Monday, July 20, 2009

Fail blog

This blog has failed. I have failed this blog. Last post is Feb. 2009? That is sad. That is a sad state of blog affairs. There's like, five or six blogless months in there.

Do not worry. This is the first of many failures.

For too long I haven't failed. I have spent most of my childhood and all of my adult life carefully breaking down experiences into the smallest imaginable chunks, and then following through on the least risky. I don't know when I started this bizarre way of living, but it was long, long ago. I remember I was 11 or 12 and talking to my dad, and said I had come up against a wall with something (archery? It was probably archery. Why do we teach kids archery? Archery is practically worthless. "Hey son, I'm going to teach you how to shoot a bow and arrow" "naw that's cool I'll just go to the supermarket like everyone else"). Anyway, there I was, totally sucking at archery, and I was like, "I've hit this wall with archery. I'm not going to get over it, so I'm walking away" and my dad was like "That's up to you. But you cannot do that too much, or you'll be surrounded by walls, and that's it." And I nodded, of course, but in my mind I was like "Yeah, whatever. We'll see how many walls I can walk away from. I can walk away from any challenge. They haven't built a challenge I can't avoid."

It's like 15 years later and I finally feel closed in. Look at me: a day job I am sitting out the recession in, a play I've been writing for years I am content to one day hope might be produced in Pennsylvania, a house I'm moving out of, a degree I don't use, free tuition credits I don't use. Zero failures. Doing a-okay. I am a beacon of routine shining atop a mountain of mediocrity.

This blog - this fail blog, if you will, if the maker's of that other fine blog don't mind - will now begin to chronicle my spectacular failures.

Here's the deal, chumps. Life is big and violent and noisy. It will break your bones, bruise your heart and whack your neck with a bat. With a bat, that is right, a freaking bat! Your instincts will tell you to hunker, your muscles will insist escape. But you cannot do that. It's inexplicable - the only response to such pressures is to reach further, to do more and to fall from greater and greater heights. This is something you already know and I already know, but which I cannot drag myself to do.

So here's the project: a chronicle of tries and fails, and it starts with this blog, which has failed already for a few months, and which will fail again, but that's the hokey pokey, friend - that's what it's all about.

Thursday, February 19, 2009




I have been very self-conscious of my weight recently, mostly because last Friday I ate two dinners and recently I have upped how many beers I drink at a time. It's completely irrational and silly, but most things I think about are.

So you can imagine the consternation when today I opened my hotmail account and it began calling me fat.

Tuesday, January 13, 2009

Future Car!


I am sick. Here is what it is: I have a cold in my head. My nose is running, and I have a headache, and my ears feel larger than usual (?). So why not blog, in this case?

Because it is January and because everything is pretty much nexus-ising in my life (that's a word, look it up, it means when everything coming together to be a nexus but isn't there yet it's in the process of nexusising (the hyphen is optional)), I am thinking of the future.

If you Google image search (or "gis") the word "future" you get the car that is pictured. It's odd that when people think of "future cars" what springs into mind is something ridiculous that you would never want to get into. No one wants to leave the grocery store with two bags of groceries and you don't have a car cause you only went in there for milk and cheese so you just took one of the baskets but then you thought as you were in the aisles that you want to make a good soup and the cat needs food so you came away with two bags of groceries and you walk to your parking spot which was the closest at the time but now there are like 18 spots that are open and closer but whatever you finally get there, and you have to reach down and unlock the pressurized seal of your cockpit to your car. Look at this thing. Good thing you don't have three grocery bags or you're making two trips! After/if you insert yourself into this glorified bobsled, if you are rear ended going out of the parking lot the car is totaled. I am guessing this thing weighs 65 pounds and has the structural support of a coffee cup sleeve. Why are we heading to this design?

Much has happened:

-Meredith is engaged! Read her awesome blogness about putting a wedding together.

-In the future when I'm a better person, I will donate to her wedding. And speaking of people whose lines I steal, Kelsi has a badass job now and also looking to purchase property.

-A whole bunch of people are either drifting together or drifting apart. (The gis for "drifting apart" was completely uninteresting, but "drifting together" yielded an interesting photo of, from what I can tell, a Pacific Northwest couple magically transported through space to a beach, left sitting there contemplating their overencumbered backpacks, their failing relationship and the guy's denim jeans.)

-I am running the board for this company doing Marat/Sade. It is an awesome show that everyone should come see.

-But because I am working for the theater, I have missed many happy hours, a date with Rapunzel, a sushi party, TWO rockband parties, a Steelers postseason victory, and too many other fun times to list or link to. Marat/Sade? More like Matt/Sad!

-I had a reading of the full-length play I'm working on dealing with a casino coming to Pittsburgh. Readings are hard but necessary, as is illustrated by this fun little stat:

A) Time spent alone typing thinking I was writing a work of art: The past 6 months.

B) Time spent listening to actors read the play aloud and finding out the play has deep, chasmic problems regarding character, tone, structure, dialogue and theme: 2.5 hours

-Other people moved and junk. Sorry, it's too much to realize what's happened over the past three months. Because you see that's the past. The last three months is the Toyota Camry. The future is the Toyota Bulletmobile, small enough to be in everyone's blindspot, yet quick enough to totally fly off a country road.

The future is now, but, like the elusive Blue Monkey from the Merrie Melody cartoons, the future is wily, hard to find and impossible to control. Which is why it is necessary every once in a while to take stock, to blow out the mucus of your decision-making paradigms out into the soft 2-ply Kleenex of the past, to snort hard the nasal spray of introspection, and to take the Nyquil of the Promise of Tomorrow. Which is why tomorrow I'll be taking a sick day.

What do you do when you're out of ideas? When the casino opus needs to be fixed with a chainsaw, not a scalpel? When you have no money for a wedding? When the housing market is surprisingly competitive? When a three-day weekend is nigh, and all your plans involve watching Season 6 of West Wing and running board for the theater?

Ladies and gentleman, I suggest we take this Nyquil, and in the morning, we start building a car. It can be blue. It can be shiny. But goddamn, it needs to have room for groceries.