete of the collective imagination. And, as this bit has been sitting here for a couple of hours, I shall post it as well.

He Thinks...

I am sitting at a computer, near a phone, at a desk, in a puffy rolling chair, in an office. I work from 8am to 5pm. Four years ago, in New York City, I was doing the same thing (ostensibly, anyway), but after one year and a half of it, I left it for greener pastures. Little did I know that the pastures were much barer outside of the office, but I don't honestly think it would have mattered. I just could not stomach the whole 'office job' mystique. It was lost on me. I was there to perform and be beatnicky and creative, to do odd jobs and 'just get by', to live the starving artist lifestyle. I succeeded in all of the latter, but fell in shallow waters performance-wise. That is to say, I didn't 'make it'. The reason? I didn't try. Having moved away from NYC, whose mystique I could no longer stomach, I have learned that the artist is terribly susceptible to being overwhelmed and discouraged, particularly in an environment which is so saturated, so competitive, and so diminishing to the artist as a being with a soul. There is an entire culture of discouragement that people live in there daily for weeks, months, years at a time. You may say it comes with the territory. I would have to agree. It comes through an obsessive and unrealistic reliance upon image by the media. It comes from an equally bizarre and co-dependent relationship with the media and the consumer, the 'viewing public' as it were, where we want what almost none of us can give--perfection, the Aristotelian form of man and woman, an unmarred, unchangeable, unaffected image of pure 'cool'.
Anyway, I like Atlanta. Smaller pond. Friendlier fish. Fewer hooks. Slowly, steadily, I'm regaining my health, in every aspect. I feel the same excitement that the Duke boys must have felt, cruising in the General, leaping over gulleys, evading the ever watchful Roscoe. It appears, for now at least, that the Southpaw has landed.

The hard way...

...this is how I do most everything. I'll spare the details of how I created this 'blog'. Just understand I made it a lot more complicted than it ought to have been. And with that, I shall post.