Almost as significant as getting married is the fact that our long time room-mate Amy moved out today. It’s taken her a few days to haul her stuff ten blocks east, but last night she slept at her new place and today she took the last load.

When Jordana and I were moving out of the first place we lived together (which we call Deb’s place because, well, the place was Deb’s parents and it was never “Deb and Jordana’s place”), we were trying to find our own apartments. Jordana was willing to pay 12 or 13 hundred a month to stay in Manhattan, I was basically broke but was talking about moving in with my sister… the whole thing was ridiculous. None of our plans were *possible*, yet they were our plans.

Then Jordana suggested that we find a place, a two bedroom, and make it work for a year or so with a room-mate. The only person we could imagine living with was Amy, who was Jordi’s pot-luck suitemate at Carolina, and was a friend of mine from back at school. I had never known Amy when she wasn’t laughing and smiling and generally being really funny and fun, and if she had lived with 18 year old Jordana and didn’t kill her, she was way ahead on the “puttin’ up with bullshit”-ometer.

Amy has lived with us since August of 2000. That’s as long as I’ve lived with anyone. (In fact, it’s weird to me that I’ve lived in New York for four years and I still love it here). During that time, I’ve discovered that Amy and I have a lot in common, she isn’t actually the sweet fun, funny girl all the time, much of the time is very dark and very complicated for her. I’ve had lots of long discussions with Amy, not just about our frailties and shortcomings, but also our desperate need to embrace those aspects of ourselves that we are most ashamed of.

Look, I lived with her for four years. If you want a list of her faults, the things she does that could drive someone crazy, I could give them to you. But the truth is that the aspects of her that are maddening are motivated by the same things in her that are touching. She walks around with a physical and metaphorical barrier protecting her from the world, everywhere she goes she brings herself. A few moments…

The three of us were playing cards at two in the morning and Amy, 90% asleep, asked who was losing and I told her she was and she smacked her head and said “that’s *terrible* news”…

My mom had made orange rolls and Amy was slathering butter on one of these sticky sweet buns and she looked at me and said “what the fuck do I care?”…

New Year’s Eve party, Amy, miserable beyond recognition, made a brave face and kept serving drinks and food to everyone until it ran out and she ended up making trays of frozen french fries and passing them around as appetizers until she finally quietly retired to her room where she cried herself to sleep without anyone knowing…

Many, many mornings on weekends, Amy would ask, “um, Sean, is there, y’know, *breakfast* coming?” and I would, beside myself with excitement, make some kind of awesome breakfast…

But, when I think of Amy, her loyalty and dilligence come to mind. She is searching for metaphysical shortcuts in many ways, but she is willing to work ten times harder for them than anyone I know. Raised with deep-seated racist tendencies, Amy has embraced every other culture to the exclussion of none. She speaks Italian and Spanish, and has spent time in Italy and Mexico as a resident, not a tourist. And her battle against her own self hatred is one she shoulders every single day, and that she faces bravely.

She quit her sales job to take a 50% pay cut in order to teach school in Harlem. She did it because her sales job made her sad and teaching kids makes her happy. The financial concerns, the classist concerns, the racist concerns, nothing slowed her down. She is, without a doubt, a great woman, and I’m really proud to have her as my friend.

I ripped a CD of my dad’s on to Jordana’s hard drive the last time I was in Napa, and I listen to it constantly. It’s The Best of the Italian Sax Quartet, and there is much to be said musically about these guys, about Italians and about quartets in general, but there will be other days for those blogs, sad to say.

It is the pressure of other days that leads me to where I am right now, and a song on that CD called “Oblivion” that gives me the word for it. It’s hard to describe to anyone who hasn’t been in that moment, so bear with me.

Like Jesus and Love and everything else that means a great deal to people, I’m sure there is some sort of chemical explanation for the mental escapades you go through when you are a teen-ager and a twenty-something, but, also like those other passions, if it feels real, there isn’t much you can do but accept it.

When I was in those moments, when I had clearly had enough to drink but I drank more, when I was as full of drugs as I could possibly be and I did more, when my life was a car balanced on the edge of a cliff and I kept trying to shift my weight forward so it would fall off, when I was in these moments I never felt a lack of clarity. I wasn’t being perverse and my judgement wasn’t crippled. Oblivion, to me, wasn’t self destruction, it was more self actualization.

There was a passion in me that was jet fueled, and it led to crippling, staggering mistakes. I remember, even in to my twenties, my whole body would lock up, all my muscles tensed, curling up in a corner where no-one could see me or bother me, for ten minutes at a stretch, and I was doing it consciously, trying to exhasut myself so I wouldn’t continue on this path of total destruction. Failure and scorn worked as well as praise… that’s not true, they worked better. Getting hit in the face, looking in the eyes of someone who’s asked for very little and you’ve let them down, it was like a shower of melted chocolate. Pain, horror and disappointment were the only things that felt real to me, and it wasn’t for the sake of drama, they really were the only things that I could feel.

There was a time, as I was growing out of this, that I was afraid of what I might do to people that I was close to. This destructive impulse goes a long way to explaining the tortures I put myself through romantically, and why people’s disdain for my exes was actually reinforcement. There were a few years when I realized that decent people were becoming my closest freinds, and they didn’t know that I had this biological need for oblivion. I was scared that my love of torture meant that they might get some of it on them accidentally.

But, as time passed and I think I either matured, or learned… or maybe the chemical things I went through in adolescence finally calmed down to an actual adulthood, I began to get the same thrills from tiny things. Talking to Jordana, cracking up Mac or Steve, and, y’know, my acting, my writing music, *cooking*- oh man, cooking really does it for me, these things give me tiny little explosions. Making my friends laugh, making my family laugh… I don’t know how it is that these simple pleasures have taken the place of that full body flexed scream that was my life when I was younger.

But they have, and that’s why I’m getting married again. And this time, it’s for better or worse, it’s not for, y’know, hoping for the worst. I’m not afraid in any way, it’s like those demons are gone to such an extent that I don’t even recognize who I used to be.

Quartets, by the way, are just about my favorite way of making music. But there will be time to talk about that later.

I got an email from my mom about the lyrics to “How Deep Is The Ocean”, which is part of what could be a master work of emails that the two of us exchange about the use of language in songs and TV shows and movies, if it weren’t for the fact that both of us have horrible memories. Our recall is so bad, both of us, that a lot of our emails are “that part at the end? Where the guy did his thing? That was awesome…”

I’ve said many times that I’m not much of a writer, and I hold by that. This blog, as well as the internet community, has made me a better writer, but no matter how good I get at it, I’m not going to ever be a writer. It’s simply a matter of discipline. A writer is transported by the act of writing the same way I’m transported by a turn of phrase in performance. When I am acting, and within acting I’m including singing, and when I’m doing it right, I become something more than what I am when I’m not doing it. Sometimes just for a moment, sometimes for minutes at a stretch, I live beyond my means, I breathe different breath, I am plugged in to the mystic infinite. That never happens when I write.

I just finished a fifteen minute play about two gay guys that is sort of an extension of a play I wrote two years ago about six straight WASPs who’s father died. And both of these are similar to the screenplay I wrote about a telemarketer in Los Angeles and the stage play I wrote about a writer in North Carolina. They all deal with levels of deceit, which I’m really fascinated by. I was thinking about writing a play about a right wing radio host who gets treatment for his drug habit in a love-fest commie-leaning rehab, but I realized the mental exercise of coming up with the idea was enough for me.

Jascha Heifetz once said that he had no lasting legacy because he had never written, never composed. That might be true, except that I now use Heifitz as an example, so there is that legacy. (He had such perfect pitch that when he was in his seventies, he was about to start a solo piece and someone muttered something about making sure his A was 440, and he said “It’s okay, I remember…”) I disagree with Heifetz, especially when I consider someone like Spencer Tracy or Cary Grant. They never wrote, yet I get as much from their acting as I do from *any* of the previous ten Oscar winners.

All of this to say, I am an actor more than anything, but I wish I could do my part, I wish I could tilt at the windmills, especially right now. Right now, more so than any other time in my life, we need to have people who can scream with clarity against the evils that we, as Americans, are responsible for. I find that my obsession with deception is becoming less a mental exercise and more a constant drain on my life.

So, if you are a writer, if you wake up each morning wanting to put finger to keyboard or pen to paper, then right now is your time. If you write it, if you find a way to scream loud enough to be heard, I will bring my full weight to bear behind it. It isn’t much, my weight, a tiny company in New York, a tiny name attached to a somewhat larger talent, but if you do your part, I’ll do mine, and hopefully others will do theirs.

My least favorite part of yesterday? Going to the DMV for the third time. Second to that? Getting food poisoning and barfing for an hour. Yes, the DMV is worse than being sick.

I know there is no way I will be able to describe this subway ride that will be as good as actually being there, but let me start by at least setting the scene.

Directly in front of me, at the end of one of those long benches, is a hindu or a sikh or something, (what do I know from God?) who is wearing a business suit and an overcoat, but peaking out from the sleeves of his pants and suit coat is one of those pale pink scrubs material prayer outfits and in the center of his forehead is a red smudge, like on ash wednesday but red. He is reading a small book and muttering prayers. He does nothing else in this story but take up *way* more room than he should for a man who is about five foot five.

Next to him is a sort of Jewish faux Sex-In-The-City type, small chested, small wasted, small assed, who is reading a woman’s magazine. Between her feet on the floor of the subway is one of those boutique shopping bags, see-through soft crinkly plastic with not very much in it, but propped open.

Next to her, but sitting about a half-person’s length away, is a ghetto fabulous black woman, gorgeous, hair dyed in strips of brass, blonde and brown and wearing those rimless sunglasses that are dark up by her eyebrows and fade to clear by her nose. She’s wearing a suede jacket with a huge fur collar over her tight earth tone outfit ending in suede patchwork high heel knee high boots.

I’m on the other side, listening to, I’m not lying, opera on my ipod. Next to me is a girl, and next to the girl is her mother.

The girl is right around three years old, she’s sort of walking without much help, but she didn’t talk the whole time we were on the train. She was latina, but I only knew that from her mom, she could have been native American or Chinese, she was just gorgeous. Round face, piercing huge dark round eyes – her entire leg was just shy of the length of my femur, she spent most of the ride sliding down the seat and the pushing herself back up.

When she got on, she sat on the bench and spent the next three or four minutes gazing deeply into her mother’s face. It was an unsettling gaze, a hard questioning gaze, and I know because I was next. She flashed her gaze on me while I was giggling at her, and there was no accusation in her eyes, but *research*. I have a terrible memory, especially for faces, and I can remember her eyes *exactly*, like they’ve left that flashbulb trace when your eyes are closed.

The ride continues, and the music swells in my headphones and at the next stop, a young man gets on the train. Ghetto-fabulous lady is checking her cell-phone… wait, we’re in the subway, you can’t check your cellphone… it turns out, she’s checking her reflection in the turned-off cellphone’s face plate. She likes what she see and puts the phone away.

The young man is holding a large backpack, and he’s a normal sized guy, but he still tries to fit in the half-person spot between Ghetto-Fab and Sex-In-The-City. He shuffles his ass in between them, which only makes the praying man with his arms and legs spread out look more ridiculous.

The three year old is interested in none of this. She is looking past me out the back window of the train. There is a blue light there. She decides it’s fine and goes back to looking at her feet. The train leaves

The backpack kid starts opening and closing different pouches on his bag. He’s *shuffling*, and the ladies around him aren’t used to being shuffled outside, y’know, the club. This kid looks like he’s one step too creepy and one step too handsome to be a close friend of mine, he’d be just on the outside of my closest friends, but he’d still be someone I knew. He’s too young, but he looks like he’s got some art-related business to peddle.

The girl next to me is staring at me, but playing with the tiny balls that run along the bottom of her pink shawl. She has on pink socks and polished black shoes.

The group in front of me is perfect New York. No-one cares about ehtnicity or religion, they care about space. Space is all we are really fighting for. In Isreal, if it was three times as big with half the people, there wouldn’t be as much a problem. In New York, we just need a coupla million people to move and we’ll be better.

A bad negotiation for backpack boy and suddenly, disaster. Out of one of the pockets a yellow legal paper slides out, and out of the folded yellow legal paper, about thirty polaroids dump out on to the floor of the subway.

I told Mac and Jordana this story, and I loved the look on their faces. “Polaroid” means only one thing. As Mac said, “polaroids are pictures you don’t want the kid at the 24-hour developing place to look at.” If I told you that a guy was carrying around a stack of polaroids in an envelope, that would mean something to you.

I didn’t see all of them. But the ones I saw were just people, some laughing, some making silly faces, and some pulling shirts up slightly, like the beginnings of a striptease.

Here’s the thing, the fell out, not just on the ground, but also into the see through bag of the Sex-In-The-City girl, and the kid started picking them up *way* before anyone had a chance to even process what had happened, in a nervous frenzy.

This guy had private porn spilling into the subway? Holy crap, this was just terrible for this kid, humiliating. The Sex-In-The-City girl was trying to help him get his pictures out of her bag, and they were sort of shoving each other’s hands away because the kid didn’t want this lady to have the pictures, but this lady didn’t want this kid’s hands all up in her shit. Ghetto-Fabulous blew an enormous bubble.

I turned to look at the little girl.

She was staring, right up at me, her beautiful eyes burning right into my heart and her hand, which had reached out to my jacket to steady her during the last turn, was pulling my wallet slowly out of my pocket.

Her mother saw this and was mortified, and started saying something to her, those quiet condemnations that lovely mothers give their children in *really* embarassing situations, and I sat there and laughed and tried not to lose the staring contest the girl was having with me. Lips in full pout, eyes completely on mine, she struggled to get my wallet free of my pocket. Her mother finally reached across and pulled the girl’s hand away, just as my stop came up.

I mean, I only had about five bucks in there. The ride was worth way more than that.

There is a great story about my subway ride today, which hopefully I will write and post later. My friend Bud. basically stopped blogging for a few weeks during which I’m guessing he was gathering himself for the coming storm. My nephew Sean Patrick is preparing himself for largely the same thing.

What the hell are we supposed to do? In my mind, this presidency has gone from one that supported things I don’t and pursued paths I wouldn’t, to a group of people who are hell-bent on destroying the ideals that our nation was founded on. I’m not hyperbolizing, look at the list…

Stolen election. Granting Haliburton contracts to rebuild Iraq before the war started. Scalia duck hunting with Cheney (which when taken with their claim about Rice’s testimony being an infringement of the separation of powers particularly ironic.) Lying to the American people about WMD in Iraq. Huge recess appointments of far right wing justices. Constitutional ban on gay marriage. Blacks being barred from voting in Florida, protestors being denied access to those in power… They are systematically taking apart the aspects of America that are most American.

That is in addition to the normal Republican things that trigger me, plus a littany of particularly Bush-ist problems. Prioritizing Star Wars missile defense. Lies about Uranium in Niger going to Iraq. Massive terrorist attacks in Europe as a direct retaliation of the war in Iraq, more people killed by Al Qaeda since September 11th than in the eight years Clinton was in office… Every day there is something else. School was cancelled in Boston so Bush could have a fundraiser there… and yet…

And yet… None of this matters. It occured to me today that Kerry’s just, y’know, nothing. He got the nomination because the Democrats want to win, and even a bad actor can tell you, if you have the wrong intention, you aren’t going to do a good job. He is a follower, and most of the time he doesn’t even know what he’s following.

I’m gonna vote against Bush, and when I pull the lever or push the punch card, I’m gonna do it *really* hard. But it won’t matter. I was never gonna vote for Bush. However, if McCain were running against Kerry, I might vote Republican.

This election is the Democrats’ to loose. And they are going to. No-one has any reason to vote for Kerry.

God, I hope I’m wrong.

A year after someone dies, they unveil the headstone. In the Jewish faith, that is, you wait one year and then you inveil the headstone, which should, I guess, be the end of the mourning, or at least the beginning of the end of the mourning.

Today, we had the unveiling for Jordana’s grandmother, who was buried a year ago. A year ago, there was driving snow and we had the awkward attempts at sideways umbrellas and people trying to be there for other people harder than they were trying to deal with their own shit.

It’s tough to know how to deal with death. I went to a funeral about eight years ago, the funeral of my girlfriend’s father’s mother. It was the kind of family that was a balancing act between terrific egos completely self absorbed, and desperate hangers-on that tried to placate the others in order to find their identity.

I didn’t quite fit in on either side, and the funeral was the beginning of the end of that relationship. My girlfriend wept epic tears and berated me for not being there for her more, but even better was her father and his wife. The father reverently, and for all to see, bent down and kissed the urn that contained the ashes, but his wife, the step-daughter to this woman who disliked her and whom she disliked, was caught between not wanting to be there at all and wanting to show the proper respect to her husband. So, instead of walking away, and instead of kissing the urn, she kissed her fingers and smacked the top of the urn, almost like a high five.

Today, there was a different dynamic. Everyone here would rather be helpful than helped. Jordana’s aunt said, “It’s a shame that she won’t be here this summer, we have three weddings and she would have loved this.”, that was really the extent of anyone crying out for help. The rabbi led the group, about twenty of us, and then at the end he turned to Aunt Cherie and said, “it isn’t a shame she won’t be there, the weddings are a testimony to her.” and he just looked at her until she smiled.

I have a lot of thoughts, always, about the fact that my children will have to figure out what they want to do about their jewishness. As the rabbi prayed, Jordana said the prayer under her breath, in Hebrew, a prayer that almost no-one else there knew. She’s admitted to me that she may become more Jewish as the years go by, and I’m prepared for the changes that will take place, no matter what direction.

But in the middle of the day, the year after the driving snow, as the Rabbi spoke, the sun came out and warmed the back of Jordana’s black jacket and the flat of my hand on the small of her back, and I heard Jordana’s grandfather, as he stared at the blank half of the stone that bore his wife’s name and waited for his, I heard him whisper to Aunt Cherie “don’t worry. She’ll be there.”

If you live in New York or LA, which are the only two places I’ve lived since ’96, you have come across that moment when two or three car alarms are all going off at once, all at their own pace. Even if you haven’t, you’ve probably had a leaky faucet and a loud clock in the same room, or you’ve been on a treadmill while listening to headphones… something where a constant system fights against an equally constant but unmatching system.

And life is full of these gears that turn on the wrong axis’, the impact moments of sound blipping one against the other until one moment out of every twenty matches up and produces a beep louder than the combined parts.

And our lives move in these patterns as well. We have hard patches and easy patches, we have times when we are happy for days on end with no real reason and days when we can’t seem to smile even when good things happen. And our individual rhythms are moving at a speed that no-one else can match, a constantly variable speed. And once in a great while, the beats match, they meet. And when they meet at the nadir, it isn’t the sound of two people crying, or three or all of them and you at the same time. It feels like one voice, almost silent, crying when they know no-one can hear, the worst sort of sadness there is.

So, let me say this about that. I don’t feel God, I don’t feel the infinite or the metaphysical. But there is a moment for me that I can go back to, a moment that visits me and stops me from despairing. It was there when Michelle and I were in the Second String and I said to her “we aren’t going to save the world, we just aren’t. So, knowing that, what are we supposed to do?” It was there when, before the show each night, Mac, Jordana and I would tell each other we loved each other and Jordana would say “I love you, Seth!” for no reason. It was there when I made enchiladas with my mom and she showed me that the cheese that fit in your loose hand was the right amount to put in the tortilla. It was there when we were done mixing Dies Irae from Verdi’s Requiem. It was there the first time I made my dad laugh so hard he cried.

I don’t know what it is. It’s so small, this tiny little moment of happiness that flits on and off so quickly. I could spend twenty three hours and 59 minutes of every day angry that I can’t be a better friend or a better brother or husband, and that one minute of not feeling lonely is actually my entire life. My entire life. And my entire life is spending that twenty three hours and 59 minutes trying to make sure that one minute is there.

So, maybe like everything else in this blog, that thing I wrote about not feeling God is a lie. I really hope so. I hope that people who know God feel that one minute all the time. I know I’ll never have that, and I know the only place I get that feeling constantly is in my art, my friends and my family, so I’m gonna keep looking there.

My wheel isn’t with yours right now, if you’re hitting that horrible note, but so many other people are right now that I feel I have to admit to feeling hopeful.

I love Bill Bryson, I think because I love the English language. The strongest bond I have with my friend is one of language, which doesn’t really separate us from most of the rest of the world, but we all value a turn of phrase so highly that comments from years in the past have lingered like remembered touchdown passes or choir competitions. We re-tell the same linguistic pirouettes the way some other people might watch Sportscenter highlights, and some of the better quips have lasted decades.

Sometimes I’ll get a word stuck in my craw, something that I think Ian does as well, and it just stays in there getting chewed. I remember we had a long conversation, Ian and I, about words like nevertheless and wherewithal, these words that just drip with age. When they’re sprinkled in a sentence, it’s like biting into an au gratin and finding aged parmesan melted in the middle.

The word “temper” is sitting with me now. I lost my temper last night a little bit, and the realization of that gave me, more than anything, a little word to chew on.

More often than not, and this is just for me, “temper” is used for eggs, which is strange as that is the first definition in the dictionary. “To modify by the addition of an agent or quality, to moderate” You temper eggs so they won’t scramble, you temper steel to make it harder by heating it and cooling it, you can temper your wisdom, your judgements, your actions.

But if I were forced to think about the word, the meaning that resonates with me most (pardon the pun) is musical. Most of our instruments are tempered now, they have been built on 12 tone scales and have been assigned pitches. The frets on a guitar, the keys on a piano, are reflections of tempering.

Temper, if you were to ask most people, probably has more to do with anger and rage. If someone were to rant and rave, you would say they were in a foul temper, or that they simply had a “temper”. My “rants” as they are called now, were called “temper-tantrums” when I was child.

There’s a hell of a piece of language. “Temper-tantrums”. If I didn’t love my family as much as I already do, I’d fall in love all over again.

So, this is a word that has to do with making food, making music, and screaming about the iniquities of life. It’s like they made a word for me and my family. All we do is make food, make music, or bitch.

But as I read the meanings in the dictionary, at the bottom there is the archaic meaning. “A compromise between extremes. A middle course.” There was a time when you spoke of a temper as the action which is most in tune with your surroundings, the one that won’t scramble anyone’s eggs, the one that requires no screaming banshee middle-of-the-night cell phone harrangues from your older brother.

It is the meaning that isn’t used anymore, way at the bottom, a meaning that is buried under all the other contractions and shifts in pronunciation. It’s the opposite of the way the word has been working all these years, and it feels strange and wrong and hard. So, I promise, I won’t try to convince anyone to use it that way more than once in a great, great while.

Please, if that mystical middle ground is found, let’s go right back to the cooking and the music and, most importantly, the talking about where it hurts as quickly as possible. I’m along for the ride no matter what happens.

I was in the shower two days ago, and (for those of you who know me, this will come as no shock) not since, and I was thinking about the upcoming Law & Order auditions that Jordana and I were asked to attend. I think I said, out loud, “If only one of us can get it, let Jordana get it.” I didn’t say it to write it in this blog, and I didn’t say it so that she would hear, I was just hoping for a piece of awesomeness to happen to her, and I realized that I was willing to forego a piece of awesomeness for myself.

In 1997, I had just moved to Los Angeles for WhoTheFuckKnowsWhy, and I had an audition for Rent. I had tried praying when I was 15 or 16, one of those times that an evangelical had grabbed hold of me and asked me to read and seek and all that crap. When I prayed, by myself without anyone’s interference, I heard that icy chill of nothingness in response, that dead hollow open-door-on-Tundra sound that comes from movies.

But in 1997, after giving up the beginnings of promising momentum in New York, I decided to pray about the Rent audition. I don’t know how I did it, but I took it very seriously. The next day, during my audition, it was the only time I have had a casting director roll his eyes while I was performing. At the end as I was leaving he was actually *not* stifling a yawn. He was yawning as I said thank you and he actually handed my headshot and resume back to me. He didn’t even want to throw it away.

For the last few years, I’ve done various wardrobe changes during basketball games to improve the luck of the team I’m rooting for, it’s done nothing. When I sent out resumes, I did a little deep breathing as I mailed them, trying to send positive energy with them, and for the last 16 months it’s done nothing. I used to have a little thrill by muttering “Macbeth” in the theater during or before shows, but I’ve actually forgotten to do it lately. I didn’t do it during the last show, which didn’t change the outcome at all.

Look, I know God isn’t about answering your prayers. I know that God is an omnipotent whatever that works in mysterious ways and that asking for anything from the cosmos when you’ve given nothing to it is missing the point. I don’t need your cards and letters telling me I don’t understand what God is for, I do.

But I can’t feel it. I have never felt any sort of metaphysical power come over me at any time or for any reason. I know that when I said out loud “Let Jordana have this one” that it was for my own pathetic edification, the fact that she did get cast and I didn’t had nothing to do with me, or at least it was only because she was what they were looking for and, for this one instance, I wasn’t.

I have a basketball in my house. I don’t have two. It isn’t a belief that I don’t have two, I don’t actually have two, I have only one. If someone walked in to my house and said, “I believe you have two basketballs, but the second one can’t be seen, smelled, heard or touched. It functions as a basketball, in fact is a basketball that will go where you want it to go as long as you believe in it. No-one else can see it either, but you will know when it has gone through the hoop, you will know when your crossover breaks ankles, because your faith will guide you.” then I would look at that someone and say, “I don’t have to offer proof that there is no basketball, you have to offer proof that there is. When you do, I’ll play with your magic ball, but until then, all there is is the real ball and me.”

I’m willing to go one step further. “You only say there is a basketball because you can’t deal with a world where athletic talent is uneven. You can’t accept a world where trying to succeed doesn’t guarantee success. You are so afraid of living in a world where the only basketball there is is the real basketball that you have to invent a pretend magic ball that will give the world some order.

“But, the fact is, people die from falling ice, people don’t love the people who love them, dogs get hit by cars and monkeys fall out of trees. The world is breath-staggeringly random, there is no order, there’s not even the remotest possibility of order. A certain number of people die every year when they fall in a parking lot, just slip and smash their brains open. And it is horrible to live in the actual world, I know. It’s lonely and inconsequential, and in your life, your brief stretches of joy and happiness are going to be mathematically corrected by periods of suffering and pain, though most of it will be filled by eating, sleeping, shitting, fucking and ennui. It’s horrible, but that’s the truth.”

So, if anyone’s got God’s number, have him give me a call, okay? I don’t know what it would change in me, but I’d love a little burning bush to give me some direction.

Michelle, this must be killing you or you’d have written a blog or called me by now.

Here’s the thing; I’m worried about why you want to do this. I’m worried about what’ll happen to you. I’m worried that you will be lonely or hurt. I’m worried that you will die. I’m worried that you want to do it partly because we all hate ourselves so damn much and the only thing you’ve ever done that makes those screaming voices silent is to do for others.

But you’ve been called, and so you need to think about going. I can’t really address it, because a call to service is a metaphysical thing, and my mind doesn’t wrap around the metaphysical well. You have a calling, you’ve heard that voice telling you that it’s time to serve. I’ve never heard a voice, ever, in my life. So, when that happens, I step back and respect that something religious, for lack of a better word, has happened and that I have no say now.

Michelle, you know what you’ve been called to, I don’t. I want to say that a call to serve is not a call to serve in Most-Fucked-Up-Ville, Africa, that there is a lot of work to do in America, in New York. When you were working for the Red Cross, the infuriating thing was the bullshit and the lack of money for your time, if you had a good job and more free time then part of that would be taken care of, and if you hate the bullshit red tape, I’m fairly certain that the Corps has as much or more.

You said to me on the phone, “I’ve been called” and I said, “then nothing else matters, you can’t worry about what anyone else says ever, this decision is entirely up to you. Fuck Dad, fuck Mom, fuck all your brothers, none of us has this call and so none of us has to make the decision.” I stand by that. I can’t help you.

No-one can, you awesome fucking girl. No-one can do anything for you in this decision. You’re the smartest and the most spiritual of any of us, the fact that you ask is flattering but retarded. There isn’t a single person alive in our family who has a handle on their lives enough to advise you, and the ones who I knew who are dead now weren’t any better.

This is one woman show and as much as I want to feed you lines from the audience, I don’t know the script. You’re the one writing it, you decide what to say.