Meditations in an Emergency

Jesus fucking Christ my neck is killing me. Anyone who has ever romanticized the wandering life has clearly never actually slept on a couch for an extended period of time. Maybe it’s this particular couch, which grows harder and crueler with each night, and which I’ve grown to disdain more than just about any other anonymous object. Sure, me and this couch have had some good times, most of them involving a huge flatscreen HDTV and season 2 of Mad Men On Demand, but every time I start to come around, start to see her in a sweeter light, the old bitch gives me another night of uncompromisingly restless sleep, and I wake up with a splitting headache.

Thus far, my brief soujourn to Chicago has been one of peaks and troughs. The show I’m here to work on is very exciting, and we’re making lots of progress (I think), but it’s also mind-bendingly difficult, a musical adaptation of a short story that deals with consciousness and the nature of reality and lots of other things that are particularly suited to fiction and very difficult to adapt into a dramatic frame. The thing is, when I first started working on this, I thought it would be one of the most style-driven things I’ve ever done; in it’s most basic form, it’s just a simple horror story: a man can’t sleep at night because he’s still haunted by a childhood fable, a monster that will come into his room and rip out of his eyes. That, compounded with the fact that I’m writing the book for a musical that already has lots of gorgeous music written, made this whole thing seem like a slam-dunk on a children’s size basketball hoop. Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy that it’s become so much more complex and multifaceted than I originally expected, but it’s also, you know, really hard. My entire trip to Chicago is actually a pretty close parallel to this; I figured it would be a fun, creatively rejuvenating coupla weeks, one last hurrah of summertime before my big move and my big hunkering-down into real life. Instead, I find myself in a twisting, wildly fluctuating emotional state; over the course of nearly every day I’ve felt completely hopeless and miserable one minute, then completely inspired and fulfilled the next. I dunno. The one thing that’s abundantly clear is that I could use a good night’s sleep.

Also, my friend Matt gave my new blog a shout-out in his, so I figured I would return the favor. Especially since he was the one who convinced me to give this thing a go in the first place. Matt, a buddy from High School who’s currently living in LA, keeps one of the most detailed, consistent blogs I’ve ever seen, updating several times a week and more or less chronicling his entire life. It can be both very funny and very sad (sometimes in the same entry), and he has maintained a degree of raw emotional honesty that I still find shocking in such a public forum. It’s at http://simpsnsfan.livejournal.com/ (and you get extra points if you can figure out what the hell the name “Electric Five-Star” means without him having to explain it to you)

Meanwhile, I want to get more people to read this, but I don’t know how. I guess I’ll advertise it on the ol’ facebook, even though I’ve been making a concerted effort to phase that ugly, ugly website out of my life. Problem is, I don’t want to be one of those people who updates their facebook status constantly with the same goddamn links. I want to just pick the time of the day that has the most facebook traffic. When would that be? I can’t decide. I feel like it might be late at night on the weekend, or mid-afternoon on the weekday. Any thoughts, four or five readers I currently have?