Years ago in San Francisco a friend of mine in acting class was in a play that was heading to Scotland for the big fringe festival and they were previewing it so another friend and I went to see it, called Godot Arrives. It popped in my head tonight because when I’m this tired, I seem to think of Godot Arrives because, despite my friend’s best efforts, the play was pretty bad and writing a sequel to Waiting for Godot defeats the purpose of the play unless you intentionally go for farce/spoof a la Hamlet 2. Maybe they did and I forgot. It popped in my head as it does every once in a while when something happens that shouldn’t, like a man Godot showing up anywhere. Or the absurdity of last night. My windows are on the ground floor and face right outside a hopping Brooklyn street where, a week after I moved in last year, someone fired gunshots. Not to welcome me in a salute, I don’t think. There was no ruptured spleen in a fruit basket the next morning at my door. Over the year and half here though my windows attract lover’s quarrels, either one on the phone yelling at the other or both feeling the need to compensate for their inner child wrapped in psychological duct tape and make drama for an unwilling audience. Last night, at about 3am I woke up to the sounds of a very spoiled woman who apparently kicked in the car door of her lover and whined through what sounded like five nostrils about how’s she misunderstood and that this was no big deal because it was just a Honda or maybe a Hyandai. Meanwhile, this man yelled at her for disrespecting her, yeah, she’s got problems and then sat while she whined and they just kept going, her rambling on and him letting her instead of walking away from it. I couldn’t get up because I was exhausted from not sleeping the night before and the tales of unfulfilled romance or what I would call rejected spec scripts of Moonlighting were the last damn thing I want to hear or anyone on the street or in the borough. Ten minutes after they finally wrapped up Scene IV, the Pipe Bang Symphony in E flat major had a rehearsal; there’s a free standing pipe in my illegal apartment and when the heat comes on it’s like the world’s first Stomp rehearsal. After that wrapped, Son of Sparkles, the rat living behind my wall where my head lays to attempt to sleep, the one that seeks revenge for the death of his father Sparkles last year, began running suicides, back and forth. By sunrise, Godot Arrives.
I’ve had times in my life where I’ve let the air filter in way past it’s capacity, so to speak and I end up having what clinicians title a nervous breakdown. I call them Great Quakes. I had one in 1985, one in 1995, then a core meltdown in 2001-2002 culminating in a instant choice of walking out on my job, my life and saving myself from turning into coffin filler maybe a few months later. Now, there are magi moments in life, sometimes they urge themselves with no seeming relation to the things happening around us, and sometimes they are C-sectioned into your life by a gathering of a series of gloriously shitty events that force out the new life. I am in one of those moments. I have a job that, as most NY artists can relate, is one I’d like to shed. This week was a porous and horrid stretch. In the past, when I’ve either walked out or been fired, which I was from NY Times, I end up in a financial freak out vacuum for a while before getting another lousy gig. This time, this is the end because it is hurting my soul. I am exhausted and once I leave this entity that sucks up my energy like a 1980’s ad exec and cocaine at 3am, I am in tears and it’s easy to blame myself for looting my pulse of its essence, trying to pinpoint moments where I lacked faith in moving forward, the grappling to be large and in joy; there’s nothing left, really; when I do leave this job I will expand on the details; for now, it sucks out the healthy cream and then fills me with recycled couch foam from a Cold War couch. Pardon me I am sleep deprived. This is simply the Endtimes. Bring on another happy little Armageddon.
So, what next? Hopefully, meaningful sex with a physical-spiritual kama-sutric wanderer-achiever looking to tussle and harmonize and peel away a sweet fruit of the night for a week. Maybe somwehre you’re teaching stars how to listen, I don’t know. I would love to see breasts outside of my own or the eight on my dog in my apartment. Let us pray, O Lord. I want to remember how to swim in the pool of love and hate, oilig the joints of an orgasm. Bonnuit.
