I’ll update the blog later. This weekend is all about Steve and Deb who are in town.

Yeah, that last blog was a joke. I thought the bad writing would give it away but apparently, a long bad car metaphor isn’t really beyond the pale for my writing. I don’t know anyone named Beth Tucker, I’ve only known about three Beth’s in my life and I wasn’t all that close to any of them.

My friend Ehren is at the doctor’s today, so wish him luck.

I was sixteen years old and living in Basking Ridge, New Jersey. I grew up fast and hard, the streets were no stranger to me, and even at the tender age of 16, I had figured out how to keep my wits about me to stay alive. The important thing to know is that even the smallest choice you make can butterfly effect its way up to affecting your entire life. Should you drink that last drink? should you do shrooms out of a thirty gallon garbage bag? should you take that paper sack across town for fifty dollars? If a girl really wanted to have sex with you, but now she’s unconscious, should you go ahead and do it? The answers to these questions may seem to be clearly “yes”, but other decisions are not so easy.

Beth was part of our group, not terribly close to me, sort of on the periphery. I first talked to her because she was wearing a Cramps T-Shirt and I walked up to her and said, “The way I walk is just the way I walk.” She knew right away, I was someone to be dealt with. She gave me a drag off her cigarillo, and we were fast friends. We sat down and did some math and, if the old pamphlets that say “every time you have sex with one person, you’re having sex with everyone that person has had sex with” are true, then Beth and I had sex about six different ways, which is impressive because at the time I only knew three.

I think I remember the moment Beth started spiralling out of control. We were at a party and I was out in the bushes vomitting in order to make room for more Vodka in my stomach and I saw through the window that Beth was going down on my friend Chris. This didn’t bother me as much as the fact that she was doing it badly and eyeing a hash pipe. It wasn’t like my friends to not keep their eye on what they were doing, to me this clearly looked like a drug problem in the making.

Of course, back then, we didn’t call them drug “problems”. We called them “renegotiations”. I mean, obviously, a drug in itself isn’t a problem, it’s your interaction with it that creates friction. I remember my friend Brad said, “y’know, renegotiations and love songs are often mistaken for one and the same,” and it was the only time our group savagely beat one of our own.

Over the next few months, Beth started getting that look in her eye, that look of someone who couoldn’t quite engage the clutch of her life and who couldn’t figure out where the emergency brake was, or what the little “check engine” light meant, or how to switch her radio off of AM, if you know what I mean. If her life was a car, that car was driving far beyond the legal limit in terms of speed, and it wasn’t being steered by someone who had a good idea of how to steer it.

So, one morning I opened my eyes and looked up and there was Beth, hunkered over the kitchen sink, smoking a nugget of hash. I had gone to sleep with my head in the fridge (*that’s* a whole other story) and from my angle, I thought I could see her cry a single tear while she sucked on the opening of a “Pepsi Free” can. I don’t know why, God knows I wasn’t quite the fount of knowledge that everyone seemed to think I was, but I stood up, pulled on my pants, and talked to her.

I just said, “I think in this life, there are two kinds of people. There are people who try to see what they can accomplish, and there are those who try to see what they can get away with.” Then I paused, and I put my hand on her arm and said, “Maybe it isn’t two kinds of people. Maybe it’s three.” And then I looked out the window and said, “I’m just not sure.”

Anyway, thanks for writing in “Beth”. It’s good to know that what I told you all those years ago has stayed with you.

I mean, *SERIOUSLY*, what the hell do spammers even get out of it? I’ve *never* bought *anything* from you assholes, I don’t have any money to buy anything with. Whoever that one idiotic mother fucker is that got his first e-mortgage from one of these fuckers needs to choke himself with his power cable.

This blog is used for me to get rid of some bad shit in my head so I don’t get rid of it all over my family.

This page is for the show I’m producing and acting in. It’s a lot funnier, and I promise there won’t be too much kvetching. And absolutely no talking about poop

So, apparently, if you want to leave a response, you can. Please don’t feel like it’s necessary, it’s so much easier for me to be self flaggelating when I know no-one’s reading.

Also, don’t correct my spelling. I’ll hunt you down and kill you.

I’ve been extremely blessed in the last month or so. I’ve been overwhelmed by the love shown to me by groups of people far and wide. It’s really been ridiculous. At times in my life I have been angry with my now-wife, I’ve had fights with my friends like Mac and Dani that have made me rant at the top of my lungs in my bedroom. I’ve been so mad at my dad and my brother Ian that I’ve cut little half moons in my palms from squeezing my fists too tight. I actually yelled at my father in law at a restaurant once (for saying the Democrats were “politicizing” the Iraq war). I’m really blessed that everyone is being so loving towards me right now.

I’ve also had troubles in my past with *stuff*. Using two mis-matched forks instead of a blender. Buying coats at thrift stores and laughing about how fucked up they are. Paying my rent three months late, but paying the next three months while I was at it. I’m not doing that anymore, for years I’ve paid my bills on time, for years I’ve had a bed to sleep in that was mine, and for the last year or so, since the engagement gifts, I have every machine you could want as a home cook. I’m incredibly blessed to have these things.

And, in all honesty, my life has been a series of dodges, always staying one step ahead of bill collectors, always managing to find a job right when my grocery money had run out, always waiting until I got so sick that I went to the emergency room and then ducked out on the emergency room bill. If I wasn’t going to make “money” my priority, then I couldn’t really bitch about not having money.

But now, sometimes, it’s just exhausting. I don’t have any money, I don’t have any job prospects, I don’t have health insurance or car insurance or renter’s insurance. I have been incredibly blessed these last few weeks, but it’s crippling to even think about it. Jordana is sitting in the ocean with water wings stopping her from drowning, and this marriage is really just me adding 220 pounds of dead weight to her back.

This is introspection, not complaint. I’m not blaming anyone. But I’ve tried for a year and a half now to somehow work through and past the mistakes I made from 1985 to 1998, and I don’t seem to able to stop that guy from haunting me. It makes me think that 15 to 28 year old Sean is the real deal, and the guy I’ve tried to be since I started hanging out with a better class of person is just a fake.

If pooping is like a night out at the theater, and I maintain that it is, then first, you have to accept that the entire evening is part of the metaphor and second, it can either be a short comedy or a long Wagnerian operatic undertaking.

If you have live in the city, your theater plans are pretty fluid. You can think to yourself “Hm, I feel like going to see a show…” but the feeling might pass. And so it goes with pooping. You stop and say to yourself, “I’m feeling a certain amount of, um, pressure to make this happen”, but sometimes, that’s just, y’know, a fart. Of course, you can’t be sure. There is the age old axiom that every time you gamble, you might lose, and if you aren’t at your own home or within range of a change of clothes, you’re sort of gambling with *everyone’s* money, so to speak.

But, for the sake of argument, let’s say you recognize this as the real deal. It’s usually after you fart-gamble and you get away with it, but only just barely. It’s time.

You make your way to the theater and, depending on the nature of the room after your fart gamble, you generally know what you’re in for. But much like the theater, even if you know the name of the play and you’ve read the reviews, you might be in for much more than you bargained for.

The possibilities are endless. My personal favorites are the light musical comedies, the ones that burst forth on the scene with an uptempo overture, followed by a funny piece, provided there are meaningful and multi-dimensional characters. Every once in a great while, especially after a large cup of coffee in the morning after a huge dinner the night before, I like the three act turn of the century comedy, full of quiet dignity and gravitas.

But every once in a while, you sit down and you already feel yourself sweat and you know you’re in for it. The pace is just horrendous, the seat is uncomfortable, the theater isn’t air conditioned and every new development seems to be so much sturm and drang with no actual *development*. In the theater, this just makes me mad. When I’m trying to poop, I actually get nauseous.

The most disquieting moments are the more modern inconveniences, when you’re urinating standing up, you have a good stream immobilizing you, and you realize you have an entirely different experience bearing down on you. If you’ve done as much yoga as I have, you can actually aim carefully, swing your leg over the back of the toilet and then carefully lower yourself down so that all activity can happen in one fell swoop.

Actually, even if you aim carefully, you’ll still pee all over everything. Just trust me on that one. Remind me to tell Jordana to replace the tooth brushes.

The fact is that the most common unpleasantness is the missing third act, when the first two pass like hard dry biscuits dropped down a well and you know somethine wonderful and substantial is about to happen but then, boom. The curtain comes down and no matter how long you sit in the audience, there’s no more show. Elvis has, in fact, *not* left the building, but he’s also not going to perform any more.

It’s times like this that I wish I had a “comment” button.

You ever notice you can only talk for so long about pooping before someone brings up Elvis?

So, here are some pictures of the rehearsal dinner.

Here are some pictures of the honeymoon.

I took out the ones of Jordana topless, but I included our stomachs after the free meal.

Growing up, I had the incredible luck to switch schools almost every year. I did go to the same school for fourth and fifth grade, and the same wonderful private school for 7th, 8th and part of 9th grade, but other than that I switched schools every year.

I was either born an actor, or this helped make me one. I got in some sticky social situations and when I switched schools I just switched personae. I was even a sometime liar about my past, creating better characters to have been. In sixth grade, I had people convinced that the surfing in California was fantastic. Y’know, because I was born in San Jose…

Ian’s blog talks about that sad feeling you get when a show closes and compares it to Buddhist sand paintings. This feeling of loss has been so profound with me that, on two separate occassions, I’ve quit doing theater. Along with dance, live theater is as ineffable as it gets, and it isn’t just the loss of the experience once it’s done. The fact that you can’t review a videotape or re-play a CD or go to the museum means that opinions about the art can be vastly different, and vastly wrong, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it.

We’ve done Lucretia a bunch of times, and one show everyone hated it. We did the exact same show as other times, but people just glowered. (It was mostly our friends- man, do they suck) (Just Kidding guys! We love you!) (bastards). There’s no way to go back and let these people know that they missed the show, because they didn’t. In live theater, you don’t do the show twenty times because you want that much audience, you do it twenty times because doing it twenty times is the art.

And you learn to understand and love the end of a run, you prepare for it. I’m never gonna quit acting again, I know that now, even if it means not doing it for a living. But you forgive your friends for telling you endless stories about being on stage, you forgive yourself for trying to one-up them, you forgive everyone that sad pause when the show closes down and you just keep praying that another job will come along.

And it’s that attitude that has made the last couple of days a little better. I think Jordana and I would be *very* depressed. We just produced the best show we’ve ever put on, in terms of everyone enjoying it. The writing was by two of my favorite artists, Steve and Mac, with a tiny addition by Jordana and myself. People cried, people laughed, there was singing and dancing and, at one point, the audience literally jumped out of their seats and started dancing and singing along.

But, we’re gonna keep making more shows. I’m excited about doing something that people might even hate. If theater is a lesson in impermanence, it’s a lesson I learned a long, long time ago and I’ve finally resolved.

Yeah, we’re leaving tomorrow at the crack of dawn. Jace Alexander has decided that, despite my best attempts to be a bum, I should have some sort of a career, so he scheduled an audition for me tomorrow afternoon.

A couple of things. I understand the power of a good backrub, and the disappointment of a bad one. I also understand that most of the world is living on totally different economic legs than we are. I walk in to this place and tip twenty percent for people and suddenly I’m the frickin’ mayor.

The spa bought us a two hundred dollar dinner tonight, so I tipped as best I could and rolled back up to the room. Jordana was packing our stuff up while I sat on the bed watching TV. She was smiling. I asked her what was funny and she said, “it’s not that. I’m packing up our clothes, both of ours, and I feel like someone’s wife. It sorta made me smile.”

It will be indescribably great to get back to real life, back to auditions and rehearsals and meetings with Mac and Jordi to try to get our collective professional lives jump started. I want to have dinner parties and get up at 7 and go to the gym and all the stuff that makes up my real life. It’s been a lovely departure, but now I have to actually deserve the love I have from my family and friends, and I’m, strangely, excited about trying instead of cautious.

About the wedding, I’m starting to be able to deal with it. During my massage today, I spent the entire time trying to remember every detail. I clearly remember the ceremony and then there’s a sort of blank and then I remember the toasts (J’s mom, my dad, and our punk ass best man). When I concentrate, little tiny things come back to me, but it’s fun to do it that way. I think I don’t want to see the videotape.

Anyway. Tomorrow, back to life, back to reality. Thankfully.