October 9, 2012

Yesterday a boiling cauldron of deeds. I finished Act I of The Mermaid. I sent off my application for an artist’s grant from the state (my eighteenth application, with no reason to think it will find more success than the others). Worked out memorably at the Y (still stretching against leg cramps), met with TD at Starbucks to convince him to enter his screenplay for a grant as well. Did not once look at my portfolio. Made a slumgullion of the vegetables left from the garden, peppers, tomatoes, red onions, the un-eggplant looking white eggplant. Then it was noon.

The Mermaid sends me back to those days when I set down to write and the writing rolled out before me like landscape before a moving car. All I had to do is look, and write. Great joy, but also, behind the joy, anxiety that this too will never find its way into the world. Does the world need it? Not so much as a cure for cancer, as much as anything onstage now. I hear MM saying the lines as I write them. I must tell him.

Late dream that DJ and I were in a hurricane on the coast. I parked the car, with him in it, and ran. I assumed he’d follow, but he didn’t. When the wind died down, I went back to look, and the street was empty, no cars, no people at all, just emptiness and debris.

No frost yet, but the garden looks as battered as after a night of frost, or it will when the light comes. It must sense what’s coming, give up, some of it, on its own terms.