Bounty.

I dream of basil.

More to the point, I dream of a wall of rich, lush basil leaves growing happily in the summer sun, giving me an endless supply of pesto. I dream, to be very specific, of the trellis that used to grow outside my friend Ruthellen's house where leaves half the size of my hand flourished. Any time I visited I could pick freely from it, load a baggie and giggle my way back to my kitchen knowing I was having pasta that night.

I had pasta last night, and as you may guess, basil was involved. We have tried to plant and grow basil in the past. The folks who owned our house before us built a small garden in one corner of the deck. It used to have a "pool" as part of it--which is to say they dropped a plastic bucket into a hole, packed the edges with dirt, lined it with bricks and filled it with water. In this manner, they created a delightful little oasis where mosquitos could find all the stagnant water they needed to potentially breed with unchecked fecundity and take over the world.

Needless to say, the little garden no longer has a pool.

As I was saying, we've tried to plant and grow basil, among other herbs. We have, in fact, successfully planted it. That part, we've got locked. Growing it--beyond what growth is going to occur naturally for a few days because we bought a fairly healthy plant--has proven somewhat more elusive. Unless, of course, I've misunderstood the point of it all and what you're supposed to end up with are withered stalks covered in a stylish black blight. Then we're perfect at it.

I think the problem has been that we condemned our basil to a life without shade. Our understanding had been that basil requires full sun. That's what the little stickers on the several plants we've killed have said. This year, however, we added some trellis work to our deck, rising over the little garden. And, lo and behold, the basil has (so far) prospered. It's not as if we've installed some sort of retractable garden roof that closes according to the needs of the basil. It appears to just offer the plants a little respite. In thanks, they are producing big, full leaves--and plenty of them.

While I'm not pretending I've mastered the art of basil growing to Ruthellen-like proportions, I admit that I've let the idea of training it to rise up the trellis enter my head. Until then, I'm content to just be able to step out my door and pick the stuff. Certainly a benefit on nights like the one that inspired this post.

(Cue flashback music.)

I was tired. My back had been flaring up. I really didn't want to cook, and my wallet explained that I didn't feel like buying anything, either. But this is why the universe gave us the wonder that is pasta.

The initial idea was to make a simple pasta with basil. I'd looked at the plants that morning and knew I had to pinch off some leaves to keep them growing. So that, with a bit of garlic, olive oil and butter, would make for a classically simple and summer-light dinner. (With wheat pasta, of course.) Then I remembered that in a recent bout of indiscriminate shopping I had re-upped my caper supply. And the hits kept on coming--when I got home I discovered that, much to my surprise, the Food Fairy had left me a package of Trader Joe's chicken-garlic sausage. Now I was a bit more inspired. Even if I hadn't been by then, the act of actually pinching off those deep green, two-fingers-wide leaves certainly would have done the trick.

The plan in the long run is to have our little garden teeming with herbs. On one side, rosemary, chives, mint and lavender are already fighting for supremacy in their 1x2 space. I think the mint is winning. The basil has made a foothold in the middle section, squaring off against a sage plant. (And that stuff can grow like mad.) There's room for more. On the other side, a strawberry plant my daugther insisted she had to have (along with some corn) is getting large and leafy but hasn't yet turned out a decent berry. There may or may not be a pepper plant lying dormant in there. There's a wonderful vibrancy to fresh herbs, and growing them well brings a surprising level of satisfaction, even to an old grump like me. I honestly haven't used much of the rosemary or mint, although I have been known to snap off a mint leaf now and then to chew on. But the more of the stuff I grow, the more likely I am to get around to finding ways to use it.

For now...who wants some pesto?

Brilliant.

As I thought about writing this entry, it occurred to me that the story I wanted to tell about the video below actually had some usable relevance to writing. First, just watch the video.




For about a decade in the late 80s and early 90s I was heavily involved in public access cable TV. In the days before God gave us the internet, public access was the medium of choice for show-offs and misfits--the same folks who haunt YouTube now. During my stint in cable I met my friend Ed O'Rourke. That's him playing Vespio. Ed was and is one of the sharpest comic minds I've ever met. No moment is unusuable, no idea is unexplorable, and all that became evident every time you turned a camera on him. I was lucky enough to be able to spend several years playing opposite him. It was one of the most creatively productive and genuinely fulfilling times of my life.

Around 1991, I believe, Ed ran the cable studio in Saugus, MA. This meant that whenever we wanted we had access to thousands of dollars worth of high-end video equipment and pretty much all the time we chose to burn playing with it. Around this time there were a lot of commercials for cheesy albums by artists like "Zamfir, the Master of the Pan Flute." I wanted to do a parody. My first idea was to create a character called Salivar (accent over the "i"),a flute player with a seriously problematic spittle condition. But I couldn't figure a good way to A) get a tube up to the actor's mouth easily and B)ensure a steady flow of liquid. Not to mention the matter of cleanup.

Sitting around the studio, we came up with the name Vespio Aragoya. Ed disappeared into the men's room while I hashed out comedy details with our co-conspirator, the unfairly talented Mr. Ron van Dam, whose show we worked on. Ed came back with the open shirt and the slicked-back hair. We were hysterical. We had our man. We decided he came from Serbo-Croatia. Ed fired up the accent. It kept getting funnier--to us, anyway. But then came the question: what does Vespio play?

Stay with me now. This is where we key in to the analogy, and I'm not going to be explicit about it.

O'Rourke headed into the studio's store room. He was in there for several minutes. Lots of clanging and banging. And he came out holding an 18-inch-or-so-high section of a fake Christmas tree. It had the base on it, and a couple of stray branches.

I said, "What are you going to do with that?"

And O'Rourke raised it to his lips and, risking a burst brain vessel, blew into the thing like a freaking shofar and out came this wonderful, hellacious, absolutely non-musical bellow of sound. Vespio's instrument.

Watch the video again. I want you to see how he invests in and commits to the idea of the instrument. Before he plays, he always whips one branch over to the side. Like it matters. The move becomes integral to his development of the Christmas tree stand as a viable musical instrument. He's consistent about it. He has sold himself on the idea, and he sells you, the viewer. This is not a Christmas tree stand, he says to you a la Magritte. This is the Bogorian Tree Flute. And you buy it.

So here's my writerly koan to you, my pen-poised friends:

Can you find the Christmas tree stand in your closet? Have you looked?

Reminded.

Last night was one of those scramble-for-dinner nights. Crawling toward payday and with nary a spot of food in the larder, I knew it was going to be an improv evening. Which is fine; I've always liked the let's see what we've got here school of cooking. I knew there was a set of chicken breasts waiting at home. The rest remained to be seen.

As I drove, I fixated on the idea of a simple chicken quesadilla. I was pretty sure there were tortillas in the fridge, and we've always got more than enough cheese on hand. (This is largely because every time we make burritos, we convince ourselves that we have no cheese, so we buy some, only to find out we had plenty.) There was an onion left over from a recent gathering, so using it before it totally shriveled would be wise. So there it was: chicken quesadillas.

Skip ahead a bit to this conversation:

"Hey, the tortillas... Uh, the date on the package says May 25."

"Oh."

"Do you think they're okay? There's no color on them. They smell okay."

[Silence, with an I dunno sort of face.]

"Hang on, let me look." [from the kitchen] "There's a flatbread from Trader Joe's. I could make a pizza with it."

"That sounds good."

"Hold on... Oh. The date on this says July 5. What do you think?"

[Silence, with an I dunno sort of face.]

Needless to say, we had neither quesadillas nor pizza. What eventually came along, however, reminded me of one of the first times I got creative with cooking. It was called Bucky's Chicken Shit.

Appetizing, no?

It was the mid-80s. For reasons I cannot remember--other than figuring it would impress women--I started taking an interest in cooking. I was reading cooking magazines and keeping a binder of recipes, I had gotten a recipe-making program for my Commodore 64 that could take one ingredient and offer a slew of possible dishes to make... I was discovering a new land.

Came a night when my girlfriend and I were hungry. I think there was another friend with us. Not that it matters. I went into action. We had egg noodles, which I've always loved. (Mom used to serve them doused with butter and sprinkled with a hint of black pepper.) I had a can of chicken meat. (I was not shopping for myself in those days.) I had an onion. I had tomato sauce.

As you might guess, Bucky's Chicken Shit was not exactly high-concept gourmet. The onions got a quick sauté in butter, the chicken was de-canned and dumped unceremoniously on top of the onions, the noodles got thrown over it all and then I smothered it in sauce. Oh, and lest I forget, there was (of course) cheese. Cheese aplenty, actually.

The girlfriend was suitably impressed. Clearly, it didn't take much. Cooking had the desired effect, and started me down the amateur culinary path I continue to walk today. And last night, out of necessity and scarcity, I revisited that early concoction. Running out of options, along with food that wasn't expired, I turned to the old standby: a half-box of pasta. We have several of them at any given moment. This time around it was wheat elbow macaroni. The chicken had been cooked up for quesadillas and sat waiting. It went into a baking dish with the pasta. A boatload of pasta sauce. A truckful of cheese. Into the oven at 400 degrees and out in five minutes for a simple, nostalgic, delicious delight.

I think the girlfriend was suitably impressed.

Snack.

Intellectually, I knew the brownie was not a good idea. First, because it was a vending machine brownie and second, because I am an increasingly chubby guy with no self-control in the food department. But brownies are my kryptonite and I am a semi-happily suicidal Superman when it comes to them.

I prefer my own, of course, because I make them with orange extract, habanero pepper sauce and cayenne powder. It is impractical, however, to try to whip up a batch of said brownies in the editorial offices of a catalog company. Thus, my addiction costs me $1.35 and a small sliver of pride.

In the vending machine, the brownie is number 20. I slid in my two dollars. I pressed the numbers--3-0.

The realization struck too late and in a flash of regret and terror I watched a 90-cent Fiber One granola bar being shoved off its perch to land with a thunk at the bottom of the vending machine.

The brownie is number 20. Two-zero. I slid in my two dollars. I pressed the numbers.

Another Fiber One bar glided forward. No! I was sure I pressed 2-0! Lying sonofabitchin' machine!

The sugar lull was clearly getting the best of me. I stepped back. Took a breath. What I did not need at the moment was a machine dictating my snack needs and getting snarky about my lack of dietary fiber. I will have you know,I wanted to tell it, that I consider Metamucil to be a recreational drug.

Two. Zero. Simple.

I slid in my first dollar. Then my second.

The machine spit it out.

Okay--bad dollar. It happens. I had another in my pocket. I slid it in.

The machine spit it out.

This is the juncture at which a normal person might think, Hmm...perhaps the universe is telling me something. Could it be I am not choosing wisely due to my hunger? I should take this moment to consider the many healthier options currently available to me, such as trail mix.

I, on the other hand, was thinking, I will drive my forehead through this Lexan window if that's what it takes to get that brownie, and then I will disembowel this heathen machine, kill its family and burn its village to the ground.

Me with low blood sugar has never been a pretty sight. Nor one that involves any kind of rational thought.

The machine sensed it was in danger. It swallowed my dollar. Carefully, watching my finger all the way, I pressed.

Two.

Zero.

Brownie.

I wish I could tell you it was worth it. It was a vending machine brownie and I was a sugar-fix whore. I settled, even when the machine was telling me otherwise.

On the upside, I've got two Fiber One bars for a snack tomorrow.

Quote.

"When you're dead, it robs life of many pleasures."--author Harvey Pekar, on Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations

Voice.

The other night I heard my words for the first time in a few years.

A friend is directing my play, Dinner for Several, in Rhode Island this fall. At his invite I went down and sat in on his auditions. As I prefer, I sat there quietly with no one knowing that (gasp! horror! panic!) the playwright was in the room.

For the record, I have never liked being the playwright. I'm this guy from the 'burbs who happens to have put together a script, and someone in the theater liked it. I try to leave my beret and cigarette holder at home, on the hall table next to my artsy bohemian disregard for ordinary people.

I went not because I wanted any sort of input on the casting process, but because I hadn't heard these particular words since Stacey's superb production at Walpole two years ago and--odd though it may sound--I wanted to know what they sounded like again.


The curiosity derives largely from my current mindset of feeling like I don't have anything to say that warrants an artistic expression. The thing about playwriting is that in the long run you don't just have to convince yourself that you've got something to say. You need a group of people to think you've got something to say, too. Everyone on the playreading committee, a director, a bunch of actors...there are a number of hurdles and/or filters between your deathless craft on the page and its public performance. In 2003, 2004, I obviously believed that I had something that required expression on stage. Now? Not so much. So the questions become: Did I really have anything to say back then? And how is what I had to offer artistically then different than now? It really boils down to: Who was that guy?

The tricky part, of course, is trying to answer that question via the struggles of actors cold-reading a script they've never seen. But that's part of the fun for me.

As an actor, I'm that annoying guy at auditions who you'd swear has already read the script. I can cold-read the living bajeezus out of a side. This odd thing happens in my brain--it's like it splits down the middle and while one part's doing the acting, the other part is reading ahead, deciding on how to hit the lines, and sending a message back to its partner. Some folks cold-read well. Others... Well, everybody loves a good train wreck.

Thing is, the words are the words. The jokes are the jokes. Even in a thick-lipped stumble through it, a good line can still come off as a good line. And during the auditions, there were laughs. Funny is funny.

Dinner also has its dramatic moments, and watching those I was struck by the honesty in the dramatic scenes the director had chosen. This play is about the amount of time and energy we burn trying to find love or, often, an overly idealized version of it, and how we alternately reveal and hide ourselves in the pursuit--not just from other people, but from ourselves as well. Heady stuff for a comedy, but I think it's in there. That's what I had to say. Would I say the same thing now if I was writing it? Can't answer that.

Since its debut in 2004 I haven't been able to get anyone to consider staging Dinner unless they knew me. It's been turned down by two publishers, including one who gladly publishes several of my short plays. I've seen the shows, I've listened to the audiences. I sat in a packed 235-seat theater and watched the thing absolutely enchant, night after night. I know how good this play is. I think I went to Rhode Island to remind myself--not just about the play, but maybe about me. Perhaps I knew that even in a stumble-through filled with apologies and stops and starts and odd choices, the core of thing would still shine and maybe I'd feel good about my writerly self.

I think I have always boxed off my life to some degree. The things I remember and the things I don't surprises me. When I try, in my mind's eye, to look back at the guy alone in the 20x20 studio with the keyboard on his lap, writing his first play at 40-plus, the image is fuzzy. The picture jumps, trying to fine-tune the clarity. It never clears. What I come away with is: whoever he was, he wrote a helluva play.

And sometimes I wonder where he went.

Touchpoint.

I've come to one of those odd realizations about my writing, which has led to an equally odd "writerly" moment.

The way that I write now offers me far too many options for excuses. For example: My "office," such as it is, is a space about six feet wide and four feet deep in an oddly walled-off portion of my upstairs, with just one door leading in from the bedroom. I'm sure a real estate agent might call it part of the master suite. In case of fire, I have no option but to dive out a window. The space is encroached upon by a vast array of misplaced clothing. Once a season we break out pitchforks and torches and force it back from the borders of my "office," but sooner or later the piles re-embolden themselves and have another go at annexing what little psuedocreative space I have. (Which amounts to a desk with a computer on it.) In addition: My house was built in 1850. The bedroom and the office are in what was the original house, which was at one point a single story. Thus, this area used to be the attic and it's not exactly packing a refreshing flow of ventilation. Two windows on one wall. Opening them, research has proven, does nothing to encourage the stale, superheated attic air to actually move. I know there's a crawlspace above the room that runs to the "main" part of the house and it's got a gable vent and two roof vents, but apparently it's just a place where hot likes to spend the summer.

Which is why, in summer, the office becomes a superb sauna. While this is very good for my pores and overall complexion, it's not conducive to me spending any time in there writing. (Other than the inspired short poem, Ode to That Rivulet of Sweat Carefully but Surely Making Its Way Down to My Shorts, which won the Murray Feldman Memorial Perspire-A-Poem contest in 2008.)

We have a small netbook that we use for wireless internet downstairs, but its Lilliputian keys don't play nicely with the unique--okay, almost entirely effed up--method of manic, mostly-two-fingered-but-sometimes-up-to-four hunt-and-peck typing technique that I've developed largely due to one finger that bends in an odd direction. (Ask me to make a fist with my right hand sometime.) I can't explain how it works and you'd never be able to follow along because I can't follow along myself, but I still manage to type about 55 wpm this way. Point being, on the netbook things just don't come out right. Programs get launched out of nowhere. The cursor bobs and weaves like Ali and often forgets where it's supposed to be. Like Ali.

Okay. That was mean. I'm riffing. Ride it out with me.

So there are all my excuses. Know what's hard to make excuses about, though? Writing stuff down on paper.

I don't want to ruin the suspense, but in a few moments I will make an excuse about it. In the meantime:

The first realization about my writing is that perhaps it's time to stop believing I need to be seated at the keyboard to write. My history belies the idea anyway. I wrote a lot of my fiction in the 90s in notebooks or journals, standing behind a convenience store counter. One of the best speeches in a pla I ever wrote was scribbled out on a yellow pad while sitting in a stairwell in a convention center in Chicago. I've done the pen-and-paper thing, of course. All writers have. I've just gotten away from it, and I have perhaps forgotten how much I always enjoyed the sheer visceral pleasure of it.

Writing is an act of binging and purging, of building up and tearing down in the name of constant refinement. It is liking and hating, often in the same sentence. And when you don't like it, you rip it out.

On a computer, "ripping it out" is relegated to highlighting and deleting. Or maybe the less-than-decisive CTRL+X...in case you're not sure. It's less definitive than the act of crossing out words and passages. And how you cross out says a lot about how you feel about your work. A single quick hashmark? Maybe you just didn't like that word much. You might like it later. Two or three scratch-outs and you've told that section that you never want to see it again...although maybe you'll call. Then you get down to the ink-based equivalent of a nuclear carpet-bombing where the strokes come so fast, thick and plentiful, the pen landing so violently that no amount of forensic work will ever reveal the crap you wrote in that last paragraph.

Computer deletion also usually removes the chance to go back and reconsider. You can CTRL-X once, but do it twice and the first one's gone. So do you start to keep a page of deleted passages? You could. But the written word, even with a few judgemental strokes through it, is something you can come back to. You could find the value in it that you hadn't seen before. It just waits there for you to decide.

In addition, when you've written something down on paper, in the act of transferring it into a Word doc you give yourself another pass at editing. It's unavoidable. You're considering every word that's lifting up from the page and shooting over to the keys. You will edit as you go. Therefore, you will improve as you go.

This is how I used to write.

This, I think, is how I should be writing.

A journal nearby to catch the words as they come. A pen at the ready. No booting up. No sweltering in the office. No excuse. Back in the moment, fielding thoughts like butterflies and pinning them down to use later. Writing without excuses.

If writing is life, then why am I choosing to live it so remotely? Thinking about going back to putting pen to paper, handwriting my work first, is like remembering an old friend I haven't thought to call. (People who know me personally will take a moment to savor the irony in that statement.)

And here's the writerly excuse moment.

Yesterday I went over to Barnes & Noble to buy a journal. To get the ball rolling. I had a lot of choices. Journals with printed covers. Leather. Spiral bound. Magnetic closure. Pithy quote on front. Embossed leaf. I picked up this one and that one, flipped them open, priced them out.

Here's the thing: None of them felt like the right one. I walked out without one.

Intellectually, I know it's just paper that I'm buying. Doesn't matter what the cover looks like or what it's made out of, right? Just needs to hold the ink in place for a while without ripping.

But it's more than that. It's this thing that's about to become an integral part of something that's integral to me. It needs to feel right, and I can't describe what that would constitute. I just know it wasn't on the shelves there.

I have a journal holder at home. It's lovely. Leather, embossed with a Celtic knot design and a Celtic-knot-style button that closes with a leather tie. My first wife gave it to me when I was writing sword & sorcery fiction in my 30s. I'm not writing sword & sorcery fiction now and although I know it doesn't really matter, it somehow does. I am not a Celtic knot sort of writer right now. I think I might look a bit odd at 48 hauling that one around. It would do the trick, I know. I know. It just isn't the one yet. But soon. I also have a couple partially filled journals I could use--but, like the holder, they're from before. They were given to a different writer. I need to redefine myself through my medium. I know it sounds hokey and I know it sounds like an excuse, but consider:

What I do, what all writers do, is intensely personal. All art is. From the very beginning of an act of art, it's about you and who you are and what you feel and believe and it's about your need to state that. Everything about that act should pull from that center. At my center, in that space that I feel I've been denying, I hear and see and feel the idea that this is what I need to do. That's truth. Honesty. The core of good art. Start from there and your work falls in line. Art without the artist's integral truth and honesty driving it forward is not art.

My hand already itches. I know it'll cramp up good on me. But it wants to hold a pen and write. It wants to scratch stuff out. It wants to write in the margins and doodle when it's blank. I intend to let it. Just as soon as I find the right book.


js

Weenie.

If you're interested, I've got two new blog posts over at The Hot Dog I Ate. Link is to the right.

Beyond that, still waiting to feel that something's worth writing about.