October 7, 2015

The Iliad today. Amid the glazed eyes, five were with me. I suppose that’s a lot.

October 6, 2015

Terrible dream sometime last night. There was a big political rally on a green hill, some righteous cause. But I said something that turned everybody off, and spent the rest of the dream trying to explain myself, and even though I knew I was right, I watched my friends depart from me, one by one, even one who was supposed to be my lover. Deepening the distress was the fact that I had acquired a beautiful green table, and when I was left alone, there was nobody to help me carry it home.
   
I keep looking around for the cappuccino I already finished.

As dawn broke I was enlarging the back garden to plant two kinds of lilies, toad flax, trillium. Transplanted a tulip tree out of the garden to a place in the lawn where it may work out its destiny for the next two hundred years.
   
We have gone from judging art on the qualities of the work to judging it according the identity of the artist. On one level, I don’t know how to dispute this. I learned one way; that doesn’t make the other way depraved. And yet, I wonder how long we will be satisfied with bad poems coming from good people, wrong plays written from the right perspective? I remember a colleague’s insistence last year that the Arch Brown Foundation only consider the work of women. She almost said in so many words, “in case a man’s work is better and we have to give the prize to him.” A woman won on her own merits that year, so the issue subsided for the moment.
   
Bought two enormous pumpkins for my front porch. Couldn’t have lifted them had they been any bigger. Happy as a kid.

October 5, 2015

Gym, email, coffee, and it’s still dark. I do love the dark of the morning!

Read-through of Washington Place last night at the Magnetic. In my court are the almost unbelievable number of typos, sometimes whole missing words and phrases. I wanted to blame S’s printer, but they’re the same on my file. Add “proofread play” to the list of accomplishments above. This is the first stolen day of my “spring break,” and I might actually go to the studio, if I think I can sustain Lupe’s redecorating and the almost certain flooding.

Planted blue parrot tulips, crown imperial, and what I took to be wood hyacinths.

Dinner at a new Chinese fusion with DJ. I ordered what the waitress said was their mildest dish, and it was still too hot. I did notice, however, that the ache in my joints abated– one pain distracted by another, or is spice a real remedy for the bones? Staggering to bed too early--

October 4, 2015

Saturday was shimmering curtains of rain. Achievements included managing to program a new universal remote, after having told the clerk at Best Buy that it would never work for me.
   
Though I’d decided that try to sing outdoors in the unrelenting downpour was idiotic, I nevertheless appeared at City-County Plaza in time for the opening of Pride. Turns out that was well, for the other basses were no-shows. It was quite miserable, but not quite unbearable. At one point I was standing at the edge of a tarp when the tarp had filled up with rain, and dumped its load directly on my head. This occasioned much mirth, even on my part, once the shock passed away and I saw the faces convulsed with laughter around me. It was like a scene out of a movie. We actually sounded quite good, delighting the ten or twenty people who may have been listening. The Asheville High ROTC color guard raised the colors as we sang the National Anthem.  We sounded good.
   
Scudding gray clouds outside the tiny window.

October 3, 2015

Crashed into the end of the week like a locomotive into a wall. You would have thought the heavens had rained all the rain they possibly could, but though the air is empty at this dim hour, more rain is forecast. A hurricane churns off the coast.
   
Went to see Lucia’s play at Magnetic last night. Struck by the fact that I knew no one in the audience (it used to be all “us,” a tightknit theatrical group) though I still knew everybody on stage. The audience was sparse, but, then, the weather was unspeakable. They had cider. Cooling my throat with cider, I thought that sitting in a theater waiting for the show to begin, drinking cider, was one of the best things in the world.    

Heaven rained me home.

October 2, 2015

Odd conviction sitting in the theater in Waynesville, hearing director’s notes after the rehearsal. The conviction was that I was going to be in an accident and die on the road on the way home. The weather was terrible, so it wasn’t completely implausible. I considered staying over in a motel for the night, but then thought, “Oh, hell, let’s get it over with.” The main emotion was disappointment that my last night should be so dreary and lusterless. The rain was heavy and the driving awful, but here I am.

October 1, 2015

In an ethics argument with philosophers, you know you’re winning when they sink into philo-speak (“etiology,” “normative” etc). Undergraduates (who are not philosophy majors) talk of Philosophy as a smokescreen for bullshit, and I cannot from my experience with my peers contradict them.

Rough rehearsal last night. We may have lost Erin for good. Another woman is being groomed. Driving through cloudbursts– not my favorite thing. If I don’t stop to think I can get through most of my speeches. When I pause to correct or consider, then we leave the rails.

My first Café Americano. It is both bitter and weak– I hope that’s not a comment on “Americano.”

Distant hurricane. Rain. Petals falling on my floor from the fading roses.