June 10, 2015

Image from the dark of morning: the streetlight dashed off the birdbath in such a way that it looked like a sea ripped by violent wind. Only when I opened the door and heard the sound did I know that it was not wind but heavy rain shattering the surface.

    Gratifying E-mail from K at GPTC:

Thank you for this very kind email.
I know that I spoke with you after, but I want to reiterate – your play is beautiful, deeply effective and moving. I think you may get a production query from Omaha before long.
Scott and I always review the responses and respondents each year and try to make changes that will best serve the playwrights. This will certainly be the case again this summer. We will be working hard on our end to improve the feedback and we will not stop until damaging comments/tone are a thing of the past. Your ideas will certainly aid us in this regard.
Please feel free to write or call with anything regarding this or anything else and please let us know how the continuing journey of the play goes.
Have a wonderful start to your summer.
Most warmly,
            K

Settling into a summer rhythm. Some of it is wasteful, and those parts must be revised.
   
Cop in McKinney, Texas, caught on video arriving at the scene of an over-attended pool party already out of control. HE was out of control, I mean, as soon as his shoe leather touched the pavement. The clear, obvious and immediate testimony was that he did not find the white teenagers to be a threat; he did find the black teenagers to be a threat, even when they related to him in calm voices that they were simply attending a pool party. To get them under control was the focus of his anxiety, though from the video they didn’t seem to be out of control, merely numerous. So many questions. I’ll bet he never thought “I am going to distinguish between the black kids and the white kids,” but that response was immediate and reflexive. It’s hard to think how to cure something that is immediate and reflexive, except to hire different people, who have more informed reflexes, or at least those more open to the scrutiny of reason. More basically, who gave the police the idea that they ought to be mindlessly obeyed, and disobedience ought to be punished by summary execution, or the threat of it? The are like one of those diseases where the immune system, created to protect, turns on its own body in destruction. Eleven other cops were on the scene, and they seemed to have carried on correctly, except for doing nothing to stop their berserk colleague. Sometimes I hate cell phones, but sometimes I think God gave them to us to open the secrets of the unrighteous.

Good day at the gym. Hard and blissful sleep.