December 3, 2008

Odetta is dead. They are all gone into a world of light.

Overdid at the Y, and then on the winding industrial staircases of the Flood, where I moved stuff up five flights from one studio to another. With Jason there, I don’t gain much space, but I do gain light and I do gain Jason. I gave up with not even half the job done, and was afflicted later on with excruciating stomach cramps. I don’t understand why the body endures or allows those. They seem to be to no purpose–except, in my case anyway, to signal dehydration. Jolene always has a flood of projects and potential nights out for me when I walk in, which begin to run off like rain in the telling, and I struggle to keep just one specific enough actually to consider.
The nap out of which I woke into the cramps was filled with strange, vivid dreams. The last one reminded me that when I dream of myself in a play, or of the production of one of my plays, the stage is often immense–I’m talking football fields and basketball courts-- and brilliantly lit, and the audience so far away I don’t know how they see or hear anything. There is sometimes a series a stages, each one with its own scene or moment at the play, and the dark audience at the far end, as though they themselves were the last scene. This afternoon it was my play. Disasters kept happening and mishaps befalling the cast, so I was acting in it myself. It kept getting weirder and farther from the original conception, which I took, as one does, for as long as possible, until I mentioned my distress to the director– who was Rob, I think, clad in a white night shirt. He blew up and said, “You know, I don’t really care. I don’t love you–“ Here he said my full, real name, which is rather startling in a dream, whether the speaker loves you or not.

Does my subconscious think that a director must love you to do justice to your play? Perhaps he recognizes that as a rare and precious ideal.

Christmas card from the Nicolinos signals the start of the season.

The Arts Council names Jonas Gerard as Artist of the Year. The work I’ve seen of his is immediately striking and pleasing, but subsequently, once one gets the point, boring. I would buy one if I thought the electric first impression would endure until the bill was paid.

Some sort of traffic karma is working itself out on me. Was nearly wiped out on Lakeshore by a woman driving very fast in my lane, straight toward me. She had veered out to avoid a cyclist, and had chosen to do so on a bend where oncoming traffic was obscured. The look on the cyclist’s face, when he saw what was about to happen, was sheer horror. But I slammed on my little PT Cruiser’s brakes, and the woman had enough time to get back in her lane just inches, it seemed, from my hood. There wasn’t even time to blow the horn.