Excerpt from my Letter to K.

...Only recently does it feel like I'm emerging from this past harsh winter. In many ways, I'm actually still quite lost in it. 2009, redemptive and astonishing in some ways, predictably decimated and besieged my spirit. Life and work deteriorated into a terrible and humiliating crush of stuff, just STUFF that never stopped pushing and crushing. I began 2010 prepared to seek vengeance for 2009's abuses; now I'm approaching yet another birthday with even just a little bit more exhaustion and dismay as before, and an even longer tale of indignities for which to seek satisfaction.
As demoralized as this may sound, however, there is, in fact, a great deal of joy in my days, grand little pieces in which I take some pride, things that are worthy of my love--
--for that's where my great bitternesses and griefs are all rooted, so far as I can see: as I grow older, the citadel of my pride only strengthens, and I rush that much quicker to the conclusion that the world is not worthy of my love. This citadel grows out of grief; it is in fact a lament written in bluster, for all the heart-blood poured out quite uselessly, as much for myself as for others.
There is something true, here, though. I know enough to know that my pride, my heart-blood is worth something, and I feel its wastage practically as an act of aggression:
How dare they? How dare they drop the ball at Copenhagen? How dare they tolerate such crappy work in this theatre community? How dare they continue to sanction such grievous acts of police violence in this city? How dare they...
I do not mean to draw neat equivalencies between all of these things, and it's true that I do little enough to justify how personally I take all of this. Still, to me, that only underscores how tough this problem is. For I am notorious for my emotional firewalls: I have few close friends, and fewer of these know enough to begin to understand my impossible families. My professional world in the addictions-recovery/mental health community exists in an entire other universe from my performance community, as that is likewise almost literally a hemisphere away from people I care quite deeply for, and that quite apart from my families entirely.
The problem here is that I am the flying bridge linking all of these emotional provinces. And so volatile are they all, that a full-fledged crisis in one of them never fails to somehow coincide with another crisis, in an other emotional province... And I have a hard time defying the accusation that I am, in fact, the agent of crisis, transmitting from one such remote emotional province to another...
Oftentimes, my vestigially Catholic self will take quite seriously the Apostle's enjoinder, to live each moment as a sacrament (I forget which Apostle so memorably said this). And so I lurch from project to project, meeting to meeting, day to day desperately seeking to expiate my all but sinful contagions. As silly as this sounds, I cannot help but point out the etymology of the word, 'tragedy,' translated literally as 'goat-song,' from whence 'scapegoat.' My theatre and my work are the sacrificial offerings I make to atone for my unwitting crimes. But by that measure, I'm failing indeed.
Again I reiterate that there is more joy, in my day-to-day existence, than this angstiness allows for. Right now I'm teaching at Rosemont, a residential rehab for adolescent women in custody for behavioral and/or substance abuse reasons. I'm teaching with a group called Playwrite, Inc--a local nonprofit that leads two-week workshops teaching at-risk youth how to write plays. At the end of those two weeks, their works is staged with professional actors. Both as a teacher and an actor, this is the finest work I do.
Concurrently, I'm rehearsing, and am about to open a production of 'Madeline and the Gypsies' at NW Children's Theater. I'm playing the Strong Man, and I'm having an extraordinary time. Secret: I've always loved the Madeline bookes. That alone is more than enough to counter my habitual theatre people misanthropy...
...I did not mean to ramble at such length, and in so scattered a fashion. Know that this is all by way of saying, in my own, inscrutable way, that your friendship and company is much missed...

best,

paulmonster-rar-rar-rar

Excerpt from my Letter to E.

...I hear you.

A part of me says that all of us are unsuited for one another. Since we each contain Whitman's multitudes, what right can we possibly have to find the suited one? Who themselves may or may not be looking? In this context, 'settling' is not a compromise. It is almost a moral imperative.

In my chequered history of intimacy (which reads like an Abbott and Costello oral history of the Thirty Years' War), the good bits are where my flawed insuperable multitudes clamor a kind of harmony against her flawed insuperable multitudes. Such things cannot be choreographed, not really...