Cool beans! I'm sharing a daylog with Iceowl!
I'm a kid-less bachelor for the weekend. My wife is taking the boy and driving with her sister to Spokane (her hometown, in case you're wondering why anyone would willingly go to Spokane), leaving me free and easy for something on the order of 50 hours. Needless to say I've been looking forward to this for weeks; and perhaps equally needless to say, now that the possibility is actual, I'm feeling lonely and pointless and schlumpy. Those two make up more of me than I realize until they're gone.
All right, all right, enough! I have to be productive this weekend. I have to write, I have to meditate, clean up the house and do yard work (while maintaining mediation, a zen practice called 'samu'), hook up our new DVD that's been sitting in a box for a week, go see a movie if there's any worth seeing, have a cocktail Saturday without going on a bender, wake up and treat myself to breakfast at some greasy spoon heaven, read the New York Times Sunday edition (and do the whole crossword in peace!) watch the Seahawks kick the crap out of the Forty-Niners, etc, etc. ad infinitum, ad nauseum.
Now I'm starting to panic that 50 hours isn't enough.
I'm in a strange, possibly blessed place with my writing these days. I've finished up all my major projects and I don't have any in the pipeline. I'm kicking around at least ten ideas for plays and not one of them is a money-maker. But most of them would require me to make some innovative leaps in theatricality or dramaturgy (how I still loath that word!), which is cool. Playwriting is architecture, and one of the funner things we get to do as playwrights is create new forms to accommodate the ever-changing ways our audiences (if we have any) process drama. To that end I'm checking out a heretofore blind spot for me, August Strindberg-- his A Dream Play, to be exact. It's much more cogent and engaging and fun than I imagined. It reminds me of Wilder, and I'm wondering now if my dear old Thornton dug Augie, though you'd think I'd be aware of an influence before now, given how much I adore Wilder, and how much I've read about and by him. Just goes to show though, you can never completely know what works on another artist. Hell, you can never completely know what works on you.
It's all a bastardy beautiful blind man's bluff.