April 28, 2012

I stood still beside the water gardens long enough, and the frog forgot about me and kicked up from the depths. He is a big, stout bullfrog. He looks heftier than he did last year, but maybe he profited from having all my bugs to himself. I bought goldfish for the pools, to combat the larvae I saw dancing in the water like dust in a storm.

Went to the studio late today, mostly to try to rearrange, but did a little painting. Most of my paintings are back from the restaurant, and “Rough Beast” comes down Monday. I don’t know how many people saw “Rough Beast,” but certainly no more of my friends than managed an appearance at the opening. I long ago grew accustomed to my colleagues’ and friends’ indifference to what I do (maybe a scar over the place rather than full reconciliation) but what continues to perplex me is what I interpret as a lack of curiosity. You’d think there’d be interest in knowing what people you know do. Morbid fascination, even. I think I have such an interest. I think I go where I’m invited to see the people who invite me in action. My students thought it was canny of me to assign a book that had two of my plays in it, making that fifteen cents royalty and all, but I did it because I would have been devoured by curiosity if one of my professors has been a playwright, or a poet, or an exotic dancer. I would have gone to see, whatever the cost. Earl Wassermann’s book on Shelley came out while we were his students, and the few copies that could be had at first were treated as sacred relics. So much community is available at our fingertips, so many devices and social networks, that perhaps curiosity is a thing of the past, like hunger in a place where the tables are always laden.

TD has me watching a TV stream of Smash, a show about putting on a Broadway musical.  It is funny, slick, horrifying. Most of its horror is that it rings true. One line did stand out, the assertion that most shows take three or four years to reach the stage. I think the tears I wept over Lincoln may not have been so much wasted as premature.

Devouring time, now that I have it, like a rich dessert.

The roses are in bloom.

A pair of mockingbirds is raising their brood in my rose thicket. It turns the yard into a war zone, them attacking everything that moves. They’ve stopped attacking me, probably assuming I’m a sort of lumbering ruminant who means no harm and has manifested no bird-eating behavior. I blame them for banishing my towhees. This is a grievous thing, and I don’t know how to make it right.