10.07

Late again. Oh well, what the hell, he sang.

Everything in my life is pivoting on a pumpkin towards a golden banner year.

Personal

Erin came to visit, which was great fun. At long last delusions of grandeur there have been stamped out. Pretty authoritatively this time. The girl gave it a shot. I guess that’s all you can really ask, though it might not be what you hope for. Kudos for trying it on anyway. She brought a pumpkin, and with it, everything good. She came for the first week of Redmoon rehearsals and the beginning of fall, just before my birthday. The mini-pumpkin still sits on my wall, causing the earth to slowly shift its metaphysical rotations.

In the first rotations of the pumpkin, Summer came to visit two days after Erin left, which was maybe the greatest birthday present I ever got. The kind of Adventürlife that says a suggestion to check out how to get to a vegan diner is pretty good evidence that she’s bought a plane ticket. Too much vodka at the polish bar down the street and a lot of conversations spiraling outwards into the shadowy arms of thoughts. Too much to keep track of.

Professional

Hunchback maintains its golden glow, though I miss some of the more serious group physical exercises we used to do. On the other hand, this has got to be the most positive rehearsal atmosphere I’ve ever been a part of. Leslie continues to blow my mind as someone with a keen eye for what the story wants to do, but someone totally unattached to ego. She’s perfectly willing to let things go if an accident proves stageworthy. I mean a lot of people talk about listening to the input their actors are giving them – I just never met a director that actually has that much faith in her actors’ creativity. Couple that with a wicked discerning eye and you get a whole other way of making theatre.

I got some more thoughts on that brewing. Parallels between directing and acting that begin to point towards what theatre had ought to be.

Other auditions go well. Finally got my foot in the door at Steppenwolf, where I gave a good audition, and Erica seemed pleased, saying she’d forward my stuff over to Phil at Lookingglass, where they’d be happy to know I’m around. For those of my readers who don’t speak Chicagotheatrese, that translates into English roughly as FUCK YEAH.

The plan continues, puzzlingly, to work.

Political

It’s a two way split for me between Barack and Edwards. Depending on who picks up momentum in Iowa, I’ll probably vote for whichever of the two of them is leading when New Mexico’s primary rolls around. My head says Edwards and my gut says Barack, and both say not Hillary. Remember NAFTA?

Support the Writers’ Guild strike. Watch:

More on that later.

The Lemon System for Rating Bad Ideas

So my friends and I, we have this system of rating just exactly how bad a bad idea is. It comes from the kind of shit you get up to when you don’t drink in high-school, and I think it deserves some written words.

So one night, east mountains, we’re sitting around looking at stars and talking about Kurt Vonnegut (or Sartre or Stalin or oil prices or Catholicism or Kafka or all five), and there’s a bowl of lemons in front of me.

Suddenly I think with myself:

“You know? Lemons are a fruit. How come we don’t just eat them?”
“Um. Cause it’s a bad idea.”
“Yeah, of course, you know. Yeah. Of course. -But how bad?”
“Bad.”
“…”
“Don’t do it. Don’t.”
“I am a scientist. A philosopher.”
“You are just stupid as hell.”
“In the name of philosophy.”
“Stupid as hell.”

And I was right. It was a bad idea. Eating a whole lemon is a bad idea.

So anyway long story short we all ate lemons, and we all agreed: it is a bad idea. We even agreed, roughly, as to the relative badness of the idea. So eating one whole lemon is a One Lemon Idea. Implying, of course, the question: is a Two Lemon Idea as bad as eating two lemons? Or is it twice as bad a One Lemon Idea? Philosophy is big. The bowl of lemons was also big.

In the spirit of philosophy, we ate more lemons.

Turns out, OK, that eating two lemons is much worse than twice as bad as eating one lemon. It is easily four times worse than eating one lemon. I capped out at two an a half, with a little vomit. And another long story short, one poor bastard Joe gets up to four lemons, determining at each stage that the increase in badness of idea is certainly not linear, and may well be exponential.

But. You cannot eat enough lemons to equal the badness of the idea of The Holocaust. Just can’t. If you feed yourself only lemons for ever, still you cannot eat so many lemons. There are not so many lemons for one person to eat.

So after brief considerations of exponential systems (but what about bad ideas which are, say, 18 times as bad as eating one lemon, but not yet 32 times as bad?) and some absurdist detours (but what about the metaphysical ramifications of one man eating two hundred thousand lemons?) we elected for a straight multiplication of a stable base system. A Ten Lemon Idea is ten times as bad an idea as eating a lemon. So that eating two lemons is actually (and Kafka, I think, would agree) closer to a Four Lemon Idea, and eating three lemons is probably a Six Lemon Idea.

I promise you it’s more useful when you apply it to ideas that don’t involve eating lemons.

So driving drunk has got to be like a twenty lemon idea. Flipping the school flag was probably about a five lemon idea, and we never got around to it. Soaking tennis balls in kerosene, lighting them on fire, and launching them from a three-man slingshot is like a three lemon idea if you have a lake and there are police nearby, but in New Mexico is like probably a thirty lemon idea, depending on the season and the potential for wildfires.

We had a lot of fun in high school in the one to ten lemon range of ideas. Flaming pesticide and nine literal hours of literally nonstop extreme ping-pong come to mind.

The moral of the story is that you should not eat lemons because it is a bad idea. And it’s also not good for your teeth.