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.

It’s nice to walk in to a junior high school and know that, no matter how shitty any of these kids are, I can just beat them to death with my bare hands. I won’t do it, but it’s nice to know I have the option.

I went in to the rehearsal hall, a really nice old auditorium with about five hundred seats and four hundred coats of paint on the walls. I love auditoriums, I love standing on the stage and seeing the seats. It could be that the stage was the only place I ever felt safe as a kid, but whatever the reason, it is the only place I go where I am reverent.

The kids can tell. As they come in, they know they can still goof off, they can still hassle each other and do their 7th and 8th grade pecking order ruthlessness, but they also know not to come up on to the stage where I am. They all showed up at about 3:25, all but one of them, and they didn’t come up on the stage until 3:29. They know, I’ve told them, that 3:29 is their time and 3:30 is my time.

It’s hard to imagine. I’m sure, but I am an effective disciplinarian when I need to be, and a very natural one. I am panicked about wasting other people’s time, and I am driven to use every single second I have toward the artistic goal, and my own drive translates into inspiration.

These are great kids, really talented. I’ve been told a thousand times that I should teach full time, and maybe I should, but if I did, I’d end up with a worse group than I get by teaching ocassionally. Give me a choir of a hundred kids and I’d be great, but select the best 12 out of that group and let me inspire them twice a year and I’m the best choral director in the country. That’s really my secret, I never stay anywhere long enough for contempt to breed. Also, I’d get sued for language and emotional abuse.

Because I treat them like adults. And they aren’t. When you are directing a group of kids, the energy coming off them is like a group of pidgeons fighting over discarded bread, they seem to have a common goal but they just keep wandering and pecking, side to side, a disjointed whole made from distracted parts, methodically and spastically lurching toward their ideal.

So, you have to know that you’ll have to say everything a thousand times. There are things I say all the time, “Breath from here, sing from here” kind of stuff, but there is also “what key are we in?” and “why is this note going flat?” and “where are you going to breathe?” kind of things, hurled at them as quickly as possible. It takes months. One girl will answer “is it the third of the chord?” and I won’t let her answer again until even the 13 year old boy who is using his butt to run laps in his seat figures it out.

By 3:35, one girl still isn’t there and I say, “I am going to single you out when you make mistakes. That is simply going to happen, so prop each other up when you feel bad. Tess is five minutes late. If we were in the studio, the studio would be getting paid, the producer would be getting paid, the AD and the PA are getting paid, I’m getting paid, there is money pouring out of this project, all waiting for *one* of you to show up. We can’t start ’till the whole group is there, and five minutes is hundreds and hundreds of dollars…”

They know. But if I don’t reinforce it, they won’t. I fire kids, I’ve done it a lot. If you are late once, you are told not to do it again. If you are late twice, you’re fired.

Because, despite how talented these kids are, despite the magic of music and theater, despite how much I want to be involved in the creation of the next group of artists, you should *never* be late to rehearsal or a performance, and if you are the kind of person who is, you need to quit and do something else. Be a lawyer, be a typist, be a writer or a publicist or… Jesus, I don’t even know what most people do for a living, but go do that. Be late once a month to your job.

But if you are only as diligent as the average person, you will suffer and fail as an artist. If you are more diligent than the average person, you will suffer and fail as an artist. If you are the 99th percentile in terms of dilligence and hard work, if you turn over every stone, if you have stop gaps for every scenario, if your work ethic is unimpeachable, you will suffer as an artist, but you’ve given yourself a chance to not fail. You probably will still fail, this is s terrible life full of incredible odds, but yoou at least have a chance.

It gets to be 4:30 and these kids have been working for a solid hour with no breaks. They won’t get a break. I need them to be able to focus and concentrate for an hour and a half, take a ten minute break and then do another hour and a half. It isn’t fun, it’s work. But these recordings will be here, still, when their grandchildren have grandchildren and they will be able to play the digital recordings on water molecules or whatever and I want those grandchildren of grandchildren to say “He sounded amazing…”

At 4:46, we are making the sound, the sound that I have worked with kids all over the country for the last 15 years trying to get them to make. Before I knew how to make it, I knew what I wanted, now I know and these kids have worked with me for a year now and I can get them within striking distance after an hour or so. So, I tell one of the girls to take the solo. I play the opening pitch and start counting off.

This is totally unfair, I know the girl will freeze up. You don’t ask college kids to sight-read a solo in front of all their peers, I know she is going to fail. I count off and she squeeks out a note or two and then stops. “What happened?” I ask.

“I don’t know if I can do this solo,” she says.

“How are you gonna find out?”

She doesn’t say anything. I don’t either and the group is staring at the two of us.

“Look where you are,” I say. “Look out there” I point to the rows and rows of empty seats. We’re on the stage, half inch of cloudy laquer on a half foot of wood, literally “the boards”.

“Out there,” I say, “is full of people who don’t know if they can do this solo. For the rest of your life, every single seat will be filled with people staring up here, saying to themselves, ‘I don’t know if I could do that solo’, and you’re going to be up here staring back at them. The only thing that separates the two of you is what?”

“I’m doing the solo?”

“Are you?”

“I’m doing the solo.”

“Exactly.” I give her the pitch again and count off. Of course she sings it fantastically and the rest of the group sings along. It’s a kids song, a really basic little song, almost a nursery rhyme. There is no way that any one of the kids couldn’t have sung it, sight-read it in fact. They could each have done it, and this girl was the teaching sacrificial lamb.

There is still one boy that isn’t making the sound right, and I singled him out at 4:53 and make him sing it alone. The rest of the kids have taken up their pidgeon ways, nudging each other, writing little notes on their music, generally feeling like they are getting away with something, but they are actually just being allowed a little space while I work with this boy.

They are respectful and silent, but unfocused. The boy is locked on my eyes as we sing back and forth. I give him clues and secrets, different things. I finally say “half that loud” and he sings it a little bit better. I say, “half that loud again” and it’s better still. I say, “as quiet as you can” and this voice, this gorgeous perfect bell tone comes out of the top of his head, and every single kid on stage stops what they are doing and whips their heads at me, huge smiles on their faces. No-one says anything.

“That was great, but it was too soft, right?” I ask. The boy, smiling, nods sorta dismissively. “You really need to make more noise than that, don’t you?” The kid sorta laughs and nods. I lean in as if to whisper to him, and all the other kids lean in.

“Look, what’s happening,” I say in a whisper. “if I whisper just to you, using the smallest voice I have, every single person in this room is trying to hear me. In ten years, you are going to be standing in the middle of a stage exactly like this and you are gonna pause” and I say nothing for about five seconds, “and every single butt in every single chair is gonna lean forward, dying to know what you will say next.”

I leave about five seconds of silence.

“Okay,” I holler. “Next Thursday, exactly same time.” and the group leaves with choruses of “Thank you Mister Williams” and the girl smiles and says to me “Thanks, Sean.”

Hey, you won’t be thanking me in seven years when you’re part of the Fraudience at an Ashlee Simpson concert, but, yeah, for now, at this moment you are making music. And, I guess, this moment is all we got.

I have received more than a little encouragement from friends when it comes to seeing plays. It turns out, they really want me to see plays I don’t like because it leads to wonderful blogs. I hate to disappoint, but the play I saw last night isn’t going to fit into that.

Now, if I were to go to most of my friends and family and say “I saw a play last night, lasted about 2 hours and 45 minutes, and, despite the fact that it contained horrible domestic violence and rape, it was actually a comedy that ends in a passionate realization of the destruction of the self in order to create a sense of purpose” they would all say to me, “Yeah, isn’t that the play you produced in 2000?’

It turns out, it isn’t. But the similarities are striking. Sakharim Binder is a play by an Indian playwright, set in basically modern day India (although, who can tell, it could have been India from the 1600s except for the language) in a small house owned by the eponymous subject. Women in this culture are thrown out by their husbands and left to wander the streets, untouchable, until predators like Binder can collect them and make them servants, slaves and whores in exchange for a roof and some food.

I know, it doesn’t sound funny, but it is actually. The sheer charm of the main character, as played by Bernard White , is the engine behind the show, and the entire evening would be worthwhile if only to get a chance to see this wonderful actor work. But he is not the only reason to see this show.

It is written in three acts but presented in two, which is a small problem only because, in terms of the drama, it reads in three acts. Binder brings home one woman, abuses the hell out of her and then kicks her out. I laughed the whole time. He then brings home a second woman, a “sexy” woman, and Binder can’t quite make his abuses stick. He starts missing work, doing the chores, forgetting his place, just to please this woman. The third act, the first woman shows up and manages to stay, and the whole thing becomes a mess.

******(There are three theatrical conventions that drive me mad that I will throw in as asides. In almost every play or movie where one woman is presented as meek and homely and the other is presented as a sexual dynamo I, *WITHOUT FAIL*, find the homely one more attractive in every way. It’s like they find the most beautiful woman in the world, and then fit her with a pair of glasses or a baggy sweatshirt and I’m supposed to be convinced. The first woman in the play, Sanjiv Jhaveri is certainly less famous than Sarita Choudhury but she’s actually more attractive and, to me, a better actress.)

The play is long, but I’m not sure that’s bad. It’s so long that you forget you are in a play for most of it, you find yourself transported to the world being presented. Within the first 45 minutes, I had completely accepted Binder’s worldview, and I found myself annoyed at the many people who were fighting against it by acting like human beings. I was frustrated with the second woman for being independent and not putting up with Binder’s abuse. By the end of the play, when the real dramatic push happens, I remembered I was in a theater just in time to start applauding.

That being said, it felt like, at times, the writer was including a lot of stuff in the play that could have been left out. There are several scenes with extra characters that certainly flesh out the rest of the play, but by the end, I had wished the play was maybe shorter and had focused on our main three characters a little more. I’m always glad when a professional company includes more actors, particularly ethnic actors who can’t always find good roles, but at nearly three hours it did end up being a price to pay. If you keep your audience in the theater for an hour longer than they expect, you kinda have to justify it.

*******( Theatrical Convention Annoyance #2- Blackouts. I don’t know if Mac has convinced me of this, or if we both thought it was true and it became a rallying point for working together, but I really hate it when the stage goes dark and the actors move stuff around while we pretend we aren’t in the theater for a minute. It’s the weirdest ten to thirty seconds of my life. Okay, the lights are out, the actors are stumbling around, I can *hear* them, but I’m really not supposed to be paying attention to them… but I’m also not supposed to make any noise myself.

It’s like all the people involved in the play are saying “Okay, this little bit here? This isn’t the play. Don’t pay any attention for the next few seconds… wait, except pay *close* attention because you never know when the lights might come back up and we’ll start the play again. Pay attention, but pretend that you aren’t here… You know what it is, it’s like we’re *hiding*. Pretend that we are small children playing hide and seek, and you know *exactly* where we are, but you aren’t going to catch us *quite yet*. In fact we can make as much noise as we want… up to a point. We can make noise, but we have to sound like we’re trying *not* to make noise. So, when we leave through the functioning door on stage, it will make a noise when it closes, but it will make the quietest possible noise and then *BOOM* the lights come on and NOW THIS IS THE PLAY! WE’RE BACK! MORE PLAY!”

Even worse are the black box plays where they do “dark, dark grey-outs”. Not blackouts, mind you. The actors on stage have almost enough light to change the set, which is, of course, just enough light for the audience to see every single thing you are doing, but is also little enough light to ensure that an actor will break his foot moving a desk.

What’s a director supposed to do? I don’t blame the director, I blame the writer. If you are writing stuff where scenes change instantly, you are writing a TV show or movie. Plays happen in one or two total spaces. And a director can always “Children Of A Lesser God” the whole thing and bring out a bench that indicates every single playing space. My friend Dan Kois did every single play with four chairs.)

Full disclosure, I know the guy who runs the company and if I had *hated* this show, I would still try to write something nice. But you can tell when I’m bullshitting, the truth is, this is a magical amazing piece of theater, powerful and rhapsodic.

And I wouldn’t say it was good just because of my friend. The truth is, the play company has been producing the most consistently good theater of any company I’ve regularly seen in the past three years. Sure, when you go see one of their shows, you can be sure you are seeing a great internationally themed script with great actors. And that alone is enough to separate them from most other companies.

But more than that, the world of the play is perfectly created by their team of designers. The set, lighting and sound design are so *articulate* so focused and exact in this production, as they have been for all of the past productions as well. Names like “Antje Ellerman” (who’s set design for this show is fantastic) and “Nicole Pearce” (who’s understanding and understated light design propelled the show) and “Bart Fasbender” (who showed, in his brilliant work both in this show and in “Trust” that sound design is the most overlooked and undervalued aspect of theater) are names that won’t mean much to most of you, but without them this play would not have been the incredible evening it was.

*******(Yeah, you knew I wasn’t gonna leave it at that. #3- Stage combat. I’ve seen shows where people actually hauled off and hit each other, and believe me, it’s worse than the staged combat. When people hit each other, you just get worried all to hell that the *actor* is hurt. But stage combat is just terrible. There are many ways that television and movies have ruined theater, the jump cuts, the “natural” dialogue covering up brilliant “stage” dialogue, the fact that every moderately talented actor goes straight to method acting without ever learning how to articulate or speak loudly, etc… But stage combat is the one area where these glaring problems are met head on with the flaw of using film sensibilities on stage.

See, back in the day, we always knew we were watching people pretend. Aristophanes didn’t pray that he would find the perfect actors to embody his characters, no-one was watching a play and thought “Hey, that’s *actually* one of the neighboring lords that we are sworn to kill!” When people got killed, the characters lay on the ground dead and, yes, breathing. The combat was in bold strokes, obviously theatrical.

But now, we have “naps”, the small noises that accompany the crappy looking balletic fighting that happens in plays. Every time someone is slapped, someone else claps his or her hands together. There’s nothing wrong with this, but when the actors have spent an hour *embodying* the characters, then they take a swing at a spot some five inches away from the other person’s face, and someone frickin’ *claps* at the same time, it just looks ridiculous.

I have never, in the history of my play going and my play, um, being-in, I have never felt like stage combat looked good. Wrestling is fine. Choking someone to death is fine. But anything that has to have an accompanying sound is *ridiculous*. I saw a woman slap a man at a 1400 seat auditorium and I had bad seats, I distinctly *SAW* the man clap his hands together as he brought his hand up to his face.

In summation: If you have a part for an ugly girl, cast an ugly girl, if you have to have combat, make it wrestling, and avoid black outs at all costs. I have spoken.)

This site is designed specifically for me to talk about things that piss me off in a way that cracks me up about them. My family has, over the years, lost their tolerance for my full fledged deep breath rants, mostly because I like to say the *exact* same thing in about thirteen different ways. I like to extend a metaphor. I like to take things to their absurd conclusion. I started this blog so that I could spare my family and friends the bullshit, and it has done it quite a bit. My family email list and my best friends email list are both somewhat down in traffic since I started this blog, and I’m sure that, even though most of them come read this, they are happy with that.

But, time to time, I find that something I’ve written has hurt someone’s feelings, and I’m not sure how to feel about that. I have a knee jerk reaction to finding out I’ve hurt someone, and it isn’t pretty. When someone says, “this was hurtful to me” I actually become ruthless. “Well, what the fuck is wrong with you, then?” I say. “Buck the fuck up. If what I say hurts your feelings, you’re pretty goddam fragile and you really should, y’know, exercise your emotional muscles a little more.”

I don’t know why this happens. When people are hurt by me, I have learned to feign compassion, but I am honestly faking it, waiting for the bullshit whining to stop. (In case it isn’t apparent, when I dig a hole I like to dig nice and deep and make sure the walls are good and slick. I don’t want me climbing out of this later.) I wish I knew why I have such hostility to people claiming I’ve hurt them, but I feel like the expression of your pain is a waste of time.

Let me be clear, I absolutely *hate* hurting people, I just can’t stand being told that I have. It isn’t that I feel the other person is weak, it’s that I want something other than admission of damage. I want debate. If I say something that hurts your feelings, then I want to know why, I don’t want to know that you’re hurt. “You are wrong, and here’s why” is something that means something to me, but “You’ve hurt me and… nothing, you’ve just hurt me” fills me with rage, and that rage leads to more pain. For you.

I feel like I can defend almost anything I’ve written on this blog, but really quickly, some of what I’ve written about God and religion has upset some people, so let me make a couple of things really clear.

1. I do believe that, as political movements, Christians and Muslims are trying to take over the world, I also believe that Jews are not. Christians and Muslims, as non-political entities, are praying and looking to God and doing whatever it is that religious people do, and, it’s my suspicion that they would be happy with their religions taking over the world, but I’ve never tried to argue that.

2. I have no knowledge of God, and I have done what I could to distinguish this from a lack of belief. Agnosticism leaves open the possibility of God, and to me, that isn’t true. If I say to you, “there is no connection between Saddam and 9/11” and you respond with, “There might be, and I believe there is. There is no way for you to have all the facts concerning the matter, and I honestly think there is a connection,” then I think, with every fiber of my being, that you are wrong.

My wife is agnostic. She worries about Kharmic retribution, about tempting the fates. To her, there is something more at work in the universe than simply stimulus/response. If we are about the get in a car for a drive, I can say, “I bet you a thousand dollars we don’t get in an accident!” and she’ll say, “Jesus, Sean, I wish you wouldn’t say that.” We haven’t talked about it too much, maybe she believes in God even more than that, but she definitely believes that you can make bad things stay away and good things come your way by thinking and speaking like a decent person.

3. I have tried praying and it’s never worked. I have tried to ask God for guidance, and I’ve gotten nothing, Horrible things have happened to me that I didn’t deserve and wonderful things have happened to me that I didn’t deserve. I’ve worked really hard for something and then it came to pass, and I’ve completely bailed on other things and they have not panned out. I live in a universe where work and luck have given me everything I have, and where apathy or delusion or bad luck have led to every failure.

4. I firmly believe that my lack of ability to find any kind of higher power is a shortcoming on my behalf. Sure, I declare all of this stuff boldly here on the blog, but, as I said before, I like saying the same thing thirteen different ways and this gives me a forum to do that. If my declaration that I have never felt God makes you feel bad then either I’m hitting a little close to home for you or you should quit reading my blog.

5. If you have ever tried to convince anyone else that your religion was the right one, then you are, at the very least, a passionate believer. If you have ever tried to convince someone else to *join* your religion, then you are very zealous indeed.

If your religion is the fastest growing religion in the world, and every single male member of your church spends two years, on their own dime, going door to door across every single nation in the country trying desperately to convince anyone and everyone you bump in to that not only is your religion the true religion, but that everyone should *join* your religion, then you are a zealot. It’s pretty easy math.

I don’t see that there is anything wrong with being a zealot. Every single day I try to make people laugh because I’m always trying to convince myself that I’m funny. You want to baptize people because it helps you convince yourself that your view on God is the right one.

We’re all a little nervous.

But there is a difference between praying alone in your closet, and banging on people’s front doors. I’m not trying to hurt anyone, but if you think I’m wrong then tell me *why*, don’t tell me my words hurt. I can’t apologize for saying what I meant and what is hard to argue is wrong. I don’t want to hurt people, but, really, these are just words and if they mean something to you, tell me what it is and I’ll modify my language or we’ll agree to disagree.

Yeah, let me tell you the story you aren’t going to read when you go to Salon’s piece about the poor Ashlee Simpson’s debacle at Saturday Night Live.

Y’see, the world is full of little-girl-lost stories, the Red Riding Hoods that set out on an unwise but well intentioned course through the dark woods just so we can gasp when the obvious happens, she is eaten by a wolf disguised as someone she can trust. Yes, it’ a tough world for Ashlee Simpson, no doubt.

But look at the language in the story, and you’ll see a real horror show. In talking about her lack of skill, they admit that “MTV captured her first performance ever at The Knitting Factory in L.A., replete with promotional fraudience swooning enthusiastically for the cameras.”

Never mind that a person who had never performed ever in front of a crowd was losing her onstage virginity on MTV, and never mind that the article made that seem unfair to *Ashlee Simpson* instead of unfair to thousands and thousands of performers every day who sing for passionate crowds of people and are ignored (or, say, *EVERY SINGLE ORCHESTRA IN THE WORLD*, *NONE* of which will ever play on any of the “music” channels), never mind the obvious, let me tell you a real horror story.

Six years ago, a girl got up and sang at her junior high school cabaret. She sang “Wind Beneath My Wings”, and her mother cried. Weirdly, it wasn’t just her mother. Everyone was knocked out. She was incredible, somehow she sang with the maturity and clarity that escaped the other kids. It wasn’t showey, it wasn’t perfect, and the girl isn’t gorgeous, so how was anyone to know that when she stood up and sang it would melt the hearts and knees of every person sitting in folding chairs in the junior high school gym.

For the first time in her short life, this awkward little girl did something that garnered her positive attention. Not only did the thing that she sang celebrate her talent, but it also celebrated the history of music. She had discovered her voice, literally and figuratively, and from that moment on she had walked into the world of those-who-give-us-that-which-we-cannot-express-on-our-own. She became an Artist, in league with Mozart and Moliere and McCartney and French Cavemen Who Drew Hunting On Walls. There is an ineffable something that she has. She becomes something completely *other* when she stands in front of a crowd, the notes become a song, the melody has meaning, a single note she sings, wordlessly transports you.

She got leads in the school musicals, she was senior soloist at graduation, she went to college… but somehow her voice was never enough. She was a little bit heavy lidded in the eye, her skin was flawed and she never could figure out make-up, she was a little thin in the bust and a tiny bit heavy in the thighs… she just couldn’t get people to *listen* anymore because now that she was 19, her voice wasn’t the focal point of her performance. Music has become pornography, the audience isn’t listening, they want to fuck someone.

People needed to want to fuck her, and they just didn’t want to fuck her *that much*.

She moved to Los Angeles, believing she could do more for her career if she lost weight, wore a wonder bra, got into the Screen Actor’s Guild. She tried out for American Idol and made the first four cuts but, in the end, her mouth was a little too pouty, her eyes weren’t matched in shape, there was something just not *beautiful* about her. And she wasn’t getting in the unions.

She lost her baby fat in six months in LA, she now had no breasts at all and a small butt and thighs, and she still wasn’t getting work. She made money waiting tables and then spent it all on a voice over audition class that promised her a demo, which she got. She didn’t realize that voice overs are done by only 150 people in the country. She waited tables more and blew her money on headshots with a creepy photographer, who’s portfolio contained fantastic artistic nudes.

She started drinking, gained a little weight, started smoking to lose the weight, but her voice survived. She did open mic nights and afterwards every woman in the place told her she was amazing. Because she wasn’t that beautiful, and women can support other women who aren’t that beautiful. The men liked her performance, but didn’t want to fuck her. So they described her as “talented”, “gifted”, “musical”, the kind of words you use for a child, but never “soulful” or “stunning” or “heart-breaking”, the words you use for a woman. And no A&R; people ever sought her out.

Her headshot photographer calls her with an industry gig. They’re looking for musical types to go to a rock concert and cheer on a young performer. It’s non-union, you get $40 for the gig and you support an up and coming musician. Our girl thinks it’s a pretty good idea. Spread the love. She honestly believes that if she goes and screams for this young girl, it will get paid back to her when her chance comes. She doesn’t know that, at 21, she’s already too old, her chance was never going to come.

She goes and she screams her head off for Ashlee Simpson, and the MTV cameras glimpse her. She’s part of the “fraudience”. Out photographer gets some pictures. In a sweaty tee-shirt, braless and jumping, he sees something of her can actually take pictures of.

Our girl thinks the photographer will be able to help her career. In six months, she’ll have moved from smoking to crystal meth, and she’ll be taking pictures to support the habit. The drugs will ruin her skin, the lifestyle will ruin her voice and the pregnancy she will get at 23 will be easier for her to get rid of than the STD she’ll get at 26. At 28 she’ll stop drugs entirely, find God and a husband. When she’s thirty, she’ll stop even auditioning for community theater, depressed that she is always light years ahead of the ingenue and still always playing the character role. She’ll play Adelaide out in the Valley one last time and she’ll get a rave review, but no-one sees it, no-one ever will. No follow up phone calls, no casting agents.

She’ll retire without telling anyone, even herself.

She will still sing, in church, in her kitchen. And her girlfriends will still tell her she’s amazing, and they will say so knowing that she will never succeed so they can do it with a clear conscience.

And you are telling me that Ashlee Simpson, millionaire, #1 album seller, has it hard? You’re telling me that we should feel bad for little girl lost? She’s Red Riding Hood if Red Riding Hood was *carried* through the woods in a rickshaw, arrived at grandma’s to find a palace where the wolves wait on her hand and foot and as she’s eating dinner she realizes that her 1999 Château Le Pin Pomerol is a little *too* chilled.

This business is not full of girls you’ve heard of that have fallen apart. The Olson Twin in rehab, the Courtney Loves and Sean Youngs. One, maybe two new basket cases a year, that isn’t this business. This business is thousands and thousands of broken dreams every single month. Every famous woman is standing on the corpses of thousands of women they don’t deserve to be in the audience of.

And if you bought Ashlee Simpson’s album, you are the problem.

It’s ten thirty and Ian is supposed to be here any minute, which means I have an hour to kill, so I’ll give you a list of my five favorite kitchen tools, the things I use more than anything else.

1. Zwilling J.A.Henckels 8″ Santoku knife. Obviously, anyone who has ever spent enough time in a kitchen to make a sandwich will tell you the benefits of a good knife, but what you should know is that a great knife is the knife you use. I have several knives, and this is the one that, for some reason, sits in my hand the best. I have a Wustof 8″ Cook’s Knife, or as it says on the sleeve “Kochmesser”, that I use a lot as well, but there’s something about the way the Santoku sits in my index finger that feels like a violin bow.

Knives are basically like tennis rackets anymore. Spend around 200 dollars and get one the seriously improves your game. But, understand that you can spend 500 dollars on a knife you never use, and a 30 dollar knife will just feel right in your hand.

2. Spring Loaded Tongs. I have three sets of these, one regular straight up stainless, one with plastic coated tong ends and one super long ones for grilling. I don’t grill, I don’t know what the hell I’m still doing with the six foot long tongs, but the other ones I use all the time. They have a scalloped end and both pairs open when you bump the butt of the tongs against your hip.

Any time I’m frying something, any time I’m making soup, any time I’m braising meat or chicken… I mean, I don’t know how people cook without these. Up at the farm one weekend, I realized that if I couldn’t find the tongs I would simply be unable to make dinner. I think most people think they can’t cook because most people haven’t realized how useful tongs are.

3. Williams-Sonoma Heat Resistant Non Stick Spatula. My dad has given me great advice over the course of my life. He’s the one who told me that, even as a freelance artist, you should get out of bed nice and early every morning and start working. He also told me to put on my socks before my pants, a habit I have never broken. Better than all of that, he told me about these spatulas. You can submerge them in frying oil, you can leave them sitting in a saute pan, you could put them in a baker’s oven and they won’t warp or fall apart. And, I use mine to scrape the inside of the bowl when I’m making everything from soup to bread to cookie dough.

Spatulas are magic. I don’t know how people cooked when all they had was spoons. I suppose you had to make enough food to feed everyone, plus the food you weren’t going to get out of the bowl. When I’m making bread or pasta or any baked goods, and I’m adding the wet to the dry ingredients, I wonder if the recipe is altered for the amount of egg and milk left in the bowl if you don’t use a spatula.

4. Kitchenaid Bowl Mixer- This instrument means I make bread. I would not make bread without it, I just wouldn’t. And I wouldn’t make cookies quite as much, but that’s not nearly as important.

I make my own bread, and I try not to eat too much bread that I haven’t made, and here’s why. I can control the healthiness of the bread I make. A lot of bread is marked as “low carb” or whatever, but mostly that’s because they cover the loaf in nuts and fiberous crap that supposedly cancels out the carbs and adds to the vitamins. But I don’t like crust very much, and my wife and mom don’t eat the crusts, which means they miss out on the vitamins and carb-cancelling fiber.

I make bread using high protein whole weat flour. It’s hard to make a good loaf out of this stuff, but since it costs almost *nothing* to make bread, and since my bread hook cuts down on the amount of time I have to knead the dough from an hour to about three minutes, I can keep trying until I get it right.

For some reason, when I make bread, it stays good for about five days. I’m not lying. Five days later, it’s still moist, it still tastes great. I make a hunkin’ loaf and it lasts forever. For *nothin’*. And I couldn’t do it without the Kitchenaid.

5. Large Ceramic and Metal Bowls. I have several, and I really wish I had more. I mix giant salads and then eat them. I let dough rest and rise. I hold mis-en-place and mirpoix. I whip eggs and milk. These big-ass bowls are the other thing that most would-be cooks are missing, and they are always the thing that they take for granted on cooking shows. They throw together omelet makings into a huge tuscan cermic beautiful bowl and then look at the camera and talk about wisk technique. Meanwhile, we’re sitting at home with a wisk, all the right ingredients, and a cereal bowl trying to get air into the eggs.

I have three glass, three ceramic and two metal bowls, and I use some combination of them every single time I cook.

Honorable mention-

My wisks- I have three and yes, they are used for different things at different times. A big wide balloon wisk, a skinny long wisk and a regular egg whipping wisk.

Pastry Cutter- This is just a large flat piece of metal, slightly sharp on one end and rolled over on the other. I use it to move ingredients, cut bread dough in half and cleaning the counter. Sure. I clean the counter before I roll out dough or knead bread, and then I use the pastry cutter to clean up all the extra flour.

Stick Blender- Now that I have this I never use a blender. I also use a piece of cardboard with a small hole cut in the center as a lid over whatever I’m cooking.

Thermometers- I have two. One is an oil/candy thermometer, the other is a remote with a long wire. Both are digital. Bread? Done at 185. Chicken? Breast meat 160. (I know, I know, I don’t think it’ll kill me). Stew meat? 165, Turkey Thigh? 180.

I mean, yeast blooms best at 110 degrees, so if I’m making, say, sandwich bread, I heat the milk and honey until they are about 120, I pour in a third of a cup of water (it drops to about 113) and then I stir in the yeast. Stirring cools things, and the last of the yeast slips into a perfect warm sugar bath. Mo more “use warm water” instructions for me.

Things I still want-

1. Viking Stove. My current stove is about 12 pounds. I need a stove I can’t lift.

2. Counter Space. My kitchen is ridiculous.

3. Small stock pot. For some reason, I have soup pots and one 64 gallon bememoth.

4. Dishwasher. I don’t mind doing dishes, but our water isn’t very hot and I worry.

5. New Microwave. Ours is full of food crud, and no-one wants to clean it.

6. A full size refrigerator. We bought an “apartment sized” fridge because it was 300 dollars less and, well, we live in an apartment. Huge mistake. It holds about three days worth of food. We end up throwing stuff out just to make room.

7. A Rich and Rewarding Career as An Actor. I mean, as long as I’m asking…

Yeah, but I was apparently sort of wrong nonetheless. I’ve assumed this whole time that Bush supporters overall knew what they were talking about and just disagreed. Check out http://www.pipa.org/OnlineReports/Pres_Election_04/html/new_10_21_04.html#1. It looks like most of them don’t know a lot of Bush’s positions.

And yeah, that does surprise me.