February 25, 2012


Evening at KS’s “Opera Creations.” Fun. Proof that there’s nothing you can do to The Magic Flute to keep it from being magical. Zach gave me a carnation. Above all else, testimony that you can do what you want. If you want to sing opera you don’t have to audition for the established power in the area, you can put on your own, and people will come to soak up the enthusiasm. Jonathan Ross was the best Papageno I’ve ever seen, in a room with eighty people in it on the top floor of an old Masonic hall. I wanted to play too. They had left out Sarastro– I suppose because everyone is either a soprano or a boy or playing Papageno–and I wanted to cry “I can sing that!” I suppose someone’s crying “I can sing that” is the whole point.

Tamino was snatched from Bible Camp and set down in the magic forest.

Dream before morning. Jake and Ellen and I were sitting around at some conference, telling each other what we’d been doing lately. The dream was so close to the edge of waking that I told them what I really AM doing in the world of day.

Jake was in my mind because DJ and I stopped for drinks before returning from the opera, and Jake and Rob were commiserating at Avenue M over the manifold and seemingly inexhaustible deficiencies of their department. They torment Jake for the same reason they tormented Cody, because he is already beyond their level of expertise and that seems to them a kind of insolence. They do not use and absorb what is better than they, they discredit it, or hold it at arm’s length as though energy and insight were a kind of aggression. Rob’s father just died, and yet it falls to him to salvage Jake’s feelings, and the honor of his department.

Rob’s father, Cindy’s mother, Titus the cat in two days. The Reaper’s blade swings in the dark of night.

Dancing at Avenue M. You forget how awkward contemporary social dancing looks when you’re not doing it. The women looked good, but the space is really too small for men to dance in.

Logan and Alex and the glass blowing boys have moved from the studio. Jolene points out that they made all the noise and all the mess, but I miss them, and the second floor is like a funeral home without them. They reminded me of Titus, actually: he made almost all the mess, vomited all the vomit you had to be careful of barefoot in the morning, but I miss him, and the quiet in the house is unsettling.