Tomorrow The Lucretia Jones Mysteries goes up.

It is great to be in charge of so much of a piece of art. It’s great to be able to produce, set design, sound design, act, write music, record music, hang lights, build sets, find props and find costumes for a show, and it is thrilling to be able to do all of that for one show.

I have a friend who hates the fact that off-off theater requires so much of the actors, that actors are expected to create more of the show than just the characters and are also required to try to bring in audience. I love it.

But I wonder if I love it because I have chosen to. I am doing a play written for Jordana, and I get to act in it with my two best friends. I don’t have a right to complain. But I’m tired, and sometimes I am a little sad about the fact that no matter how hard I peddle, this is a stationary bike.

But it is better than not peddling at all, or, to extend the metaphor, to stand with my nose up against the glass looking at all the gorgeous bikes I can’t afford. If all I have is a stationary bike, then I am going to keep peddling and hope that I’ll eventually get where I’m going.

I have touched two important legal papers in the last six weeks. The first was at Ian’s wedding, where, as the theoretical best man, I signed his wedding certificate as the witness. The other was just a few hours ago when I opened the papers finalizing my divorce.

Anyone who has been divorced knows what it is, anyone who hasn’t, no matter how close you were, doesn’t. It is a singular experience.

There is the same heartache that goes with the end of every love affair, and I don’t think it’s any more or any less with divorce, that kind of pain is universal. But added to that is the idea that you might be insane. You look at your ex and you know why you liked them, can imagine how you loved them, can fathom how you sacrificed for them and fought for them and cried over them. But you just can’t imagine marrying them. You can’t imagine that you didn’t see this coming.

The first time you fall in love like that, it sends a crack right down the center of your being, like dropping an old hot pan in ice water. And that’s just that, the crack is there and will be there for the rest of your life.

I’m getting remarried next May, so it’s not like I’m hurting because of this. I was told the other day that my relationship with Jordana isn’t fair because she does everything I want to do. I mean, the reason we are together is because we both do everything we want to do, and almost all of that intersects. The happiness I have with Jordana would have been impossible for me to come close to with my ex-wife.

But I feel so bad for young Sean. I feel like I let him down. He saw a star and he grabbed hold of it and suddenly it was right there in the car next to him on road trips and in his bed and at his side. That girl never understood a goddam thing, that girl always asked for things that young Sean didn’t care about and didn’t care about the things that young Sean loved. But, man, the myth that Li’l Sean attached to the girl, the myth that was the star, that was a beautiful story, and I miss that story, I miss that star.

My family and my fiance read this, sure, but that doesn’t make me want to qualify this. It is an awkward thing, feeling sad for getting release from ultimate doom and sadness. I think about my own parents, and how grateful I am that they are not still albatrossed around each other’s necks. I know that what I loved was never actually there, and I know that she is happier now, released from the lies she told herself about me.

It doesn’t have to be true to miss my belief in it. I’m sure ex-patriots miss home cooking, I’m sure fallen church members miss God even when they quit believing. Too many times did she look me in the eye and gaslight me, too many times did I find myself facing west, waiting for the sun to rise. The things I believe in now are keeping my head down, keeping my cards close to my chest and trusting people who see with my eyes and no-one else.

And after all that, I just sometimes miss that big blank smile and stringy-armed hug after the few moments that our myths about each other matched our realities. I miss the couple we became when, for a few moments, we were able to bend and stretch ourselves into the couple we pretended to each other that we were. I miss being able to say something without always thinking, ‘but, y’know, I thought I was in love, I thought this marriage would last forever, so, I mean, what do I know?’

Mostly? I miss the feeling that I can trust my self.

I can beat myself up all I want, but my friends and I decided to have a really small little dinner party, just a couple of sweet people who wanted to get together on the anniversary and feel better. We did.

I made amazing food. I’m starting to get really good at a pretty limited menu. I want to be better with vegetables, but I feel like I have a good feel for fish and meat.

Of course, right now, my stomach is killing me.

It was really nice, and we managed to miss all the 2 year crap on TV, which I have to assume was just unbearable. We drank wine, we talked theater and art, we talked about bullshit, we played basketball on tv, and we didn’t think about terrorists. I don’t know if that means they won or what, but we just didn’t think about it at all, all night.

I have only a minute or two. Last night was excrutiating, today’s hangover from the piercing migraine I had feels almost worse, but you can’t let a day like today pass without comment.

For some reason, the only thing I feel about today is shame. There is something amusing about figuratively standing up and shooting out your shame instead of just feeling it privately, but sometimes this blog is just me standing in judgement over just me.

I felt ashamed of the people who attacked us, other people who are exactly like me, and, after about six weeks, I felt mounting shame for our President’s reaction to the whole ordeal. For those six weeks, New York came together under our Mayor and seemed to stand together, united in an effort to heal each other and to help each other. The fact that it didn’t last and didn’t work at all makes me feel ashamed as well.

My brother Kent has our emails from that time posted elsewhere on the web, and I honestly can’t read them. My emails just seem like self congratulatory lies. I did do all the stuff I wrote about, but I did them half so I could write something cool and half because everyone else was doing it, which sums up my life basically. I always have one eye on the audience and one eye on the other actors, judging myself as comparison and by applause, not by action.

It is a sad time for me right now. Realizing I could easily leave my theoretical dreams behind to pursue a life on more solid economic footing, realizing that many of my friendships are with people I don’t have any admiration for, just a shared history, realizing that having ideas is about 2% of getting those ideas implemented. It’s a sad time, sad changes are happening to me.

But on a national scale, I am humiliated that the victims can sue the city, I’m dismayed that a once united western consciousness was essentially disregarded by our president, and I am appalled that many of the firemen who were lucky enough to survive the WTC attacks are now losing their jobs to the new economy.

Even more so, I’m ashamed that I didn’t change for the better, that we didn’t learn, and that we couldn’t make anything good come from this.

I got some funny responses from my last blog. Relax. You can’t help it if your blog sucks.

On a completely different note, it’s interesting to me that everything in life involves some kind of compromise. It may seem simple to say, but it is profound as hell to me. The people who learn to balance and compromise their lives seem to be a shitload better put together than I am.

There is a sort of fantasy that I guess men must have about women, My own fantasies are too twisted for print, but I see these idealized Madonna/Whores everywhere in popular culture, so there has to be something there. We apparently want a woman who will have sex with us with relative ease, who will do kinky ass stuff with us at the drop of a dime, but who wouldn’t do it with any other human being on the planet. Unless, of course, we wanted them to and we could watch.

So, right away, y’know, just forget it. You aren’t gonna find that geisha prostitute virgin with the double jointed hips who will hold your hand when you have the pukes, so make peace with it and decide what your priorities are.

New York is a clusterfuck, to be sure, but the give and take here is obvious. I have never lived anywhere where the truth of this idea was more apparent. How much money do you want? Where do you want to live? How much room do you need? How many people do you want to live with?

See, the answers to these questions can’t be what you think they’re gonna be. Because all of the things you want become mutually exclusive. My poor sister made some decisions based on what she really wanted, and her whole life became the commute to and from work, the picking up a billion extra shifts, the nightmare of living hand to mouth. Now, she is realizing that she has prioritized these answers, and she’s gonna change her life into somethings she doesn’t want so she can have all the things she *really* wants.

I want to live, just me and my fiance. And, I want to have money, lots of it, money left over, y’know, all over the place. I want money all over my bed and I want to roll around in it. So, this aint happening, obviously. But I have discovered that my priorities are such that making money is way more important to me than I realized.

And you got to love that about a place. New York forces you to make decisions, to prioritize, and that’s gotta be the way you learn about yourself.

All right, this blog wasn’t all that funny. But seriously, it’s funnier than yours.

All right, my only excuse is that I am up at ten to two in the morning because I might have a small-scale life altering job, and I am waiting for a west coast call. And I am tired as ballsacks. But *seriously*, folks.

Y’all’s blogs is boring as *SHIT*.

First of all, everyone’s blog contains somewhere a disclaimer about how you don’t really care and shouldn’t read it. You also say that I shouldn’t care about your life. Then why the hell are you keeping a blog? Man, after reading your blog, how the hell do you care about your life?

Did you go to work today? Really. How did that make you feel? Hm. Right, right. No, no, go ahead. Your co-worker? No- what did he do? He didn’t! He did?! So, what did you eat when you got home? Hot dogs? Really? Just the hot dogs, without any veggies? Wait, wait, hold on a second, you haven’t told me what you bought at the Labor Day Sales. A suede skirt? Is that the one from the HOLY LOVE OF GOD, I AM GOING TO SHOOT MYSELF IN THE HEAD JUST KNOWING YOU SHARE THE SAME PLANET AS ME.

Jesus Christ. Think about it. Give yourself five years, wait – no, give yourself two weeks. If what you are doing right now won’t matter to you in two weeks then you have three choices. 1) do something more interesting, and then write about that, 2) keep doing the same boring ass “I heart McDonalds, I shop at the Gap, I hate my job, I want a nicer boyfriend, I eat little kid food and claim it’s ironic when actually it just dulls the pain, I talk about my weight, I love Friends” fucking life and don’t write about it, or 3) be more goddamn funny.

Look, I know some people read this shit. The only reason you’ve read this twice is because I don’t tell you about my boring ass day, I don’t talk about how stuff feels good that’s supposed to, and I don’t complain about the same shit frickin’ Dilbert complains about. And if I ever do these things, I’m funny. I’m goddamn irreverent. It’s a gift, really. Everything I do is art. Everything you do is boring.

But you can do whatever you want, if you can be more goddamn funny. My brother Ian’s blog is actually never about anything. No-one cares about his pumpkins. Seriously. No-one. His pumpkins don’t care about his pumpkins. But I read his blog because he’s funny.

I know, a lot of people were born without a quick tongue. It’s a *BLOG* for the love of God. Take your time. My brother Kent can write his blog without thinking and it’s awesome. You can’t. And by you, just assume I mean you. Almost every blog is bad, so if you’re reading this and you have a blog, that means you.

Not you, Mac.

Be more goddamn funny. It is no wonder Americans are hated. We actually think people want to read about our *jobs*. You don’t even like being there, why are you writing about it? JESUS CHRIST! YOU HATE IT, DON’T MAKE IT THE THING YOU WRITE ABOUT!!!!!!

Again, 1) do something cool and be a bad writer, that’s fine. 2) do something inane and don’t keep a blog, also fine. 3) do something cool and be a cool writer. (That’s where you come in, Mac.) I mean, you can do whatever you want, but I aint gonna troll for blogs anymore, I’m just gonna read what’s recomended to me. And if any part of your introduction implies that your blog is boring and shouldn’t be read, I’ll just trust you on it.

My dad is actually a superhero. His existence is shrouded in mystery, his real name is known only to him, his superhero name, Richard Williams, is an uncommonly common one, but better than “The MusicMan” or “SuperConductor”, which are both also taken. He is modeled on the greatest of the superheroes, the Greek superheroes, drawn to the dark side and riddled with myth surrounding his origin and his adventures. But, y’know, that’s what makes him a superhero.

One aspect to being a superhero is having an alter-ego. My dad’s alter-ego is found only when it’s just you and he, sitting in a car or having a glass of wine, and there is mostly silence around you. This is when Clark Kent comes out. In music, the two most important things are melody and silence, and my father is appreciating the latter in these moments. He sometimes shuts down and responds to what you ask him with shy grunts and muttered asides. I like the alter-ego, as much or more than the superhero.

But the superhero side of my dad is the part that most people know. That’s the part of him that is the party-host, the symphony-conductor, the executive-producer. I have a thousand stories about my dad, but my favorite is being in the car with him on the way to a performance and a train is delaying our arrival by twenty minutes. We were already late and I pointed this out to my dad and he looked at me and smiled and said, ‘they can’t start without me…’

Where some flighty superheroes have a cape and tights, my dad has a tie and tails. Sure, he can’t fly, but when he stands in a doorway and smiles in your general direction, every single person at that end of the room thinks he has smiled at only them. He can’t leap over tall buildings, he can’t deflect bullets, but he does seem to have a thousand lives and no matter what is done to him, it doesn’t seem to kill him.

He is a natural leader of men, the kind of person who, even when being given orders, will only follow them out of an active acquiescence. He’ll do what you say, but only because it’s what he would have decided to do anyway. When he is given the reins, suddenly everything starts magically happening. He is a man of a thousand ideas, and the right way that these ideas should be implemented. When you consider where he came from and where he is now, it is laughable to think that this is anything other than a superpower.

Some others have a fortress of solitude or a batcave, but not Richard Williams. He has a spanish style villa that affords him both solitude, should he need it, and a temperature controlled wine cellar, which is his only use for a cave. Otherwise, the house is designed for maximum celebrations, should they be necessary. Sure, he has a studio, far removed from the house, but there is also a pool, a bocce ball court, a full wine list, gourmet dinners, and a constant parade of lovely fascinating artistic people.

His flaws have cost him dearly, just like all real heroes. He doesn’t get Christmas with his family, he doesn’t get daily emails from his kids, he has struggled with all of us, often having to put up with years of silence. But he has done what so few heroes have the guts to do. He has looked in the face of the man he used to be, he has decided to stop being that man, he has asked me to forgive him for that, and he has done all of this without ever losing his heroism.

He is an epic man, a man who makes wide sweeping continental mistakes and huge gorgeous gestures of charity. He is a man who wants to buy you a car, but doesn’t want to lend you a hundred dollars. What the hell is heroic about a hundred dollars? Have a car! He is a man who has found a devotion to his family that exceeds a thousand fold his past apathy, and he has found love where once he was incapable.

I feel my dad in me, always. Every time people look to me to solve a problem, every time I jump in and say, ‘How about this, this’ll work’ and people follow, every time someone makes fun of my chest hair, I feel his blood in my blood. As I look down the shotgun barrel of marriage and children, knowing that I have failed in the past, I hope that I can learn from who my father is now, and pass some of that heroism on to my kids.

I’ll say this, when you are doing Yoga and you start thinking to yourself, “Man, this is boring and really damn hard” and then your arms start quaking even though it doesn’t feel like you’re doing anything, at least if you just hold on and wait a minute, at least then, nothing else happens.

That’s the nice thing. Your sort of stuck in a position that you would normally only do if, say, you dropped something on the far side of a porcupine and you had to pick it up without moving your feet or if, say, you were submerged in water up to your mid thigh and your arms were tied to your ankles and you were trying to breathe, but then, y’know, more *nothing* happens. You just stand up and salutate or whatever and then bend more.

It makes my knees hurt as well. The price I pay for being skinny.

Despite a few really bad schedule problems, we had a great weekend with Steve and Deb.

This might look like all Deb does is yap and yap. I mean, I’m just saying that this might look like that.

Seeing Steve is just outrageously great. At one point we were laughing so hard that I inhaled a piece of twizzler and felt bad for two hours. Steve was a freshman in college when I met him, and the one thing I noticed about him was that the funniest thing said at any social event was said by him, and that is still true. He makes me laugh until I have to rub my cheeks down and catch my breath.

Steve, Mac and I developed one of those Carolina friendships that seem to happen to so many of my friends. Each of my close guy friends has one or two other guys from Carolina that they will love deeply for the rest of their lives. Ian has about eleven, but he was at Carolina for 15 years or something, so that makes sense.

The best thing is how hard the girls on our lives try not to find me, Mac and Steve funny. They mostly try to be disgusted when we start fighting with our stomachs or farting, but for some reason, they keep coming back for more. Maybe it’s because Steve looks like Dave Matthews…

So, the thing with a career in the theataah is basically just maintaining momentum. I wrote some time ago about a terrible audition I had to go to for a piece in the Estrogenius festival. The show was good but the part was basically just this guy in a play.

The audition was horrible, but I knew I had the Lucretia Jones gig (www.gideonth.com/ljmblog) and I didn’t really get too down about it. I went back and auditioned for a different piece in the Estro fest. The show was good and the part was great, nice and broad and sarcastic and tasty. I had a phone call during rehearsal last night from the director and, despite my terrible schedule and the fact that I have a show opening three weeks before this one, I was cast in the show.

I feel like you gotta just keep doing. It’s possible that my career will continue to develop like Mac’s has, just always having something on a burner somewhere, curious if anything is every going to bubble over. I know that all of what I’m doing will fly under the radar, but… I don’t know. I feel like I gotta keep doing it.

And, in case my head starts getting too big, I can always look at this;