Change, recycling.
Narratively:
I’ve been playing pool and learning to ride a unicycle.
Lotta, the Swede that lived in my house for four months, is gone, and I don’t even have a picture. Silly, that. Kelley, the original Chicago roommate, has gone on to live with her boyfriend in Minneapolis. Ian, a friend from Albuquerque, is moved in, though I haven’t seen much of the Traveling Man so far. Montana, New York, DC.
I avoided getting involved with a girl who, in hindsight, was a poor match (didn’t see why preplanned housing developments might be horrific), and then bungled (mostly?) involvement with another, who might have been a better. They had the same name, but pronounced it differently. Odd. An old friend from home continues, problematically, to haunt my imaginary lovelife.
I had to go on for one of the actors I’m understudying at Lookingglass. During previews, a week before my contract was originally to even begin. Kaboom.
I built a table and am spending a lot of time at home. My mother says that the clinical term for it is regression in service of the ego. Meaning that I’m staring at the walls and recharging. I’ve also had Ratatat’s “Classics” on repeat for about three days.
My brother is getting married! Congratulations!
I’m thinking of visiting home again before the tour, looming large on the horizon.
Thematically:
The last week or so has seen me in a bit of a funk.
Change in roommates, an accompanying change in furniture and decor, wonderland’s radical upheaval of reality, new music, and a new weekly rhythm all has me forgetting everything past two months. Chicago is new again.
I like to think of my time onstage as an understudy as my time down the rabbit hole. More literally, through the lookingglass. I got six hours of rehearsal. It was crazy, and its memory is precious to me. I don’t think I have ever been much more focused for so long a period in my life than the 48 hours before going on stage, or much more happy than when toasted to by the actors in the lobby after the show.
One day, wonderland, the next, Mitch and his girlfriend: “Yeah, she’s looking for a bike. You know. Just something basic.” …Is she.
In the days after Loookingglass I let the momentum die out on the interesting girl from Six Flags, my brother got engaged, and I received some troubling text messages from my good friend and ghost-lover. A bit of a funk followed. There was much reading of novels, and much drinking of liquor and coffee, both at home and abroad. So I’m drying out for a week or so – trying to reassert at least some kind of chemical / nutritional balance. We are our bodies, after all.
Listening to Ratatat all day in a scrupulously clean apartment, I am reminded of the strange and isolated weeks in my parents’ living room after Ava gave me notice, playing Final Fantasy six hours a day and eating Posole. Not in its heartbreak – not at all – but in the strange feeling that some great finger was taking all week to very slowly push some hidden reset button.
I am excited to see what comes next. I don’t always feel liberated by the neverending newness of life, but I try. And sometimes I do.
