What you should be thankful for

1) I make you laugh all the time, and you are almost always really boring. C’mon, you know it’s true. Sure, I laugh a lot when you talk, but I have this thing, this unfortunate thing, that makes me laugh a little bit more depending on how not funny you are. I’m goddam hilarious, and I don’t really get paid back very much.

2) I’m a really good cook. Sometimes I make stuff that isn’t great, but even then I’m probably better than you are. And you eat my food all the damn time, at least you have over the last few years. Think about it. At, say, ten dollars an hour, how much do you owe me for the time I cook?

3) I give some really good advice. Sage. Motherfucking *sage* advice. That’s what I give. And what do you give me? Trouble.

4) Shit happens when I’m around. Trouble is caused, excitement ensues. Oh, sure, maybe not as much now as back in the day, but you know that a part of you gets nervous when shit starts being talked because you just *know* I’m gonna jump in the center of it and get all *redefining inappropriate*. You’re right, I cut my mohawk off, but you know the mohawk is living on just under my scalp, ready to piss some people off.

5) I will physically get in the way if shit starts going down. I’ve been hit in the face more times than I can count, chances are you haven’t really. I’ll jump in front. I’ll take it. My face is no great loss anyway.

6) I bring it with this blog. I’ll write to support plural marriage, I’m the only one on Ron Artest’s side. I don’t fill a blog with stuff unless it’s good stuff. Oh, sure, you actually write your blog, but you don’t bring it. I bring it.

7) I’m the perfect wingman. Take me with you, I’ll talk to any girl. What do I have to lose? No, I probably won’t show up to stuff that interferes with my life of going to sleep within ten minutes of getting tired and playing golf any day the weather is good, but if you find me sitting next to you at a bar and you want to have, say, sexual intercourse with someone, let me know. I’ll buttress your ass right in there.

8) I am willing to be fat and fart simply for your amusement. Maintaining this weight is a lot of work, and eating the right amount of beef and spice in order to create gastrointestinal distress without actually hurting myself is a fine balancing act. I do this for you.

9) I am inspiring both in my work ethic and in my constant failure. It’s fun to watch my life as I furiously spin my wheels like a palsied spastic on a treadmill. I wake every morning at 7:30 and you can use that as a source of inspiration, however I also never accomplish anything, and you can use that as a comparative analysis to feel better about yourself. If you sleep till noon, you can always say, “Yeah, but if I got up at 7:30, I’d just be a tired loser like Sean.”

10) I make love to you the way you like it. Real fast at the beginning and then the low slow asphyxiation section followed by the pre-orgasmic crying binge, culminating in the depressing anal foot fetish. I can take one look at you and know what you need, and you know it, too. You can see it in my eyes.

So, there’s more, but one more thing you can thank me for is my willingness to let certain things go unsaid. I’m not sure how much, but, yeah, from where I’m sitting, you owe me.

I am beyond tired and yet I can’t seem to stop whittling music out of my computer. It doesn’t feel like inspiraton, certainly, but there is something sort of other-wordly about writing music when it works really well. I use Finale and it is such a great program that I firmly believe I would be unable to write as quickly as I need to without it. If I don’t write in a manic flat out sprint then I don’t get my ideas down fast enough to be able to re-play them. I think I have not really written music before now simply because my computer skills and the software had not yet converged to allow me to. Every song I’ve written on guitar has slipped from my mind before I even decided on a theme.

What has been interesting to me is the fact that the systems put in place for the writing down of music are really here to help you. Every single teacher I had (bunch of fucking bastards they were) made it seem as if there was an incredibly difficult minotaur filled maze that you had to drag yourself through before you could make music, and it simply isn’t true. Rock and Roll stars have been proving for years that it’s far more magic and intuition than it is scholarship.

Of course I say that and it might be because it comes really easy to me. I’ve read music since long before I read words and I am always surprised when people can’t. It seems pretty intuitive to me.

But all the writing of it down requires is a little basic math and about ten hours of practice. The creation of music doesn’t require shit but an ear. And sometimes not even that. Mac, who is co-writing this musical with me, will come in the room with a sheet of paper and squawk some perfectly respectable melody line at me, and I copy it down note for note and add chords. The tune and the flow of the line are totally inspired, totally inate to him, and they are just as good or, frankly, better than anything I’ve come up with after hours of noodling.

Jordana will just start singing. She just fucking starts singing, words and all, off the top of her head. She writes music like I did when I was eight on the crapper, before I had any hang-ups about making, y’know, mixolydian cadences. I could tell you what a Dorian scale is, but I can’t possibly tell you why it’s useful.

What’s interesting is that it’s the lyrics that I’ve had to press Jordana and Mac on, both people who are verbal gymnasts. Lyrics are actually terrifically non-verbal, in a way, because you have to say something not just within an exact number of beats, but also up to the exact number of beats. I could sum up this blog in two sentences (and I’m sure you wish I would at this point) or I could write a book about this subject, but could I use *exactly* thirty two syllables? With each syllable falling at the exact right stress moment? And make it rhyme? And sound like normal speech?

Some lyric advice-

1) Don’t end a sentence with a verb. “Up on your fence you’re sitting” is a stupid sentence, and you are obviously just trying to rhyme it with something like “Shitting”.

2) Don’t keep adding modifiers until you get the number of syllables. “It seems to me, I think I might be getting too old” is bad, when what you mean is “I think I’m getting old”. If you are going to make someone listen to your music, treat every single second of their time as precious. I’m not kidding, if you’ve run out of stuff to say, then stop singing.

That actually should be a mantra for all plays. If you’ve already said it once, don’t say it again, and if you say it and it isn’t a whole play, then no amount of repeating will make it better.

3) Alliteration is fun, but hard consanant alliteration is bad. “Chuckie checked his checkered coat” is a fun like, but when you sing it, you aspirate every ‘ch’ and ‘k’ sound and you run out of air.

4) Land your emphasis where it fits musically. If you say “My opinon is based on fact” that’s great, unless the music fits it so that you sing “my *o*pinion is based *on* facts”. This is the hardest rule but the most important, unless you’re writing rock songs, and then it could be funny.

5) If a rhyme is too good it will make people laugh, no matter what you are saying. Consider the master, Ira Gershwin-

“IThere were chills up my spine

And some thrills I can’t define.

What a break, for heaven’s sake,

How long has this been going on?”

Those are simple to the point and they break your heart. Compared to-

“I’m bidin’ my time,

‘Cause that’s the kind of guy I’m

While other folks get dizzy, I stay busy

Bidin’ my time”

It isn’t that the point of the last one is hilarious, the rhymes are just so outrageous that it makes you smile. Between the three of us, we came up with this-

“then in undergrad, I dreamed of Chad,

The defensive back supreme

So I stuffed a sock down in my jock

And tried out for the team

He tackled me in practice,

He said I could take a hit.

But his girlfriend Anne came from the bland

Sorority I quit…”

The context is too bizzarre to explain, but I like it because the rhymes are just enough to make you smile, the internal rhymes all line up, there are no verbs at the ends of phrases and the verse reads the way people actually talk. The overall idea of the song was mine, the actual lyrics are largely Jordana’s, and the edits and refiguring were all three of us, I don’t know who should get credit for any of this. It took us about an hour to come up with these few lines.

Some of the stuff is just easy as pie. Mac sang a song “The Seven C’s” (The coast guard call to arms) and for the chorus I haven’t altered even a rhythm of what he stood and sang at me last week. I even made a suggestion and he sat down for an hour and gave me five versions of what I asked him about.

I don’t know. Maybe all of this will suck and won’t be nearly as funny to other people as it is to us. I’m writing a song right now that our male hero sings about his dead boyfriend, who is actually a woman and not dead and, it turns out, tied up and gagged and sitting next to him.

It’s possible that it won’t work at all.

Before I got mind-wanderingly sick, I made those appointments to go in and see commercial agents and, despite the fact that when THursday rolled around I wasn’t really feeling that much better, I went in to the city yesterday and held the meetings.

First was Tracy at Abrams. I was immediately blown away by the fact that meeting with agents in New York is entirely different from meeting with agents in LA, although it would take me most of the day to figure out how different. Abrams Artists has one floor on a building in Chelsea, and it is populated with men and women, young and old, of different ethnicities and, frankly, weights. In Los Angeles, you become an agent when you have proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that you are completely free of acting talent and that you are great to have at a party. In this building, it looked like a professional organization.

Tracy brough me in to her office and I was knocked out by the view. 30 floors up facing New Jersey, I could damn near see my old house in Morristown.

She loved my headshots and then talked to me for a while about my life as an actor. She asked me where I am from, and what some of my skills are, what shows I had done, etc. I pulled out every fucking name I could think of. I was dropping names like I was wearing mittens. It was wierd that none of that meant anything to her, she knew some of the names, didn’t know others, didn’t give a shit.

She asked me how I knew Debbie Brown, and I said we had been friends for years but that I wasn’t sure how we met. No, I had never read for her, I have to guess she saw me in something years ago. It’s the only thing close to a lie I told the whole time, and I’m sure when she checks she’ll catch me on it. Truth is, Debbie is my friend Steve’s cousin, and she just likes me as a dude.

I was too sick to wonder if it was going badly, but I have to guess it wasn’t going great now that I look back on it. My resume looked like I had spent very little time in front of a camera, which is true, and although I am SAG, it was obvious that I had a group of people supporting me in theory and none of them (except for Jace) had come through in practice. Every name I dropped made it sound like I was cool, but since none of those names were on my resume, it also made me sound like I wasn’t a good actor.

She asked me why I had waited until I was in my mid-thirties to push for a career as an actor. I said that in my mid-twenties I was making a go of it in LA and I was married to a minor Soap actress and when our marriage fell apart, I spent a few years drinking, I moved to New York, I watched the towers fall and I licked my wounds. I mean, I said it better than that, but that’s the sum total. And then I said, “after the election last Tuesday, I realized that I had to make a difference in my life.”

She hooked right up with that. The election has been a disaster for New York intellectuals, actually intellectuals anywhere. Anyone who can think clearly has been crushed by the staggering stupidity of an electorate who votes against their own self interests. Tracy is Jewish, and I let it be known immediately that half my family is, and we talked for some time about the few Jews we know who voted in line with southern anti-semites, voted in favor of an escalating sense of desparation in the Middle East, and voted that way because they thought they were helping Israel.

We had found common ground. She asked me about acting.

I’ve written about it here before, I don’t know if I was quite as rhapsodic, but you probably know what I said. We were in there for an hour and a half, talking about the practice, the art, the patience, the beauty. You know what I said, read other entries from this blog, it’s practically all I talk about.

I told her I had been cast in an Adam LeFevre play several years ago (technically true), and she told me about how he got the Best Buy gig. Apparently, it was to go to another actor, but this other actor was an LA type who threw a fit about stuff, and they immediately replaced him with this New York playwright. It’s no wonder you see Larry Pine hocking stuff, it’s huge money and people outside of New York don’t recognize him.

I said, “I’ve done two shows at the Access Theater on Broadway, three blocks south of Canal. It’s four flights up, four long long flights of stairs up, and I went up and down those stairs in the middle of the summer four or five times a day for weeks. Then I did it the next summer. When I got my residual check from Law And Order, I was stunned. I’m used to working my ass off for car-fare.”

All of that should be familiar to anyone reading this blog. She said she would start submitting me tomorrow, she made an appointment for the “on-camera guys”, and she agreed to put a cover letter from another agent at the agency if I found anything in the breakdowns that I thought I’d be good for. She said, “guys are like Gold around here, especially a guy your age with your look. You have a little weight on you, which is fantastic, and your height and your look and your talent… it’s all good.” I could lose a little weight… “I would be *really* careful about losing any weight,” she said.

I’m not in L.A. any more.

I told her that I had a meeting at Paradigm, and she said, “that would probably be with Doug, right?” Um, yeah. “Doug is the best, send him my love.”

Oh. Okay.

I mean, she does know that he’s another commercial agent, right? I was totally confused. In LA, agents didn’t want you, didn’t want you, didn’t want you and then *BANG* they want you to sign an exclussive agreement with them. I actually *signed* with each of the agents I had in LA, which is amazing since none of them got me anything.

I actually stood there for a while and then said, “so, should I, um, I’ve got…” and she said, “I set you up with the on-camera people, right?” and I sorta nodded and she said, “so, we’ll start sending you out soon!” and shook my hand.

I left and called, y’know, everyone I could think of. Tessa called me back. She said it sounded like they were “freelancing” me, where they were gonna try to get you work but other agents could try the same thing. She was concerned that I was careful signing with too many people, because I could get double submitted. Neither of us know what the “on-camera” people are, but I figure I’ll find out at my appointment, which is in the middle of December.

I had a little lunch with Jordana. She said, “you have a special look that you reserve for Rice Krispy Treats.” My guess is that it’s the same look she gets from me when she’s changing after a shower, but maybe there is an extra special way my face sets when I see a Rice Krispy Treat. I like them a lot.

I met with Doug at Paradigm, and, although it took us a little while of staring at each other, we eventually really hit it off. I told him I met with Tracy and he gave me a big smile. These people are obviously really fond of each other. He took my headshot and resume and asked me if there was anything on there I wanted to brag about. “Actually, making the call and meeting with agents is about the most impressive thing I’ve done lately” I told him. He laughed.

He had heard of Suicide/Joke. Go figure. I told him that I hadn’t asked anyone to come because early in the rehearsal process, I wasn’t sure if it was gonna be anything. “I knew it was gonna bea vehicle for me, but I didn’t want everyone to sit through the rest of the show.” He said, “Any chance you can get people to see you in something, you really should,” and I said, “Yeah, but there’s always another show. The show I’m doing now is never gonna be, y’know, the *last show ever*, so I figure I should let people know only when it’s gonna be great.”

This blew him away. He said he would start sending me out. Tomorrow.

I was like, “I’m embarassed about this, but I have no idea how this works.” Here’s what he told me.

There are about 10 or 12 really good commerical agents in New York. I now have two of them. In a perfect world, I would have all of them working for me. For a coupla years, or at least until I really started firing with one of them. At that point, maybe I will decide to stick it out with just one, but until then, it’s good for the agency to have me on their rolls because, frankly, they want to be associated with good actors who have a good work ethic.

Doug said he would work with Tracy to get me work, and that it’s good for either of them for me to be getting commercials. He said it was capricious as hell. “Twelve people will be making the decision, and if you are everyone’s third choice, you’ll probably get it.” He and Tracy would both submit me, without any problem from one another. Fucking awesome.

And then he, like Tracy before him, warned me not to lose weight.

What did I do right? Well, I took Jace’s advice and figured they were either going to like me for me, or they wouldn’t. I was totally myself, in fact I wasn’t even me at my most charming, I was just the boring incredibly sick, on cold medicine me. Fortunately, I’ve gotten to an age where “me” is pretty well set and I’m okay with “me”.

I spent years trying to be cool and sexy, years spent wondering if I could compete with the cool dumb guys I was hanging out with. All those years I spent doing my hair, and I spent a lot of time doing it. Even when I grew my hair long and didn’t wash it, that was my own private rebelion against the world. My life, for years was like the Dada poems on light poles in France. The Dadaists thought they were undoing poetry, that the citizenry would be up in arms. The French just ignored it.

Doug, the last agent, said that he thought it was important for actors to take a month here and there, to do some artistic work. Take a show in Cleveland, tour with a one-person show, do something artistically satisfying. I said, “I’ve been an actor for fifteen years and I’ve never gotten a job through an agent. I’ve been doing downtown theater for four years, and I’ve been brilliant in front of twelve like minded downtown artists. If I need to make art in the future, I’ll be able to, and I’ll let you know. For now, I want to make some goddam money.”

I am only vaguely aware of either Monday or Tuesday. I keep swimming up into awareness only to realize that I’ve lost most of the time since we went upstate on Saturday.

The only update I have is that I have meetings tomorrow with two agents at two really good firms (Abrams and Paradigm) and if they don’t work out I have a meeting with a third (Innovative) next Thursday. We’re still waiting on possible other good news, although at this point it has to be any new news is good news.

Also, I talked to my dad the other day, which is nice. I don’t remember anything about it except that later that night Jordana said something about my dad and I remember saying, “I talked to him today.”

Three weeks from today is the deadline for the show we’re writing. We still have about 68% of the work left.

But still, steps forward, day by day.

Wednesday morning, Jordana’s alarm went off while we were talking and hugging. I’ve never seen her so upset, never, not on September 11th, not when she’s lost shows and jobs, never. And while I’m sure it might be shocking to many of you that she would be more hurt by this election than by September 11th, you should know that her people have been expecting attacks from the outside world for thousands of years, it’s when you are attacked by your own people that it is hard to swallow.

She left for work and I went to the gym and worked out for an hour and a half. I decided it was a new year, starting November 3. This is a new year for me, I just had a birthday, I’m now five. I turned two when my parents were divorced, I turned three when I was divorced, I turned four when I remarried and it’s time to turn five. I went and got my hair cut.

We all know the small things we could do in order to get ahead, we all know the secret things we should be doing. It’s terrifying, this life. We worry about failure. We worry even more about success. We worry about death, about pain, about loneliness. As a nation, we nominated John Kerry because we were worried what middle America would think if we nominated Howard Dean. We wanted someone electable, and we tried to play to the center. We were wrong.

I’m not going to do it anymore. The post I published some weeks ago about the Republican mindset was a peace offering, an explanation when I felt like the debate was too full of hate. I am no longer interested in the debate, I am no longer interested in your point of view. I have children waiting to be born, I have audiences waiting for my work, I have a voice that hasn’t sung in years because of *caution*, because I wanted to be electable.

I will never again back a candidate because he’s electable. I’m going to lose, shot down in a blaze of glory, my kind is always denied access to the polls, my kind is always going to get punched in the face, we will *ALWAYS* get beat up by the school bully, so I’m not gonna give him my lunch money any more. Beat me up, either way, you won’t get my fucking lunch money.

We all know the small things we should be doing, and on Wednesday I started. I went to the gym, I cut my hair, and I started making phone calls. I have the names of three agents who will meet with me next week. I have three casting directors who told me to use their names. And Gideon met.

We talked about our show, our next show, the show after that. We talked about politics, sure, but none of that matters at all. We’re New York Jews, you hate us anyway. We’re faggots. You hate us anyway. You want me to pretend like I’m *not* smarter than you? Like I *don’t* look down on you? Will you hate me less then? Will you think I’m cool? Will you like me? No, you won’t. I can pretend to like you, to respect you, but I don’t.

We’re New York Jews. We’re faggots. You hate me anyway. But soon, I’ll be on your TV. Me and my faggot Jew friends. We’ll keep cashing your checks. You don’t know who you’re writing it to anyway, you don’t care. You want fat stand up comics with hot smart wives who love them, and you want funny funny commercials for Palmolive and you don’t want to know who the check is going to. So, soon, I’m gonna take it.

You watch TV and you don’t know when you’re being spun. You listen to Rock and Roll, you don’t know you’re being spun. You don’t read the bible, you have it read to you by people scared of pretty girls and faggots, scared of bold behavior, and you stay so scared you have to own a gun and drink your meals in halogen kitchens with children bred on terror and vapors. Wood paneling living room lit by the glow of must-see TV and the faint smell of over fried chicken and gin, with the faintest whirring of your brain buzzing out “Seinfeld isn’t bad for a jew”, and you’re advising *me* to be less arrogant.

I woke up Wednesday and by the time I went to bed Wednesday night, I had started my future. I’m never leaving here. I’m dug in. And I am going to lord it over you, when they come for you. Every Mormon that voted for hate, voted side by side with Christians that think they are a cult. Every Jew that voted to protect Israel stood side by side with every southern anti-semite. Every person who lost their job voted for more jobs to be sent over seas. Every person who voted for Jesus, voted against tolerance and love.

They will come for you. They will come for me first, sure, my wife, my children. They will come for my neighbors, the New York Arabs, the Liberal Elite. They will come for me first, but I’ll survive, I will thrive because I am in the right, because I am elite. Then they will come for you, and you will be too scared, too terrified to do anything. You will hold your head in your hands and say, “I wanted *them* to change, not Me! I wasn’t voting so that bad things would happen to ME! How did this come back to me? Why can’t I worship and love and have a job? How did this happen?”

I went to bed Wednesday night, but I didn’t go to sleep. I got up Thursday and I went to the gym. I made more phone calls, I wrote more music and I taught children. Your children. I taught them to be bold. I told them to stand up, I told them that no-one in my group judges another for singing differently. I taught them that we are the music makers, that we are the dreamers of the dream. I taught them to be the next generation of loud mouths and degenerates, battling always toward absolute unfettered freedom.

I came home exhausted, drained, and I had dinner with my wife and my mom and we laughed and laughed. We didn’t watch the news, we talked about our music, about my kids in rehearsal, about our dreams. My mom is getting a job as an editor for textbooks. Whoops! I’m teaching children. UH-OH! You don’t have enough hate in you to stomp us all out. They will come for me, for my wife, my kids, sure. But they will come for you next. The left doesn’t need to wake up, the liberal elite doesn’t need to change a goddam thing. You don’t have to wake up either. Sleep as long as you can. But they are coming for you, rest assured.

I went to bed last night. I went to bed exhausted, but I did not go to sleep.

I’m not sure how many posts are gonna come out of me in the next few days. A part of me thinks I won’t write again until the world rights itself, the other part of me knows I’m gonna scream until the rafters scream back.

This election was one of fear. Every single vote, yours and mine included, was cast in fear. We were all voting in the hopes of avoiding the horrible thing we think is going to happen. The Gay Marriage votes were not votes wherein people were hoping to end homosexuality, they were voting against the imagined queering of marriage. We voted for John Kerry because we are terrified of what another four years of President Bush will bring us.

And people voted for Bush because they were terrified of what would happen without him.

Democrats lost because we had nothing to vote *for*.

The way words work is endlessly fascinating to me. Think about the meaning of “acute” and “obtuse”, and how they become almost onomatopoeiac, I’ve already talked about how cool it is to refer to something as “remarkable”, as if anything less shouldn’t even be spoken about. The word that is haunting me today is “distinguished”.

If you distinguish one thing from another, you are clarifying it, you are giving it distinct parameters. John Kerry was attacked a number of times as having never distinguished himself, and they meant it both ways, that he had never risen above the fray politically and that he never seemed to *stand* for anything.

Now, this is a shitty position to be in, arguing that my guy couldn’t have won when yesterday morning I thought he was going to. But I’ll be completely honest, when his poll numbers looked good, when all the prediction sites had him winning, I was pleasantly shocked. As soon as we turned the TV on last night, I knew. Jordana knew, she could see it on my face, I even tried not to look at her, but I knew really really early.

Long before the called Florida, I knew the polls were a dream. And I knew that my nightmare was about to come true.

It feels sometimes like it’s impossible for us to win. I’ve chalked it up to the field I’ve chosen, the fields we have all chosen, but still, it can be heartbreaking.

We drove with Mom snoring in the back seat of the car to Ohio, and then we stayed awake all night with mom snoring in the motel, only to have her wake up bright eyed and bushy tailed at 5 in the morning, all set to work on protecting the election. There are always wandering homeless when you stand outside for too long, especially in the more desperate neighborhoods in America, and here was no exception. There were plenty of crazy people, the kind of people that you feel yourself moving away from, hoping someone else will take care of them, and my mom would kind of fold them in, hear their story, make sure they know they were heard, and somehow get them to go away.

I will not despair. I will not.

Mom is 72 years old, she’ll be 76 next time, 80 the time after that, 84 after that… and no-one’s gonna stop her. She wasn’t protecting the election because all the kids were doing it, she was doing it because she was fighting. She’s *ancient*, *WAY* too old to be standing all day trying to convince people they should vote, but she was doing it. She’s gonna wake up really, really sad tomorrow and she shouldn’t.

First of all, you know mom, she’s gonna forget about the election about eight times tomorrow. And then she’ll remember and be sad all over again. But she shouldn’t be sad because it isn’t about winning. You can’t get mad at America for being scared, for believing what they are told. It’s terrifying, living in America right now, and you can’t get sad about them believing what they are told.

This fight happens every single day. This election doesn’t change anything, we are still battling fear. They try to stop schools from teaching things that show their weaknesses, they try to stop people from voting, from speaking their minds, from saying things that can undermine their power. And its working right now.

I’m stumbling. I’ll admit it. But I won’t despair. I will not.

It’s working right now, but it won’t always work. Mom knows this. She knows that you have to keep fighting the fight. Just because it’s working right now, doesn’t mean that fear will always win. It is inhuman, it’s unnatural to live outside the bounds of constant celebration.

We haven’t called each other tonight, I know that. None of us has called or emailed. I know Dad is really sad right now, the picture of his face in November of 1980 is somehow burned on to my mind, that picture of his sad face when Carter lost. Kent and Sean must be fucking heartbroken. I know Steve and Michelle are trying to figure out how the world even makes sense, and, Jesus, I am not even going to imagine what Ian and Tessa are going through.

My sweet Jordana crawled into bed. She didn’t cry. She cries sometimes when she loses a job or when a gig goes south or when she feels like her parents or friends don’t understand her, but the only times she really cries is when she feels alone in the world. Tonight she didn’t cry, she said she was scared. She’s scared for our country, for our lives, for the future.

Mom went to bed early. She didn’t cry either. After the life she’s had, I can’t imagine that she would cry.

But at some point tomorrow, we are all gonna despair. Same for Mac and Ehren and Seth and Jon and Dan and and and and and…

The fight wasn’t gonna end tomorrow no matter what. People didn’t have an option, really, they didn’t know.

We go see “well made plays” sometimes, and they never really excite you. President Bush… is a million things, but the one undeniable fact is that he is human and we sort of sold out when we nominated the most electable. We should remember that. We sold out, we tried for a package that would please the most people. Next time, we get Hillary to run with Al Sharpton and we get the white house back to someone spunky,

Or not. The war is wrong, the economy is wrong and we’re gonna have four more years of never giving up. And while this happens, we have to have our babies and get our bodies in shape and love each other and continue the debate. The one thing we have to do is to keep fighting. I know you know this, I know I don’t have to say it. I know that none of this helps.

Tomorrow, I’m gonna write music. I’m gonna work on my play and on my art. And I want you to do it too. I know, you’re all smarter than me, this is pollyanna crap, but do it just tomorrow. Tomorrow, make this our day to take one giant step forward, the day after the election is the day we decided that we were gonna throw our shoulder behind the cart and see if we can’t get it out of the mud.

And, just for tomorrow, don’t despair. If you can make it to Thursday without despairing, then maybe we won’t despair at all.