Splats

"You don't tug on Superman's cape
You don't spit into the wind
You don't pull the mask off the ol' Lone Ranger..."

-- Jim Croce, "You Don't Mess Around With Jim"

--

In the late summer, when the sidewalk below my fire escape was dry and free of leaves, I would climb out my window, sit on the brick ledge with my bare feet on the iron grate, watching whatever there was to watch--kids kicking plastic jugs like unpredictable soccer balls, streetwise panthers in chains and huge coats yelling into cell phones, packs of teenage (tweenage?) girls yapping and pock-pock-pocking along in heeled shoes--while I smoked cigarettes and called friends. I would complain about my new life in Cinci, smoke three or four sin sticks in one sitting, and spit off the escape in disdain. The little balls of saliva would fly down, down, down through the grates, and after unearthly delay, they would splat the sidewalk below my fire escape, which was dry and free of leaves. I spat often. My opinion of my surroundings: I lived in a spitoon.

Now, it is cold and raining. Big, dirty, British clouds underlit by orange streetlights, smothering smog hovering over the city like a predator, have brought darkness and chill to the land. The sidewalk below is wet and covered with leaves. The spoils of autumn. When I got back from Thanksgiving in Chi-Town tonight, I dug out an old pack of Pall-Malls, dug out an old cigarette, and returned to the fire escape, where I sat and shivered and rubbed my hands through my hair, massaging my scalp, and when I spat, the ball hit the ground with no splat. Just a whisper, a "th" sound in the night, lost in the sounds of drizzle and drip.

I left Chicago at noon, Central Time, and got back to Cinci at half-past seven, Eastern Time. A five-hour drive turned into a six-and-a-half-hour drive, thanks to the end of the pre-holidays holiday weekend. Seven times, I slowed to a complete stop on I-65 alone; twin columns of red brake lights in a foggy haze of gray was a sad sight. In Chicago, there were flurries, swipsy flakes melting on my windshield; in Indianapolis, the snow had turned to sleet, and when I pulled off the interstate for eats at a Rally's in Shelbyville, my car almost hydroplaned off the road; the last hour to Cincinnati was dismal and dark, and the cold rain came in shifts, each one heavier and more mystical than the last. I stopped ten minutes later at a McDonald's just to escape the claustrophobia of the trip. And to pee.

--

Right back into the shit, starting tomorrow: A morning show, an afternoon show, then a three-hour drive south for an overnight start to the December season. In the next three weeks, we have zero days off, assuming no schools close on account of the weather. I'm told this won't happen until January, when the hills become so thoroughly caked with ice and sledge that schoolbuses simply cannot stop on them. I can't imagine there is anything more terrifying for the bus-riding schoolkid than to be stuck in a large aluminum sled with no safety belts while the forces of Nature and Physics conspire for your demise.

--

My landlady has asked me to store some house plants in my bathroom. "The sun never shines in that window," I told her, to which she replied, "Oh, I know. These are shadow plants."

I looked up "shadow plants" because I was skeptical. Nothing pertinent, but there was a link to this amusing excerpt from Jeredith Merrin's poem "The Shadow Plant", which made me look up the definition of the word, "sough."

As luck would have it, to sough is "to make a rushing, rustling, or murmuring sound."

So there you have it: My spits no longer splat; they sough.

Quantums

"Get what you need."

-- Jet, "Get What You Need"

--

Day Three here at La Quinta, spent mostly in Lincoln Park, Chicago. Walked Ajax around and talked about squirrels with the fam. Hit up a small Italian place, famous for its deep-dish pizzas and oven grinders. Stuffed ourselves with Mediterranean bread twice the size of their biggest plate. The interior looks warmer than it is: log cabin meets air-conditioning. Sharon thinks it's connected with the mob, what with the silent, ethnic staff; plus, it's next-door to a law firm. When I dropped a fork onto the glazed brick floor, the manager was there in a second, utensil between thumb and forefinger. We made eye contact, and then he disappeared.

--

Tried to watch Quantum of Solace with the fam in the hotel room. Downloaded a pirated version from a dump site and the sound stopped two-thirds through. You get what you pay for, I guess.

--

Read most of the script for our next touring show, based on the life of Coretta Scott King. Her story of civil rights. Her singing career. Her marriage. As a non-black man, I get to play racists. At one point, I punch a poor black taxi driver in the face because of the color of his skin, and then I say (to his unconscious body), "Get out of my town, boy."

Boy, oh boy. The kids are gonna love this.

--

Weather Channel broadcasts look like what an SNL parody of the Weather Channel would look like.

My youngest sister has become obsessed with a move she hasn't seen. Twilight, the vampire teen romance movie. As if teen romance could get more angsty. The Onion has a juicy critique.

Incidentally, I picked up a copy of The Onion when in the Park today. Read it through. This column was particularly good, I thought, a kind of sunset-tasting critique for the nature hater.

Wii

"Did we bring Nigel in from the car?"

-- my mom, asking about the GPS system in the van, which has been set to a British male voice

--

Nigel brought my folks to the La Quinta between Great Lakes, IL, and Chicago, in the ritzy stretch of meadow and woods north of the Windy City. The mile-by-mile directions, cordially delivered by the robotic monotone, also aided me as I made my way back south, retracing tread from picking Sharon up at the Naval Training Base. I went west from Cinci into Indianapolis, then a fair distance straight north into the Chicago metro, up the buttcrack of road that is the Skyway, following directions scrawled on the back of a paycheck stub envelope in red felt-tip pen, the letters fat and fluffy in the creases of the seal. Listened to reams of Garrison Keillor stories, from his English Majors collection and from his new novel of Lake Wobegone, Pontoon.

Spoken-word recordings are growing on me. On long road-trips, there's nothing else I'd rather listen to, no songs I already know or songs I've never heard before. Hearing a story or essay or poem, the volume cranked so high you can hear the hiss of speakers in the silence between breaths, the sound filling the car and ricocheting off the insides of the windows, the feeling of the story comes and goes, pacing alongside your imagination, images in step with words, emotions with the storyteller's voice.

When I laugh (which happens a lot, listening to those radio yarns), though, it is short and checked. I feel sheepish and look at my face in the mirror. There is no one to share the joke with but the audience on the track, and I sound loud compared to them. I feel like I've burst too loudly in a church, or something.

--

Rice, corn, potatoes, cheese, root beer, and ham for Thanksgiving Dinner, here in the La Quinta Inn & Suites between Great Lakes and Chicago. My plastic fork shattered when I tried to cut my slice of ham. I finger-ate a slice of pie someone had left out. My sister laughed and told me the slice had been in the trash can.

We are Wii-ing. This is my first time. It took three games of bowling to master the flick and the B-trigger button. We spent a half hour editing our Wii selves, toggling hairstyles and looking at the person in question, reevaluating each face and comparing it with the animated caricature on-screen, bobbing blithely with the blithely bobbing music.

--

The girls want to get trampled tomorrow, Black Friday, in Chicago. They want to go downtown and crowd around, probably not buying a single thing.

Ahead

"People don't do such things!"

-- the final line of Heinrik Ibsen's Hedda Gabler

--

Smooth and cool, loaded and sweet and sneering, the show was. Lusty, fiery, tense: a flame on a high wire. Weird, seeing scenes from English and acting classes ("How could I have missed that?" I asked myself a dozen times) enacted in Markel, in front of discerning eyes, spoken by familiar voices in unfamiliar tones. Like watching some haunting parody of yourself. I liked it.

I wish I could have seen both casts, though, to join the ax-grinding. What a show to double-cast. My feelings mix as I envy and pity the cast--envy, for graduating a year too early, it seems; and pity, to see friends shift in their seats and stifle laughter for fear of sounding callous, or stifle tears for fear of losing pride. Pity, for them to have to stifle themselves at all, really. I suppose they didn't have to watch the other cast. Fair enough. But you can't help but watch the other couple at work on the manuscript, you can't help but rubberneck on the highway, and you can't help but go to see the same show done differently.

Hm. You can't help. A grappling double-bind, fit for this show, in a way, but...well, fuck it. I don't know for a fact that I would have handled anything differently, for better or worse. Let me just say that the shows I saw were terrific, it was magnificent to see friends again, and it was just plain good to be in my element again.

--

About that last: Yes, to be in the cold college town again. Wonderful. It's good that I know, for sure, that at certain times in the year, I can drive for four hours on three highways and find myself in a good place. Friends, theatre, happy people. The people I work with don't know about this place, not really; sure, they have heard it mentioned, but they do not know the place I know. I like coming back. I like being known--not just name and number, but flaw and failure. I can unbuckle my belt in this place. I can look into eyes that see and have seen me. I can have swagger, or I can not have swagger, but either way, I can feel cool.

Coolness. That's not as important as it is. The nice thing about feeling cool is that you don't feel like you're overheating any more. The engine clicks as it cools, and you can click, too.

--

And now: dress rehearsal for A Christmas Carol tomorrow, then lots of space and time to sway and fill. Poker tomorrow night. Maybe a movie before the break, and then back north to Chicago.

I've got a stack of library things to experience before I return them. I have laundry to do--wow. Seriously, I need to do laundry. And miles to go, and miles to go...

Oh, wait. No I don't. I just went miles and miles. I can sleep now. (Small joys.)

Runs

"Pooh, pooh! Humbug!"

-- Scrooge, in A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens

--

Been Carol-ing lately: First day (Monday), we read through, blocked, AND ran--twice!--the entire show. The most productive rehearsal I've ever been a part of, certainly one of the quickest, too. Second day: We run and run and run, stop and start and run again, and tweak a bit and add some sound. Third day (today): More running, stopping and starting, more sounding and tweaking, and suddenly, I am off-book. From the revelation of Tiny Tim's death until the boy runs off to get the prize Christmas bird, it's basically a giant punctuated monologue for yours truly, and I nailed it on the first shot. Door-nailed it, you might say.

More than respecting the role, now, I enjoy it, in a far simpler and more meaningful way than I have enjoyed any role to this point. It is children's theatre--someone, please think of the children!--and so the depth is about as far as crushed ice sinks, but in the shallowest waters one can stand, run, kick (bell-kick), cavort and ad-lib as much as one wants. It is fun to say the timeless lines. I can scream at ghosts and shriek with joy within the safety of an old man's voice--no straining here. This modified prose of Dickens floats from the tongue like Shakespeare at times ("Oh, tell me I may sponge away the writing on this stone" is beautiful, iambic, a glorious climax for the penitent penny-pincher).

And we are already planning a marathon movie night: the Muppets, maybe George C. Scott, and definitely Patrick Stewart. And probably food.

--

We are back at the main office for rehearsals. Second floor of an office building owned by a company that makes computer parts. Through the back hallway, past the costume and admin rooms, is a room with a low drop-ceiling, shredded ceiling tiles bordering a skylight window, a four-piece compressed-wood floor laid over ugly carpet (and spiked for Rudolph), props for mainstage shows, and director chairs and desks. We toated all our scenery (a vanful) up the treacherous steps, raising flats over banisters, and it is in this tiny, clean, well-lighted and empty space where the magic occurs. We have two more days there before we haul it all to the library.

There is also a break room. At lunch, we spend forty-five minutes elbow-to-elbow with the people who book and workshop our shows, everyone from the artistic directors to the lobby secretary. It connects us to the bosses, this hobnobbing with the higher-ups.

And our days begin at 10:30am. A busy life, with late starts all throughout, was made for man.

--

It's official: Beringer wines are my favorite wines, especially the reds. I'm sipping a Stone Cellars Merlot from last year (and Beringer owns the SC). Apparently there are hints and shades (and other obscure presences) of blackberry, blueberry and plums. Okay. I'll drink that.

--

Richard III is fantastic. I wish I had known about the murder scene in Act I; I think it would have made a stellar Irene Ryans scene--specifically, the part where the two murderers approach the sleeping body of their victim, and one of them hesitates. The Clarence monologues are also very good dream speeches.

(Come to think of it, the Richard-Anne scene is also wonderful. Is it crazy that every play I read, I want to direct?)

--

Been watching HBO's Deadwood lately; good, dirty Western plots. Wormtongue is the doctor.

And with lines like, "Should I tell you when I'm going to take a shit tomorrow, or would that be none of your fucking business?" you can't help but watch the show and think: When did people stop being so badass?

Oranges

"I've got a devil's haircut
In my mind."

-- Beck!, "Devil's Haircut," Odelay

--

I'm eating a small orange, leaf by leaf. It's tangy and sweet, and it comes from Florida. Thirteen of its brothers and sisters are in the red-net bag at the foot of my desk, waiting to be unpeeled by my recently-trimmed fingernails, lodging pulp in my cuticles, a fruit's final rebellion to the feast.

--

We begin Christmas Carol rehearsals today, and it is snowing in this part of the city; fitting, isn't it, that the change comes today, when we acknowledge with our work the coming holiday?

(I say "this part of the city" because it is not snowing in all parts of Cincinnati. It is sleeting a block south of here, and on the bridge, it is raining, and in Kentucky, it is only cloudy. Selective weather. The snow doesn't stick, wherever it falls. It dissolves and gathers in piddly puddles, leaking and flowing in narrow streams at street edges, pushing trash and leaves like ships downhill: microcosmic urban rivers.)

--

Because my car's locks are shitty, it's easy to break into. So I don't keep valuable things in there.

I got to my car this morning, opened the passenger door to slough my bag into the seat, and I noticed that the seat was reclined fully. And then I looked at the stash of parking-lot receipts in the slot under the radio, and saw that it had been disturbed, rifled through, sifted (probably for change), and scattered onto the floor mats. Strangely, the CD player was still there, as was the stack of quarters jutting out from the coin-shaped slot.

I imagine it was a homeless man, not a crack addict or government agent; and he was cold last night, as the snow began to fall, landing on the small patches of uncovered skin (neck above the collar, wrist below the cuffs), and in sad panic, he started trying car doors, shivering up and down the street. He got to my car, and the door, miraculously, opened to him, and he leaped in without a moment's hesitation. He curled into sleep like a child, squirming and shaking without a blanket on the seat of my car, grateful for Fate's latest gift. When he awoke, the thought crossed his mind that he should pilfer the car for any other gifts available--

But he stops, a warm pang clutching his heart in the cold, and he thinks, I just stayed here without paying. The least I can do is leave it be. And he opens the door, forgetting to pop the seat back up; rested, he looks up and down the street, at any moment expecting someone to cry, "Vagrant! Miscreant! Rat!" but he hears no such thing. He smiles, feels small snowflakes kissing his cheeks in the hushed morning chill, and he hunches his shoulders, pats the top of the car, and walks his way once more.

Carol

"There are some upon this earth of yours," returned the Spirit, "who lay claim to know us, and who do their deeds of passion, pride, ill-will, hatred, envy, bigotry, and selfishness in our name, who are as strange to us and all our kith and kin, as if they had never lived. Remember that, and charge their doings upon themselves, not us."

-- Charles Dickens, "A Christmas Carol"

--

The original short story is well worth reading (naturally). Many breathtaking passages are neglected in stage and film adaptations, including some very dramatic scenes--the Ghost of Christmas Present, for instance, is eaten away from the hem up by two ghoulish children, Ignorance and Want. The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come does not merely show Scrooge the tombstone; before it does this, Scrooge is placed in his cold bedroom with his cold, deceased corpse, hidden only by shroud and shadow. He considers lifting the blanket to see the dead man's visage, but cowers, asking instead to see "tenderness connected with Death." He is then shown the Cratchit house, wherein a child has died. (Dickens at work and at ease: the juxtaposition of refusing to see one's old self dead and with the realization of an innocent child's death.)

--

On, now, to rehearsals and leisure reading. From the top of the stack come William Golding's The Spire, and Philip Yancey's Soul Survivor: How Thirteen Unlikely Mentors Helped My Faith Survive the Church. I'm especially excited about the Yancey book. I haven't read him in years, not really. I just return to his theological texts (a journalist's honest perspective on the Gospels) as often as I return to The Cloud of Unknowing or the Good Book itself; now I embark upon a new journey, into a book I'd not known of until recently. Among the thirteen mentors are Dostoevski, Drs. Robert Coles and Martin Luther King, Jr., and Annie Dillard. Yancey made me okay with Christianity at a point in my life when I was ready to give it the itchy asshole. I would not say he has made me a believer (as trite a phrase as the sentiment it expresses), but I will say that he made me wish to believe again.

If anyone's asking, Yancey favorites of mine are I Was Just Wondering, The Jesus I Never Knew, and What's So Amazing About Grace?

--

Cincy Shakes' production of Hamlet was poorly done. A flat cast (excepting a virtuoso Claudius/Ghost performance), puzzling and pitiful homages to Asian theatrical convention, and disappointing cuttings reduced the Bard's master work to a three-hour goof fest. I appreciate such textually-supported iconoclasms as a chubby Hamlet and a witty one, too, but a Gertrude as saucy as a straw wrapper and a tragedy as lame as fallen trees... It's enough to make you pick up the old verses, plucking the play once more, thumbing the worthy volume and noting--with sadness and flinching--all those underlined and boxed passages which were shoved aside on stage. Magnificent words, casually tossed, are like death on the air, remembrances from the pure dropped glibly at your feet, azure gems shining and forlorn in the mud and murk of a dredged lake's bottom.

What I mean is this:

If you toss up enough text and flatten it with the air-pressurized fist of modern times, so roughly squeezing and wrenching truth from tradition, if you flatter with backhanded slyness of eye and slippery fingers lazy with intellect, if you cast from lofty towers the very meat and mettle of poetry into the rank stew of the moat's stale waters, as you would with ill-wrought and inedible dinners, buckets of curdled fecundity, and half-evaporated bathwater; if you do this, and then seek to reinflate it all "with bated breath," empty raspings and loathsome chuckles--the last resort of the gutless goof--or to knead it back into shape, if words could work such industries while actors spew these melodies of logic and passion with as much thought or care as the babblings of hungry babes, the feint of the poor, or the recklessness of the insane; with all this "pith and moment," the holes injure your effort and release your breath to the air you sucked it from, the shoddy bricks fall from your walls of badly-planned architecture, the tones whistle like jeers from the stops unstopped, sounding your aesthetic failure with the trumpetlike toot of a flaccid balloon drooping to the ground, and your currents turn awry, lose the name of actual action (that theatrical-magical reality), and the talking heads bobble and swivel with the seeming of the play, but it is deadly, deadly, deadly,--as fatal to the very air as the smoke of burning cars, or the stench of volcanic rage, and the listening ears shut within the uncomprehending heads (the unseeing eyes, too, bored by your harsh white lights) which also bobble and swivel without knowledge or reason, and in your space, a great play is here o'erthrown.

Well done.

Frowzy

"When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the center of your soul for years, which you have, all that time, idiot-like, been saying over and over, you'll not talk about the joy of words. I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?"

-- Orual, in C. S. Lewis' Till We Have Faces

--

Faces amock, turned upside down on my desk, finally closed. A magnificent read, a pre-Girard rereading of a sacrificial, mythological text. Cupid, Psyche, filtered through Orual, on pagan ground. Is it, like A Grief Observed, an unveiling of death?

--

A Christmas Carol is next, halfway done. I'm stealing a break in a little over an hour to catch Hamlet at Cincy Shakes (finally, after two weeks of trying, a matinee on a puffy, gray Saturday). But it's now or never, for both: Carol rehearsals start Monday, and Hamlet ends tomorrow.

Speaking of the Carol, the beginning of its rehearsals marks the end of my first run of shows. We finished touring Sleepy Hollow and Cinderella yesterday. Turned in the paperwork, too, with accompanying checks and notes. I am now one-fourth of my way through my first (?) professional gig, and the bottles in my room are testament to my life in Cincinnati. As is the stack of media from the library: The Flaming Lips, Miles Davis, Aaron Copland, Jimi Hendrix, and the old fave, MWS. Got music on my horizons as the world around me leaps past Thanksgiving and into Christmas.

Also caught Quantum of Solace last night, saw it with dozens of high-school underground types and middle-aged couples out for a Friday night frolic. Yet another hella-good Bond flick. I'll always be a sucker for action sequences with long camera shots from daring angles, and while some herky-jerky clips cut way too quickly, a good story and cool people doing ripshit stunts will always be enough to sustain a badass film.

--

Feeling frowzy today. I did not know what the word frowzy might mean until this morning, when I saw it on my Google homepage. It means "habitually unkempt." My gut fidgets at my waistline and the piles around me grow, and with the overcast sky outside my window (so bright, the brightest color of brooding, like silver milk) and the sounds of cars driving on wet streets (peeling, spraying water from the pavement, through the treads and into the heavy air, tires leaving ghostly tracks of drier road that fade back into wetness and shine), I fight my eyes for aperture.

--

Cooked for the house on Thursday night. They loved it. Ladles of casserole sauce over hills of just-right rice, sweet tea and cobbler after, and the vegetarians were just as stoked as the carnivores. And I have no chores this week; I am off, in more ways than one.

Also: Discovered the Trinity Oaks 2004 California Cabernet Sauvignon yesterday. Kept me toasty. What a wine.

Students

"If McCain-Palin had won, I was going to restart the Underground. If the U. S. military has M-16s, why shouldn't I have an AK-47?"

-- a radical liberal I talked to last night

--

Met up with Sawicki & Co. last night for Buds with her buds. Talks of nipple-piercings, militant liberalism, and ancient history among friends. Sipping watery beer, smiling when appropriate, relishing the night. Rode out to Skyline for weird chili. (Cinnamon, chocolate, and no beans...and they call this chili?)

--

Spoke with a militant pothead liberal who is convinced (and tries to convince others) that the Republicans are methodically creating a fascist state, and that Obama is leading the way to true democracy. So we talked about anarchy for a little bit while he took hits of "funk" in his swirly painted pipe, tapping the weed into the hole with the butt end of a lighter. He said he respects Libertarians, says it's too bad none of them have the balls to become socialists. But he has nothing but fear and loathing for Republicans. In the same breath that he condemns white men (he is a white man), he will use the phrase "niggah" to describe black locals (the word "nigger" is off-limits, with that pesky suffix), claim that there are "no Indians left because the government killed them all" (there was a Native American girl in the room), and expostulate the values of the AK-47 in the hands of students (the French Revolution is his chief historical source, Les Miserables his chief literary source). Consider:

Me: "Be careful quoting the French Revolution."

Him: "Fair enough. But the point is, the French had to do it three times before they got it right. We've only done it once. It took them three times. First, it was students. A bunch of students held Paris hostage because they didn't like the way the country was going. It was just those Paris students, because no one else was willing to speak up. And the government killed all of them for protesting."

"Protesting? They made barricades of gunpowder and threatened to blow up the city."

"Fair enough. But the government massacred them, and that--them dying--is what got the country's attention. Then the rest of the people rose up. And the government killed a lot of them. That's what has to happen. A lot of people have to die in order for an idea to take effect in a government. And I am going to be one of those students."

"Fair enough. But doesn't that sound like terrorism?"

"See? People are calling Obama a terrorist, too. He's not a terrorist. He's a politician."

"Okay."

"This is like the Second American Revolution. I'm going to move to Oregon when it starts."

"What about Obama?"

"That's what I mean. He's a revolutionary. He's going to change the nation. Like I said, the French had to do it three times before they got it right."

"But they were just cutting people's heads off in the street. Over and over and over. They just found the people who got rich off of the last revolution and cut their heads off."

"Fair enough."

--

It was like arguing with a crazy Hillsdale neo-con, except that he was a UC liberal. And he was high.

Sleepy

"...I discovered the wonderful power of wine. I understand why men become drunkards. For the way it worked on me was--not at all that it blotted out these sorrows--but that it made them seem glorious and noble, like sad music, and I somehow great and reverend for feeling them."

-- Orual, in Till We Have Faces, by C. S. Lewis

--

Halloween came and went a week ago; yet Sleepy Hollow lingers. We do it about every three days, interrupting strings of consecutive Cinderella shows. The immediacy of fear has gone from the children, now that October is gone--the charm of the autumn chills along with it, replaced with the constant drafts and heavy colds of November. The orange leaves and naked branches forbear an icy winter, not the shades and seams of darkness. No one wants to be scared any more.

After the tingling trick-or-treat is the scouring of candies, the devouring of dainties. Darkness to light. Reminders of fear are placebos to the mind which has reached security and serenity.

In a week, incidentally, rehearsals for A Christmas Carol begin. The Wal-Mart yuletide displays have emerged between aisles and radio stations, no longer heeding Thanksgiving as the threshold of the holidays, have begun playing Christmas music. How quickly.

--

The left front tire deflated slowly yesterday, air leaking out in the wrinkled creases in the side rubber, the sad wheel collapsed beneath its burden, the face of the bumper and windshield and headlights sinking morosely to one side, like a dental patient's numbed face before a filling. I replaced the tire today. Only one more tire left to fail, exhaling slowly on borrowed time. Even the car feels the season, its tires tiring, expiring.

--

Obama won, too. How enthusiastically the masses accept the news, how spirited and swift comes the arrogance of having been a pebble in a landslide, how joyful the countenances of those whose lives will not be altered in the slightest by the nation's latest rage.

A black friend of mine went to a black party to celebrate our nation's first African-American president-elect. He said he left after a few beers because everyone started crying, weeping over the day they thought impossible. "There were young people, and a lot of old people," he said. "Old people have seen a lot of shit."

(Is it unfair to say that I distrust any person--black, white, purple--who makes that many promises? or that I hesitate to smile with a thousand smiling faces? or that I am suspicious of any sentiments this widely held?)

--

Most of the movies I've watched lately have been rated R. I watched V for Vendetta on November 5th to remember, remember.

--

I came out of a long sickness and fell into another. This one is tamer, a tickle, a light cough. Hopefully it joins its father, circling lazily in the past along with October and the election. I sleep on air and under clouds, the blasts from the space-heater cooking my feet, and I enjoy this hearty, free weekend. No work, no shows, for two days. If there is truly no rest for wicked people, then each nap is salvation.